Nona Golan, who is spending their fellowship year working at the Adva Center, is the Nomi and Leibel Fein Fellow. Nona immigrated from Sde Boker to San Diego, where they grew up with their family and loving community. Their family spoke Hebrew in the house, and would visit their relatives in Haifa and Jaffa annually. Nona entered official groups relating to Jewish life and Palestinian-Israeli dialog after starting university and seeking out Hebrew-speaking peers.

Their familial and academic worlds gave them the chance to live in Palestine/Israel while studying. Nona was guided by the people, families and workers they lived with in Jisr al-Zarqa and Tel Aviv who worked for bettering their communities, their families, and their own lives. Nona was also inspired by the multi-species ethnographies and non-anthropocentric storytelling of the Anthropocene that her professors, Anna Tsing and Andrew Mathews, taught through. This resulted in Nona’s award-winning thesis, “The Geo-Legal History of the Kabarra Wetland & al-Gawarna People in Palestine/Israel.” Their thesis was accompanied by an auditory piece that captured their first aural impressions of rockets over Gush Dan and tensions within the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli city of Jisr al-Zarqa during the 2021 Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Nona went on to receive a bachelor’s degree with the highest honors from the Anthropology department at the University of California Santa Cruz. After graduating in 2022, Nona returned to San Diego and was accepted to the Social Justice Fellowship and local music groups. They played music until departing for the start of the fellowship in 2023, only to return shortly thereafter due to the violence on and following October 7th. They return again for the 2024-25 year’s cohort.

Elisheva Malomet, who is spending her fellowship year working at Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, is a Jay E. Orlin Fellow. Elisheva grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and suburban Philadelphia. Before attending university, she studied at Yeshivat Pardes’s Elul learning program and then Kivunim gap year. The following September, she began studying at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University (HUJI). She spent her days off touring the country with an interfaith community made up of foreigners and Palestinians allowing her to develop attunement to new cultural norms and diverse perspectives through experiential education. During the break between her semesters at HUJI, Elisheva participated in the Green Apprenticeship program at Kibbutz Lotan where she learned permaculture and ecology in Hebrew, strengthening her language skills and connection to environmentally conscious living.

After two years in Israel, she transferred to the Joint Program at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary where she received a BA in Archaeology and a BA in Jewish Texts in May 2024. Throughout college, she was active in Hillel and the Bayit (Columbia’s Jewish food Co-Op), where she often convened formally and informally with fellow students across the political spectrum to talk about their relationships with Israel and Palestine. During the summer of 2023, Elisheva participated in archaeological excavations in New Mexico and Italy and completed an independent study examining critical perspectives on GIS mapping software and its integration into archaeological training. In her last year at the Joint Program, she interned at Adamah and Emek Shaveh as a JTS Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship. Additionally, Elisheva wrote her honors thesis exploring water immersion rituals in ancient Near Eastern and Jewish texts, with a focus on how they reflect the hydrological landscape of the region at the time. These projects helped hone her interest in the connection between people and the power of storytelling through landscapes. As a Social Justice Fellow, Elisheva is eager to explore how maps can deepen our understanding of space and history, while also recognizing the potential for maps to reinforce discrimination. She seeks to better understand the impact of physical and drawn borders and how they have shaped and will continue to affect society in Israel-Palestine. In Elisheva’s free time, she loves to swim and go camping.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman, who is spending her fellowship year working at +972 Magazine, is the Richard J. Israel Fellow. Dikla grew up in Houston, Texas. She graduated in June 2023 with an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, where she also received her BA in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. As an undergraduate, she spent a semester studying Islamic civilizations in Cairo, Egypt. She wrote her BA thesis on American Jewish feminists of the 1970s and 1980s and the question of Palestine. In graduate school, her research interests continue to straddle the intersection of American and Middle Eastern history. In her MA thesis, she traced the history of the Birthright Israel program, its Israel-centric (liberal Zionist) politics and vision of Jewish identity, and grassroots opposition to the program from young Jewish anti-occupation activists.

Dikla spent the past year in Amman, Jordan where she studied intensive formal and Levantine colloquial Arabic through the CASA fellowship funded by the U.S. Department of Education. While there, she had the opportunity to work in a restaurant where she developed an appreciation for traditional Palestinian cooking, the preservation of regional and family recipes over generations, and the centrality of food to collective national identity. (And salty cheeses!) She is currently based in Haifa.

Read the bios from other cohorts of the NIF / SHATIL Social Justice Fellows:
2022-2023 cohort | 2021-2022 cohort | 2019-2020 cohort | 2018-2019 cohort | 2016-2017 cohort | 2015-2016 cohort | 2014-2015 cohort | 2013-2014 cohort | 2012-2013 cohort