Yehouda Shenhav (, born 26 February 1952) is an Israeli sociologist and critical theorist. He is known for his contributions in the fields of bureaucracy, management and capitalism, as well as for his research on ethnicity in Israeli society and its relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Biography Yehouda Shaharabani (later Shenhav) was born in Beersheba in 1952 to a family of Iraqi Jews. At the age of three he moved with his family to Tel Aviv and again, at the age of ten, to Petah Tikva. In 1977 he received his BA in sociology and labor studies from the Tel Aviv University and four years later he received his Master's degree in Industrial management from the Technion. He then traveled to Stanford University, where he received another MA in 1983 and a PhD in 1985, both in sociology. Most of his academic work is done in the Sociology and Anthropology School in the Tel Aviv University, where he is a full professor. He has also taught in several universities in the United States, such as the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Stanford University, Princeton University and Columbia University. He is head of advanced studies in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and as the editor of Theory & Criticism and Theory and Criticism in Context, and as Senior Editor for the European journal Organization Studies. He has won several awards, including the Dorothy Harlow Award of the American Academy of Management; and the Association for Israeli Studies award for The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity. Social activism Shenhav is a well-known figure in Israel as a public intellectual and as one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, a social movement founded in 1996 by descendants of Jewish refugees, Olim, from Arab countries, which defines itself as an extra-parliamentary movement seeking to challenge the ethnic structure in the Israeli society. One of the Rainbow Coalition's chief struggles was for lands, in which Shenhav and others petitioned to the Supreme Court of Israel against what he described as an unjust distribution of state owned lands, made worse by decisions of the Israel Land Administration, and won. In late 1996 Shenhav published in Haaretz an article titled "The Bond of Silence", which generated a great deal of reaction. He pointed to an "inter-generational bond of silence between the ideological commissars of the formative years of Zionism ("the salt