Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
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Yifat Bitton

Yifat Bitton, a legal academic and social activist for equality, is currently president of Achva Academic College of Science & Education in Israel. Previously she was an associate professor at the College of Management, Striks Law School, Israel, and has also had visiting appointments at the School of Transnational Law at Peking University in China (2009–2914) and NYU (2018). She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her LLM from Yale University Law School, and she has also been a visiting Fulbright Fellow at Harvard (2005).

Prof. Bitton is cofounder and chair of Tmura, The Israeli Center for Equality, for whom she has litigated human rights cases for twenty years pro bono. For her many years of human rights work, Bitton has won myriad social and legal awards and prizes, among which are the Aliance Prize for Education and Social Change (2016), the Minister of Social Equality Award for Organizations Fighting Violence against Women (2016 to Tmura), the "Honoris Causa" Award from the Israeli Bar Association (2015), the Safra Award for Excellence and Contribution to Israeli Society (2015), the Bernice Tennenbaum Prize for innovative feminism from the Hadassah Foundation (2014), the Human Rights Activist Award from the London Human Rights Annual Dinner (2014), and the Dafna Izraeli Fund’s Prize for Israeli Feminist Leadership (2013). She was also nominated as Forbes' 50 Most Influential Women in Israel, 2015.

Bitton was shortlisted twice for Israel’s Supreme Court, 2016, 2018, making history as the youngest woman and the first woman of Mizrahi descent to ever appear on the list.

Bitton served as director and head of Audit Committee on the Advisory Committee of Israel’s Central Bank.