Dr. Hillel Levine

The author of many books and articles on how ethnic violence and normative conflict may be resolved, he uses scholarly research tools and canons of evidence, but always takes an empathetic and multi-disciplinary approach. His use of evocative narrative and moving life histories makes his work engaging to non-specialists and popular audiences alike, while still remaining influential among academics and policy analysts. His research provided the basis for an Oscar winning documentary, and two of his books are being made into feature-length dramatizations. He is a popular lecturer, guest columnist in newspapers, and makes frequent radio and television appearances.

He is President of the International Institute for Mediation and Historical Conciliation (IIMHC), which has developed the methods for training political leaders and citizens in “history without hate.”  IIMHC is a new NGO organized to prevent and resolve violent conflicts that are made more volatile by disputed histories and memories of past injuries. He applies his theoretical knowledge and experience in the social sciences, from psychoanalytic theory to organizational development and business administration, to a broad range of domestic and international strategic planning processes and public programs. He directed the first planning process resulting in the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, mediating the concerns of Holocaust survivors and representatives of other genocides, historians, educators, and communal leaders, architects, artists, elected officials, and government regulators. He is a board member of many community based not-for-profit organizations and often acts as a consultant. He has designed and participated in conflict resolution workshops, including religious, ethnic, and socio-economic conflict and consulted to foundations, government agencies, and professional organizations on these topics. Following the positive response to his book on banking, government policy, changing neighborhoods, and ethnic conflict, he organized the Gentrification Project to foster dialogue, the clarification and balancing of conflicting interests among the stakeholders of neighborhood change. He has consulted on these issues in Norway, Israel, Japan, and Germany. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, he organized one of the only relief missions allowed entry by the Japanese government that included psychiatrists and mental health workers to deal with the trauma of the victims, particularly the burnout of the Kobe mental health workers who themselves were victims. In August of 2004, he traveled throughout India on behalf of the U.S. State Department. While there, he met with representatives of universities, NGOs, governments, and the general population, and he gave lectures and held workshops about how, in accordance with the justifiable modes of influence that one sovereign state might have upon another, pluralistic liberal democracy can be and must be fortified and made vibrant in India.  http://www.iimhc.org

For more than twenty-five years, he has been devoted to undergraduate, graduate, professional, and adult non-professional education at Harvard, Yale, and now as Professor of Sociology and Religion at Boston University. He has held visiting professorships in Korea, Japan, China, Poland, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Israel. He teaches social theory and ethics, Jewish history, and the history of religions. He has developed and administered policy and research oriented internships in Washington, DC and interdisciplinary programs at his own and other universities and contributed to the revitalization of the academy in the former Soviet Union after the fall of Communism. He enjoys the friendship of several generations of accomplished former students.

"What keeps a community alive? What are the social and historical forces that shape or stifle its aspirations? When does a community soar and when does it yield to resignation? These and other questions take on an urgency of their own in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon's perceptive, brilliant, and disturbing inquiry."  

"One of a handful of landmark books in our desperately needed process of just beginning to explore the strange mystery of human goodness."