Smadar Lavie
Smadara Lavie is a Mizrahi Jew born and raised in Israel. She received her BA in Social Anthropology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1980. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1989 (Majors: Sociology and Social Anthropology; Minors: Medieval Islamic Civilization, Musicology).
She co-edited "Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity," a book concerned with the study of diasporas, borders, identity, racism in Humanities, Social Sciences, and Cultural Studies. Her last peer-reviewed scientific publication was "Between and Among the Boundaries of Culture: Bridging Text and Lived Experience in the Third Timespace." Cultural Studies, 1996 10(1):154-179.
She extensively lived with the Mzeina Bedouin and wrote "The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule."
In a 2004 interview in Maariv, Israel's second largest daily newspaper, Lavie describes the circumstances that led to the termination of her stary in the [united states] as follows: "I fleed the US with my son because I lost custody over him due to parental alienation syndrome". Israel family court (תמ"ש 74430/99) made a ruling on this alleged child abduction case. These decisions, which allowed Lavie and her child stay in Israel were sustained by the Tel-Aviv District Court (ע"מ 1166/99 וע"מ 1167/99).
Lavie claims in her resume that on 2001, "the Israeli Supreme Court cleared me of any child abduction charges", yet no reference to that decision is provided.
Ever since her abrupt departure from the united states, Lavie became a political activist against the use of parental alienation syndrome against mothers by family courts. In response, Israel's ministry of soical affairs made an official statement that Lavie "never treated cases (of the the syndrome), nor made any research on the topic".