Dr. Raquel Ukeles, PhD, is the new Head of Collections of the National Library of Israel and previously served as Curator of the Islam and Middle East collection since 2010. She is responsible for the overall development of all the Library’s collections and for digital, cultural and educational initiatives based on the NLI collections as well as in partnership with other institutions.
A New York native, Raquel received her BA from Princeton (1993) and MA and PhD from Harvard University in 2006, all in comparative Islamic and Jewish studies. She also studied Jewish law in Jerusalem and New York, and Islamic law and Arabic in Egypt, Morocco and the Netherlands.
She has published and taught on a wide array of subjects related to comparative Jewish and Islamic traditions, medieval Islamic law, the history of Islamic manuscripts, Jewish intellectual history under Islam, Arab culture in Mandatory Palestine, and creating shared society in Israel today.
She currently lives in Jerusalem with her husband and three children.