Dr. Roni Mikel Arieli

Professional Background

Dr. Roni Mikel Arieli received her PhD in Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), under the supervision of Professor Louise Bethlehem and Professor Amos Goldberg. Dr. Mikel Arieli was also a Junior Post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Germany) in July 2019, as well as a Scholion Post-Doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the academic year of 2018-2019. She also served as an adjunct lecturer at the Conflict Management & Resolution Program at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in the spring semester of 2019.

Dr. Mikel Arieli is the bearer of several awards, including the 2018 Robert Wistrich prize for outstanding research into Antisemitism, the 2016 Barber-Halpern Prize for outstanding students, the 2016 Wiesenthal Award for outstanding doctoral students, and the 2015 Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research scholarship for support in research. She is the author of numerous publications, most recently “Between Apartheid, the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of Political Protest,” in Journal of Genocide Research (2019); ); “Ahmed Kathrada in Post-War Europe: Holocaust Memory and Apartheid South Africa (1951-1952),” African Identities, 17(1): 2019, 1-17; and "Reading the Diary of Anne Frank on Robben Island: On the role of Holocaust Memory in Ahmed Kathrada's Struggle against Apartheid," Journal of Jewish Identities, 12(2): 2019, 175-195. Her first authored book, Remembering the Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa, was slated for publication dependent on final approval after review, to be published in De Gruyter series “New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History.”

Fellowship Research

Dr. Mikel Arieli was awarded a 2019-2020 Phyllis Greenberg Heideman and Richard D. Heideman Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, for her research project, “Memories of Migration and Migration of Memory: The Transnational History of the Jewish Refugees Deportation to Mauritius (1940-1945).” This project focuses on the Jewish deportation to Mauritius, which has been largely neglected from most accounts of World War II and the Holocaust, as well as from Mauritian history and memory.

Drawing upon Museum resources, she will examine the intersection between the history of British imperialism, Palestine, Jewish displacement, and the Indian Ocean during World War II, with the aim of producing a research monograph. To this end, she will read and juxtapose official colonial records of correspondence; memoirs, personal letters, and material objects; oral history interviews with the Jewish detainees, and testimonies of local Mauritians who remember the detainees, in order to explore the intersections between local and transnational narratives and memories of this forgotten traumatic episode in contemporary Jewish history.  

Residency Period: November 1, 2019, through June 30, 2020