Emanuele Ottolenghi

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a regular contributor with Commentary Magazine, and the executive director of The Transatlantic Institute (appointed 28 August 2006) . About the Institute:"Founded in February 2004, the Transatlantic Institute is an American Jewish Committee initiative of international diplomacy." He has written op-eds for the National Review, New York Sun, Jerusalem Post (regular contributor), the Guardian, among others. Most of his op-eds have dealt exclusively with Israel and are seen as apologia for Israeli actions. To fend off criticism of Israel, Ottolenghi has sometimes brandished the "anti-semitism" smear. Ottolenghi also has been active in undermining calls to implement an academic boycott against Israeli academic institutions.

Basic biography

Emanuele Ottolenghi was born in 1969 in Bologna, Italy, and he speaks English, French, Hebrew and Italian. He graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in Political Science. He lived for five years in Israel, where he worked for the Israel Democracy Institute, and obtained a PhD in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Around 2003, he taught Israeli politics at Oxford University where he was the Leone Ginzburg Fellow in Israel Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford. He was also a columnist for Il Foglio. He has held positions at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as the University of New South Wales, in Australia.

Editorials

From the Magna Carta Foundation website (where Italian neocons meet the American neocons):

He works as a freelance consultant on Israeli politics and Middle East issues; he regularly contributes Op-Eds to Israel’s English daily The Jerusalem Post, the Italian Daily Il Foglio and occasionally to the Italian daily syndicate Il Quotidiano Nazionale (a conglomerate of Il Giorno, Il Resto del Carlino, and La Nazione); Fragments of Zion, his monthly column in Rome’s Jewish magazine Shalom, is dedicated to Zionist thinkers and the relevance of their work to present day Israel. He has published Op-Eds in several newspapers on Israel and the Middle East topics (The Guardian, The Jerusalem Report, The Australian Financial Review and Newsday among others) and regularly appears on news radio and TV programs.

Affiliations

• TransAtlantic Institute – Executive Director (appointed 28 August 2006).
• American Jewish Committee
• American Enterprise Institute
• Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
• Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
• Michael Ledeen (friends)
• OpenDemocracy – regular contributor
• Labour Friends of Israel
• Magna Carta Foundation

Contact

• Executive Director, Transatlantic Institute
• Phone: +32 2 500 72 80 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +32 2 500 72 80      end_of_the_skype_highlighting
• E-mail: ottolenghie@transatlanticinstitute.org

Until 2006 Ottolenghi maintained his own website www.emanueleottolenghi.com, but since he became director of the TransAtlantic institute it has been removed. The last version of it is available in the Internet Archive of 24 August 2006.

Publications

• Electoral Reform in Israel, Palgrave, due 2006.
• Anatol Lieven, right or wrong?, OpenDemocracy, 20 October 2004. (In this article, Ottolenghi provides a very good summary of his views -- and positions him firmly in the neocon or ziocon corner).

Resources

• PIWP listing of articles by or about Ottolenghi can be found here (click on button).
• Rightweb Emanuele Ottolenghi
• FORA TV, a video of Ottolenghi talking about his book "Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb" Under a Mushroom Cloud, Accessed 14-July-2009