Haviva Pedaya

She is the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Gershom Scholem award for Kabbalistic studies for 2018, the Yehuda Amichai literary award of 2012, and the President's Literature Award of 2004, for her book "Motzah Hanefesh".

She later began researching the Hassidic movement of the 18th century, and Rabbi Nachman of Breslev. In her book "Hashem veHamikdash" she deals with the concepts of heavenly Jerusalem, the apocalypse, and the Kabbalah. In her two books about Nachmanides, she discusses hermeneutics, the land of Israel, symmetry, and the applicability of layers of exegesis to layers of reality; the relationship between the symbolic and the concrete, and how it applies to categorization of texts, and attitudes towards the Jewish diaspora.

In 2017, the annual festival of Ethiopian music in Jerusalem, Hullegeb Festival, featured the event The Return to Zion: Longings for the Heavenly Israel (“Shivat Zion” in Hebrew), a multi-layered, multi-style show based on Pedaya's work, in which participated Ethiopian-born and Russian-born singers and musicians, in styles ranging from the liturgical, to electronic, to jazz. Pedaya, who has written extensively about the Sephardic/Mizrahi immigration experisnce in Israel, sought to create inclusivity for a group facing not only issues of immigration, but also color-based racism: "“Judaism comprises all the diasporas, all the colors, all the music – all the scales and maqams – that they have in Eastern and Western music. And there are also Jews who are black, which I feel is wonderful."

Since 2016, Pedaya is chairperson of the Council of Public Libraries in Israel. That same year, she was appointed to the national council of higher education. She is also on the Advisory board of the Shaharit think tank, leadership incubator, and community organizing hub. In addition, she heads Makom M’Shelach ("A Place of Your Own"), a project of empowerment and rehabilitation through the arts for women with mental illness from all sectors of society.

In 2015, Pedaya staged "Hillula for a Mother – an Oriental Rock Opera", a requiem to her own late mother. The musical was performed at the Israel Festival. Pedaya wrote the words, and Peretz Eliyahu set them to music. The musical style of the composition is classical Arabic with oriental rock.

Pedaya stood at the helm of the Helicon School of Poetry (2014–2105), and served as an academic adviser at Alma College, where she also taught. She was a board member of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies (2006–2007), and is a senior fellow at the Van Leer Institute, where she led two research groups – Piyyut, and The East Writes Itself. Pedaya is on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Bezalel Journal of Visual and Material Culture.

Another major subject of study for Pedaya is the concept of trauma in Judaism. She sees Jewish history as traumatic, and thus, she approaches her work as dealing with the theology of crisis. She considers the Spanish expulsion of the Jews as one of most major traumas of Jewish history. Pedaya was the first person to apply the ideas of trauma and inter-generational transference to 16th century Jewish history – tools more generally applied to Holocaust research.

Pedaya was co-founder and producer of the musical show called "Yehuda Halevy Corner of Ibn Gbirol" – references to two main streets in Tel Aviv named after Yehuda Halevy, the Spanish Jewish physician, poet and philosopher; and Shlomo Ibn Gbirol, the 11th-century Andalusian poet and Jewish philosopher. The event, which took place at Heichal HaTarbut in 2004, featured performances by some of Israel's leading musicians, including Hava Alberstein, Kobi Oz, Eviatar Banai, Berry Sakharof, Ahuva Ozeri, Mosh Ben Ari, Ehud Banai, Shem Tov Levy, David D'Or, Yonatan Razel, Yonah ensemble, and others. The performance was released on CD as a live album.

Pedaya initiated and produced the album "Najarah" in 2013. The album included piyyut music of the Baghdad Kabbalists, with Turkish Sufi stylings, based on words by the 16th century Jewish poet Yisrael Najarah. She collaborated on several additional projects with musicians of varying modern styles: Berry Sakharof (rock), Aviv Gedj (fusion of rock, Mizrahi, and piyyut), and Dikla (singer-songwriter, fusion of Arabic music and pop).

In 2013, Pedaya edited the book Piyyut as a Cultural Prism (Hapiyut Ketsohar tarbuti), which included a chapter by her entitled "Piyyut as a Dream and as a Window: Spaces of Memory", in which she analyzed the essence of piyyut.

In 2013, Pedaya ran for the city council elections in Beersheba, on the Meretz ticket, but was not elected.

In 2013–2014 was a co-founder of I-Core Center of Excellence, a cooperative venture between Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University. She is responsible for two musical projects at the center: "Jewish Identity, Place and Absence", dealing with Hassidic music from Poland; and "Southern Eastern", Mizrahi Hazzanic music in southern Israel.

Pedaya is a prolific writer of art criticism, opinion journalism, and social analysis, in particular about Mizrahi issues. For example, her essay "The City as Text and the Margins as Voice – Exclusion from the Book and Routing to the Book" explores musical culture as a mirror of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi society in Israel. She describes the dialectic between the geographical periphery, where she says the authentic voice and memory are held, and the center, where she says singers from the periphery flock to, seeking acceptance, but losing their true voices en route. Most of her early works on music and poetry form a manifesto on the topic of Mizrahi culture; her article "The Exiled Voice", which appeared in Haaretz in 2004, describes the ways that repressed memories are recovered by third-generation Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis, as expressed in music.

Pedaya's early research dealt with the birth of the Kabbalah in Provence and the circles of Nachmanides and his students in Spain in the 12th century. She is particularly interested in the phenomenology of the Kabbalah, which is where she began her research into ecstasy.

Her first prose work is Ein HeHatul (Eye of the Cat), published in 2008. It is a collection of stories about urban characters, interspersed with a study of the cat as a wanderer in the urban space. Her next work was Hotamot (seals), a collection of short stories influenced by folk tales. Some of the stories are realistic, while others allegorical and fantastical. Most of the book deals with the feminine existence: The girl-youth-woman in relationships and family settings, where a minor character in one story is the main character of another. Both books include Kabbalistic influences in both narrative and structure.

Between 2007 and 2011 Pedaya was chair of the non-profit organization "Reshimu" for a spiritual material environment, and chair of the non-profit "Hazon Fetiyah", the association created by her mother to provide occupational rehabilitation for mentally ill people. She was also active in the "Amcha" association, an assistance organization for Holocaust survivors, and was an advisor for the Haifa biennale.

In 2003 Pedaya established the "Yonah Ensemble" (dove ensemble), to create a renaissance of mystical and liturgical music from the Near East. The ensemble was active until 2010, with Pedaya as its manager and musical producer. The lead singer of the ensemble was the Hazzan Yehuda Ovadia Pedaya, Haviva Pedaya's brother. The ensemble was invited to perform at the Krakow Jewish Music Festival.

Pedaya also writes about art, primarily Mizrahi art. She has participated in many documentary films about Kabbalah and Sephardic history and culture, including Local Angel (2002), Liquid of Life (2008), A Song of Loves – Rabbi David Buzaglo (2015), and Yeshurun in 6 Chapters (2018).

MiTeivah Stuma (From a Cryptic Ark, 1996) is a collection of symbolic poems, many of which were later set to music by contemporary Israeli artists of multiple genres.

Pedaya studied Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University. She graduated from the School of Visual Theater in 1991. She continued on to complete her PhD in Jewish Philosophy. Her dissertation was the basis for her book about Rabbi Yitzhak Sagi Nahor, "השם והמקדש במשנת ר' יצחק סגי נהור", published in 2001.

In 1987, Pedaya was appointed as a lecturer in the history department at Ben-Gurion University, and became a full professor in 2002. Since 2009, she is the head the Elyachar Center for Studies in Sephardi Heritage.

Haviv Pedaya (in Hebrew: חביבה פדיה; born December 5, 1957) is an Israeli poet, author, cultural researcher, and professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, where she is head of the Elyachar Center for Studies in Sephardi Heritage.

Her parents immigrated to Israel from Baghdad, during the 1950s, during the mass migration of Jews from Iraq. Pedaya was born and grew up in Jerusalem.