Barak Sella, at The Blogs

Barak Sella

Expert on Israel-U.S. relations, world Jewry and The Middle East.

Dec 16, 2025, 4:12 AM

Hanukkah Is a Story of Resistance. Ours Still Is

Hanukkah celebration at Congregation B'nai Emunah in Tulsa, Oklahoma. December 14, 2025. Credit: Barak Sella

Three police cruisers, two private security vehicles, and metal barricades blocking the street. That’s what the Jewish community in the middle of Oklahoma needed to set up in order to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah in safety. The increased...

Oct 8, 2025, 8:32 PM

The Long October

The fountain in Dizengoff Square is adorned with posters and stickers commemorating fallen IDF soldiers.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass, October 7th, 2025 - Yesterday, I couldn’t fall asleep. As I lay in bed, I returned to that night when our world flipped upside down. Then, like now, I was in Boston. 11:29 PM here was the...

May 9, 2023, 4:42 PM

Are the days of unreserved support for Israel over?

The General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America is symbolically held in Israel once every four years. Although this is a significant event for the American Jewish establishment, for Israelis, it is extremely marginal and nearly makes...

Mar 27, 2023, 11:49 AM

Israel’s Path to Becoming a Middle Eastern Democracy

Freedom House, an American research institute, has been studying the global level of freedom and democracy for the past 50 years. While the report is considered to have a distinctly pro-Western position when examining concepts such as "freedom," it...

Feb 28, 2023, 3:25 PM

What can Israeli and American Jews build together?

Protests in Jerusalem against the Judicial Reform

As someone who works in the field of Israel-World Jewry relations, I frequently go back in forth from Israel to the US. After completing another tour of the United States, with stops in Texas and New York, I had...

About Me

Barak Sella is a Middle East Initiative Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an Elson Israel fellow at the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. He is the former executive director of the Reut Institute and an expert on Israel-U.S. relations, world Jewry and The Middle East.

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