Remembering Howard Jay Reiter

In March of 2023, the Katz Center was honored to inaugurate a new series in memory of Katz Center Board of Advisors member Howard Jay Reiter.

Howard passed away unexpectedly in September of 2021, leaving behind his wife Jody Ellant W’82, L’87 and his children Gavriela C’17, SP2’18, Aiden W’20, C’20, Ariana and Gideon, and many, many friends. This new series, made possible by Howard’s family and friends, is meant to honor his wonderfully insatiable curiosity with a program meant to give the Penn community an opportunity to learn about Israeli scholarship and culture. Each year, the Katz Center will host a program featuring a scholar, scientist, or artist from Israel—sometimes with the goal of deepening understanding of Israel, sometimes to learn about new research that is happening in Israel.

The inaugural Howard J. Reiter program in 2023 was undertaken in partnership with the Penn Carey School of Law and tied in with the focus of the Katz Center fellowship that year—“Jews and Modern Legal Culture.” The speaker was Professor Barak Medina, the Justice Haim Cohen Chair in Human Rights at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he also served as dean (2009–2012) and rector (2017–2022). Professor Medina’s research interests include Israeli law, comparative constitutional law, and economic analysis of law. He is considered one of Israel’s preeminent experts on the Israeli constitution.

The title of Professor Medina’s talk was “Israel’s Rights Revolution: Public Opinion and Constitutional Law.” We settled on this title a year before the talk, having no idea that, at the time Professor Medina would deliver the lecture, Israeli society would be in the throes of a major crisis about the future of Israel as a democracy, a crisis centered on the status of its judiciary and the future of checks and balances. That crisis has not been resolved yet, but it had reached a boiling point in March of 2023, and Professor Medina was at the center of it at all, having been among the first to call attention to the existential constitutional stakes in the government’s efforts to curb the independence of its judiciary. We are very grateful to Professor Medina that, in the midst of this crisis, he took time to share his perspective with our community, speaking on the issues at stake for Israel’s judiciary and democracy.

The lecture brought together several hundred people and marked the Center’s largest in-person program since the beginning of the pandemic. It could not have felt timelier and was a powerful illustration of how much there is to learn by bringing intellectual leaders from Israel to speak to the Penn community directly. We are grateful to Howard’s family and friends for choosing to honor his memory in this way.

View the recording.

Our next Reiter program will focus on Israeli music. More details will be available on the Katz Center website in the fall.