The short version: Right now, I’m an Israeli living in Leipzig, Germany, studying and working in theoretical linguistics. I’m a founding member and former Council Chairman of the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) and before that I was a co-founder and alumnus of Sudbury Jerusalem, a Sudbury school in Israel.

The long version:

EDUCATION

In 2001-2, at the age of 14, I was involved in starting Sudbury Jerusalem, Jerusalem’s first (and so far only) Sudbury school, which I then attended for four years as a student. I was (and am) the school’s first graduate.  I have since continued to care about democratic education, and since moving to Germany I have been speaking, sporadically, about democratic education, mainly giving talks for school startup groups. I’ve listed some of my talks below (as many as I could remember).

In October 2007, I became involved in creating the European Democratic Education Community and organizing the EUDEC 2008 conference. In February 2008, at EUDEC’s founding assembly, I decided to put my experience in democratic meetings to work and ran for Council, EUDEC’s managing board. That summer the first EUDEC conference attracted nearly 400 participants from all over the world (mainly Europe and Taiwan) and injected our organization with a lot of vitality. Until recently, I was a member of EUDEC’s Council, and the Council’s elected Chairman since late 2009.

LANGUAGE

Since I began my studies in 2008, linguistics has become an important part of my life. I am mainly interested in generativist theories of morphology and syntax (which I think of as one thing called morphosyntax). A while back I wrote about why I like something as boring as grammar here: “Why Grammar?” For more about that stuff, see my Linguistics page.

PEACE

I’ve always been concerned with my homeland (Israel)’s prospects for peace. A feeling of hopelessness was part of the background for my leaving there. For a while I tried to avoid this painful topic, but it caught up with me eventually, and lately I can’t help but follow the goings-on in Israel with sad horrified fascination and an intense need to do something to change things there.

OTHER FINE THINGS

Other than democratic education and linguistics, I am very interested in civil rights and liberties, strategy and politics, the Internet, technology and game design.

Below are some of the talks and articles by/about me, regarding democratic education. Linguistics stuff is on the Linguistics page.