Tomer Persico is the Shalom Hartman Institute Bay Area Scholar in Residence and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. He has taught for eight years at the Department for Comparative Religion in Tel-Aviv University, and his fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish Renewal, forms of secularization, and trends of secularization and religiosity in Israel. His book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition was published by Tel Aviv University Press in 2016. A second book about the idea of the Image of God and it’s role in shaping the Modern West will be published in Hebrew in the Summer of 2020. Persico is an activist for freedom of religion in Israel, writes the most popular blog in Hebrew on religion, and has written hundreds of articles on these subjects for the popular media.