Prof. Sergio Della Pergola
Sergio Della Pergola was born in Trieste when Italy was under German occupation.
After the war, the family settled in Milan where Della Pergola was an active member
of Jewish youth movements and student organizations. [1]
He emigrated to Israel in 1966. He holds an M.A. in political science from
the University of Pavia and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a
Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at the Hebrew University’s Avraham
Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, where he was the Institute Chair and
Director of the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics and held the Shlomo
Argov Chair in Israel-Diaspora Relations. [2]
Della Pergola is married to Miriam Toaff and has four children. [3]
Academic career
Della Pergola is a specialist on the demography of world Jewry and has published
numerous books and over two hundred papers on historical demography, the family,
international migration, Jewish identification, and population projections in the
Diaspora and in Israel. He has written extensively about demography in Israel and
Palestine. He has lectured at over 70 universities and research centers in Western
Europe, North America and Latin America, and served as senior policy consultant to
the President of Israel, the Israeli government, the Jerusalem municipality, and many
major national and international organizations. [2]
He served on the National Technical Advisory Committee for the 1990 and 2000-01
National Jewish Population Surveys, and on the experts committee of the 2013 Pew
Research Center survey of Jewish Americans. He was Visiting Professor at
the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2002-03, at Brandeis
University in 2006, at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2009 and at
the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2010. He is a member of the Yad
Vashem Committee for the Righteous of the Nations.
Awards
In 1999, Della Pergola won the Marshall Sklare Award for distinguished achievement
from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ) and his award
presentation was entitled: "Thoughts of a Jewish Demographer in the Year 2000". In
2013, he was awarded the Michael Landau prize for Migration and Demography.
