Abigail Klein Leichman
March 4, 2012, Updated September 11, 2012

A two-day conference on the California campus drew hundreds of business and law faculty and students. ISRAEL21c sponsored the keynote speaker.

 

ISRAEL21c was proud to sponsor the keynote address by Start-up Nation co-author Dan Senor at the University of California-Berkeley’s “Israel through the High-Tech Lens,” a two-day interdisciplinary conference in February.

Senor’s star-power helped attract some 350 Berkeley business and law faculty and students to the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law, where they heard 35 Israeli and US business leaders, scholars and policy-makers discuss business, legal, economic and social aspects of Israeli high-tech. The event was co-hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

“This is just another example of the partnerships ISRAEL21c likes to form in communities to help show the ‘real’ Israel,” says ISRAEL21c president Amy Friedkin.

She worked with Kenneth Bamberger, the institute’s faculty director, to plan the conference around twin themes: “Challenges and Opportunities of Local and Global Dynamics in the Israeli Technology Sector” and “Past Experiences, Present Trends and Future Directions — Lessons from the Past and Challenges for the Israeli Technology World in the 21st Century.”

Speakers represented a broad spectrum — such as Intel executive vice president David (Dadi) Perlmutter; Zika Abzuk, Cisco’s head of corporate social responsibility for Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Kheir Abdel Razek, deputy CEO of a nonprofit that promotes employment for Arab university graduates in the Israeli labor market.

Topics discussed included models of tech-sector investment, green-tech trends, legal challenges to US-Israel business collaboration, global corporations’ involvement in Israel, labor-market diversity, cross-border collaboration in the Middle East and high-tech entrepreneurship.

Bamberger told the assemblage: “By bringing students and faculty … together with local and Israeli business and legal leaders, we were able to address a critical issue for the Bay Area tech community — the future of Israel’s high-tech sector and its deep collaboration with Silicon Valley.”

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