Judith Tannenbaum Shuval is one of the main scholars in the field of the sociology of health in Israel. Her research on migration and health, inequality in health, self-care in health, the doctor-patient relationship, and the processes of professional socialization has been based in concrete life in Israel and has broader implications for such topics cross-culturally. 

Shuval was born in New York in 1926. She is a graduate of Hunter College. In 1947, she earned a bachelor of Hebrew letters from the Jewish Theological Seminary and, in 1955, a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. 

In 1949, Shuval made Lit. "ascent." A "calling up" to the Torah during its reading in the synagogue.aliyah to Israel and was appointed senior research associate and project director at the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research. There she directed studies in the areas of ethnic relations, immigrant absorption, housing and urban settlement, medical sociology, occupational sociology, and the sociology of nursing. She also served as adviser on immigrant absorption for UNESCO from 1955 to 1956. She has been a fellow of the American and International Sociological Associations and served as chairwoman of the Israeli Sociological Association from 1986 to 1988, during which time she founded the Section on the Sociology of Health. She was Israel’s representative to the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology in 1983. 

In 1968 Shuval joined the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as one of the first members of its department of sociology, in the post of senior lecturer. She was appointed associate professor in 1972 and professor in 1979, becoming the Louis and Pearl Rose Professor of Medical Sociology. She also served as the director of the Programme in the Sociology of Health at the University’s School of Public Health. During the academic year 1978–1979, and again in 1981, she was a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Shuval retired in 1994 but retains the status of professor emerita. 

Shuval is the author of many books, including a study on immigration during Israel’s first years, Immigrants on the Threshold (1963); Entering Medicine: The Dynamics of Transition: A Seven Year Study of Medical Education in Israel (1980); Social Functions of Medical Practice, written with A. Antonovsky and A.M. Davies (1970); two works on Soviet immigrant physicians to Israel, one written before, and one after, the collapse of the USSR, Newcomers and Colleagues: Soviet Immigrant Physicians in Israel (1983), and Immigrant Physicians: Former Soviet Doctors in Israel, Canada and the United States (1997, written with J. H. Bernstein); one book on the experience of aging in Israel Informal Support for the Elderly: Social Networks in a Jerusalem Neighborhood (1982); three books on the sociology of health in Israel, Social Dimensions of Health: The Israeli Experience (1992) and Social Structure and Health in Israel (2000, written with O. Anson) and Alternative and Biomedicine in Israel: Boundaries and Bridges (2012). 

Judith Tannenbaum Shuval is Phi Beta Kappa and received the Israel Prize for social sciences in 1965. Hadassah awarded her its highest honor, the Henrietta Szold Award, in 1995. 

Selected Works

A listing of Judith Shuval’s published papers may be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Judith_Shuval

Shuval, J. T., and J. H. Bernstein. Immigrant Physicians: Former Soviet Doctors in Israel, Canada and the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. 

Leshem, E., and J. T. Shuval, eds. Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives. Livingston, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998.

Shuval, J. T., and O. Anson. Social Structure and Health in Israel (Hebrew) (2000). 

Shuval, J. T. Alternative Healthcare in Israel: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives. Hadassa Word Press, 2016.