He is an interdisciplinary academic, working on various issues in Islamic law, political Islam, and disability studies. His work includes the translation of Arabic books into Indonesian, books on Islam and disability, papers in academic journals, and popular articles for Indonesian national newspapers and magazines. 

Dr. Maftuhin is also an activist working on the rights of persons with disabilities in Indonesia. Since 2010 he has been helping people with disabilities to get their educational rights and open access to higher education. He was Head of the Center for Services for Persons with Disabilities (2013-2020).  He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of INKLUSI: Journal of Disability Studies.

For more detailed information about his works, check his blog at https://maftuh.in

 

He also teaches Israeli foreign policy at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University. His Ph.D dissertation (Harvard East Asia Monograph no. 41, 1971) dealt with FrancoJapanese relations during the era of the end of the Tokugawa regime and early Meiji. His book Golda-A Political Biography (Tel Aviv, Yedioth Books) won the Prime Minister's Prize for 2010. He has published a book on Japanese Militarism (Tel Aviv, Ministry of Defense, 2005) and on Japan and the Jews During the Holocaust (Modan, 2008) in addition to fifty articles in scholarly publications in Israel and abroad dealing with Israel's foreign relations, Israeli Information and Communication Policies, Israel and the Asian nations and specifically Israel and China and Japan. His current research deals with Jewish communities in East and South East Asia.

I completed a BA in East Asian Studies with a China emphasis (The Hebrew University); an MA in Culture Research (Tel Aviv University); and an MA and a PhD in Anthropology (University of California, Santa Barbara). Straddling the disciplines of China Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology, my work covers a range of topics relating to children, youth and education in China, including: the globalization of Chinese education; the interplay between changes in notions and practices of childrearing and education and the emergence of new conceptualizations of play, privacy and subjectivity in China; the rise of child psychology in contemporary urban China; and the development of a new Chinese discourse on children's rights and children's citizenship, a topic which was the focus of my first book, Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 

My second book, Children in China (2016, China Today series, Polity Press), provides an overview of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the lives of rural and urban Chinese children since the launch of economic reforms in 1978. Covering schooling, consumption, identity formation processes, family and peer relations among other aspects of children’s lives, the book explores the rise of new ideas of child-care, child-vulnerability and child-agency; the impact of the One-Child Policy; and the emergence of children as independent consumers in the new market economy.  It also demonstrates how economic restructuring and the recent waves of rural–urban migration have produced starkly unequal conditions for children’s education and welfare both in the countryside and in the cities.

My recent book, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism and Youth Militarisation in the PRC (2024, Edinburgh University Press), draws on government, media, and educational sources and on data from ethnographic field projects conducted in 2012-2019 to trace the promotion - and contestation - of military values and techniques in Chinese education of the 2010s. It further explores the intersection between this development and the construction of nationalism, masculinities, and femininities in contemporary China.

 

Selected publications:

Naftali, Orna. 2024. "Schooling 'Soft-Spoken Boys' and 'Masculine Girls': Morality, Equality, and Difference in China's Gender Education." Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 26: 85-113

Naftali, Orna. 2022. "'Law Does Not Come Down from Heaven': Youth Legal Socialisation Approaches in Chinese Textbooks of the Xi Jinping Era." Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 51(2): 265–291

Naftali, Orna. 2021. "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949-76)". Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 14 (2): 254-273

Naftali, Orna. 2021. "'Being Chinese Means Becoming Cheap Labour': Education, National Belonging, and Social Positionality among Youth in Contemporary China". The China Quarterly 245: 51–71

Naftali, Orna. 2021. "Youth Military Training in China: Learning to 'Love the Army'." Journal of Youth Studies 24 (10): 1340-1357

 

 

Teaching & Mentoring:

Teaching: At the Department of Asian Studies, I teach BA and MA courses on a range of issues related to Chinese culture and society, including: "Gender and Sexuality in the PRC"; "The State and the Family in Modern China"; "Class and Consumption in China; "The Anthropology of Contemporary Chinese Society"; “Internet and the Media in Contemporary China”; "Resistance and Protest in Contemporary China"; and "Research Methods of Modern Chinese Society and Politics".

 

Mentoring: I welcome inquiries from prospective MA and doctoral students interested in PRC social history and the anthropology of contemporary Chinese society, particularly in regards to children and youth; family, schooling and education; gender and sexuality; state-society relations; nationalism and militarization; children's rights and youth legal consciousness in the PRC (1949-present). 

Studied in Waseda University in Tokyo during the years 1984-1986 as a scholarship student of the Japanese Government.

A graduate of Harvard University, he specializes in the study of coups d'etat, political assassinations and military disobedience. His last two books are The Plots against Hitler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a study of the anti-Nazi resistance in the German army, and Curse on this Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press), on the culture of insubordination in the Japanese Imperial Army and the roots of the Pacific War. Currently, he is studying military adventurism in the East Asian sphere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was also writing regularly for the media in Hebrew and in English on issues of military and political significance. His writing can be followed in his academia.edu page, in his blog, The Owl, and in his Amazon author page. 

 

His PhD dissertation (Kyoto University, 2007), which examines the export of Japan’s popular culture to Asia, won the Iue Asia Pacific Research Prize in October 2007 for outstanding dissertation on society and culture in Asia. As a part of this research, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul. His research interests include Japanese popular culture in Asia, popular culture and regionalization in East and Southeast Asia, Japan-Southeast Asian relations, and cultural industry and cultural policy in Japan and South Korea.