SHOHAM, SHLOMO-GIORA

SHOHAM, SHLOMO-GIORA (1929– ), Israeli criminologist. Shoham was one of first scholars to study criminal youth, the effectiveness of laws against crimes, drug abuse, and the personality traits of traffic offenders. He was born in Lithuania and moved to Israel with his parents in 1935. In 1953 he received an LL.M. and in 1960 an LL.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, School of Law, in law and criminology. He studied for a doctorate at Cambridge in 1958–59. In 1961 he began to teach at Bar-Ilan University and in 1965 served as associate professor at both Bar-Ilan and Tel Aviv universities. In 1969 he became head of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Tel Aviv University and a year later became full professor. He also taught at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford universities. In addition to his academic work, Shoham was assistant district attorney in Jerusalem, assistant to the state attorney, and criminological advisor to the Israeli Ministries of Justice and Internal Security. In 1973 he lost his son, Giora, in the Yom Kippur War, and from that time appended his son's name to his own. Among his many books are Rebellion, Creativity and Revelation (1985); Valhalla, Calvary and Auschwitz, in German (1987); The Bridge to Nothingness: Gnosis, Kabbala and Existentialism (1988); God as the Shadow of Man (2000); and Art, Crime and Madness (2002). Shoham was awarded the Israel Prize in 2003 for criminology. (Shaked Gilboa (2nd ed.)