He has taught at Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Dartmouth College, and was director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.

The son of the late Ben Shaicovitch, president of Canada's Zionist Men's Association during the 1950s, he volunteered for farm work on an Israeli collective during the Six-Day War, an experience that affected many of his generation.

His first book, The Tragedy of Zionism, was published in 1985 to considerable controversy, since it suggested that Israel's occupation was a symptom of a democracy plagued by anachronistic Zionist institutions and ideas.

In 1987, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for continuing work on the writer Arthur Koestler, which led to eventual articles in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Salmagundi.

During these years in management consulting, he continued to contribute articles, mainly on Israeli politics and economy, to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The American Prospect, Fortune, and other magazines.

In 2002, he married Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, a professor of literature at the Hebrew University, and returned to Israel and teaching,[3] becoming director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

This book argues that Israel's professional elites have made a success of globalization, and have become a natural constituency for a successful peace process; but that Israeli democracy's continuing neglect of its Arab minority, now 1/5 of the country, and the special privileges accorded to Israel's ultra-Orthodox, also 1/5 of the country, is sowing the seeds of a disaster which only a settlement with the Palestinians can prevent.