Academic Board Members

Karma Ben Johanan teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She previously served as a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she held the Chair of Jewish-Christian Relations. Ben Johanan studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, where she also completed her PhD in the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies. She was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Ben Johanan has taught courses at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at the "Theologisches Studienjahr" at the Dormition Abbey, and she has conducted research stays at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. Ben Johanan was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023 Her book, Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines and the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations. The book’s Hebrew version, A Pottage of Lentils: Mutual Perceptions of Christians and Jews in the Age of Reconciliation (Tel Aviv University Press, 2020), won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History in 2021.

Annabel Herzog is a Professor of Political Theory at the School of Political Science, University of Haifa. She is working on 20th-century philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida; on Philosophy and Literature; on Contemporary Jewish Philosophy; on Memory and Trauma, on Ethics and Politics. Her new book, Levinas's Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2020), received the 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Her current research focuses on the concept of home.

Menachem Lorberbaum is Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He has chaired the Graduate School of Philosophy and the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University (2004) and is the founding chair of the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies (2004-2008). Prof. Lorberbaum is also a founding member of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem where he currently heads the Bet Midrash program. He completed his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University and spent three years at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Lorberbaum is author of Politics and the Limits of Law (Stanford 2001; Hebrew: 2006) and We are Dazzled by His Beauty (Hebrew, Ben Zvi Institute 2011). Together with Professors Michael Walzer of Princeton and Noam Zohar of Bar-Ilan he is a senior editor of the Jewish Political Tradition series (vol 1 "Authority," Yale University Press 2000, Hebrew: 2007; vol. 2 "Membership," Yale University Press 2003; vol. 3 "Community," Yale University Press, forthcoming). He is editor of the new and first complete Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (Shalem 2009). His Hebrew collection of papers in political philosophy, Leviathan in the Holy Land, has been accepted for publication by Yediot Aharonot publishers. Prof. Lorberbaum has also published three volumes of Hebrew verse and is together with Dr. Michal Govrin, editor of the Devarim poetry series of Carmel publishers that has published his new book of poetic translations Transpositions. Lorberbaum's scholarship focuses on the formation of political and religious discourse and their interaction. Central to his work has been the effort to help create a new political language for the modern day Jewish polity. Prof. Lorberbaum is currently engaged in a study of Hassidism as a model of Jewish religious revitalization in early modernity and completing a book in first-order Jewish Theology, I Seek thy Countenance.

Assaf Sharon is an expert in Political and Legal Philosophy, Epistemology, and Rationality. Previously he served as a Research Fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, as an advisor on the committee of experts for the J14 Social Protest movement, and taught in the Philosophy department at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University. He is an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University. He tweets from @AssafSharon.

Yael Sternhell specializes in the history of the long Civil War era, the global history of archives, and the history of modern societies at war. Her books include Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press, 2012) and War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Her work has won awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society for Civil War Historians. Beyond academia, Sternhell is a board member of the New Israel Fund, Israel’s leading human rights and social justice organization, and a regular contributor for Ha’aretz. At Harvard she will be teaching a course on the history of refugees in 20th century U.S. history, with special emphasis on the World Wars era and the experiences of Jewish refugees.

Scott Ury is Associate Professor in Tel Aviv University's Department of Jewish History and Senior Editor of the journal History & Memory. Previously, he was Director of TAU’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism (2010-2020). His research focuses on Jewish and East European histories in modern times, in particular in Polish lands, with an emphasis on social and political questions including those related to urbanization, nationalism and migration as well as the study of antisemitism and memory. In addition to his award-winning monograph Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, 2012), he is co-editor of several academic volumes, including Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Brandeis, 2024), Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2021), Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe (Routledge, 2014), and Jews and Their Neighbours in Eastern Europe since 1750 (Littman, 2012).