Israel Bartal

Who is Israel Bartal?

Israel Bartal, born October 22, 1946 in Tel Aviv, Israel, is Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History, and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Hebrew University. Since 2006 he is the chair of the Historical Society of Israel. He served as director of the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry, and the academic chairman of the Project of Jewish Studies in Russian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Bartal was the co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Civilization at Moscow State University. Bartal received his PhD from Hebrew University in 1981. He focuses his research on the history of the Jews in Palestine, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Haskalah Movement, Jewish Orthodoxy and modern Jewish historiography. Professor Bartal taught at Harvard University, McGill University, University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, as well as at Moscow State University. He was for many years a faculty member of the Open University of Israel and has contributed to the development of its teaching programs. Since November 1St 2010 he is a visiting scholar at the Simon-Dubnow Institut, at Leipzig University. Bartal is one of the founders of Cathedra, the leading scholarly journal on the history of the Land of Israel, and had served as its co-editor for over twenty years. Since 1998 he is the editor of vestnik, a scholarly journal of Jewish studies in Russian. From 1995 to 2003 he chaired the Israeli history high-school curriculum committee.