Yitzhak Conforti

Biographical Information:

Prof. Yitzhak Conforti is Associate Professor at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky department of Jewish History and Conemporary Jewry at Bar Ilan University. He is the author of: Past Tense – Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi 2006) which won the Ish-Shalom prize from Ben Zvi Institute 2006, and the Hecht prize form the Herzl Institute at Haifa University, 2007. And: Shping a Nation: The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882-1948 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2019 [Hebrew]). His Book: Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024) will be published in November 2024.

He was a visiting scholar in the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University (2005). A visiting scholar in the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University (2014, 2022), and the Center for Jewish History in New York (2014, 2022). He was also a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2015). In 2024 he was a visiting research scholar in the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.

He has published extensivlely on modern Jewish historiography, Zionist history and Culture, Zionist utopia, and Jewish nationalism. Currently he focuses on the cultural influence of the Hebrew Bible on the Zionist movement.

He was a member in the Board of Directors in the Association for Israel Studies.

Research Topics:

• Jewish nationalism
• The Zionist movement
• History and memory
• Cultural History
• Utopia
• Modern Jewish historiography
• Hebrew education in the Land of Israel
• Zionist interpretation of the Hebrew Bible