Karma Ben-Johanan

Karma Ben Johanan teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She previously served as a professor in the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she held the Chair of Jewish–Christian Relations. Her research focuses on contemporary Western Christianity, as well as on Jewish–Christian, religious–secular, and church–state relations. Her work explores how intellectual communities within established religious traditions mobilize their traditional sources to respond to broad political, intellectual, and ethical transformations, and the implications of these responses for their perceptions of the Other. Ben Johanan currently heads an ERC-funded project titled Christosemitism: European Christian Anti-Antisemitism, 1945–2020, dedicated to the intersection between the emergence of anti-antisemitism and the negotiation of religion’s place in Europe’s public sphere. She has taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at the "Theologisches Studienjahr" at the Dormition Abbey, and has held research fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley; 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 and the Mount Zion Award for her contribution to interreligious relations in 2025. Her book  Jacob's Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), received the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (2023), the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations (2023), and the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History (for the Hebrew version, 2021). It was also a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (2023).