Karma Ben Johanan teaches modern Christianity and Jewish-Christian Relations at the Department of Comparative Religion. She completed her PhD in the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. 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. Subsequently, she was engaged in research and teaching positions at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna, and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. In 2019, Karma was appointed the first chair of Jewish–Christian relations in the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she served until the summer of 2022. Upon coming to The Hebrew University, Karma received the Azrieli fellowship for New Faculty Members for a project on Contemporary Catholic Mission. Karma is an associate editor for the journal Political Theology.
Karma’s book, 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. The updated and revised English version, Jacob's Younger Brother (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022) was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines, and was a finalist of both the National Jewish Book Award and the Association of American Publishers Prose Awards in 2023. Her recent publications include: “Uncensored: Recovering Anti-Christian Animosity in Contemporary Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review, 114, 3 (2021): 393-416, and “From the State of Israel to the Election of Pope John Paul II, 1948–1978,” in Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn, eds., A Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 2024, forthcoming).
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