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. Currently, Ben Johanan is heading an ERC funded project titled: “Christosemitism: European Christian Anti-antisemitism, 1945-2020”. She has been an elected member of the Young Israel Academy since 2025

Ben Johanan was awarded the Dan David Prize for the Study of the Past in 2023, and the Mount zion Award for contribution to interreligious relations in 2025. 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.

Dan David Prize 2023