Fania Oz-Salzberger

Oz-Salzberger was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Hulda, the eldest daughter of writer Amos Oz and his wife Nily. She is the great-great-niece of historian and literary scholar Joseph Klausner.[1] Oz-Salzberger was educated in kibbutz schools and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces. She completed her B.A. in history and philosophy (magna cum laude) and M.A. in modern history (summa cum laude) at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral thesis, on the Scottish and German Enlightenments (1991), was written at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. John Robertson and mentored by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. She was a Senior Scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1988–1990, and a Hornik Junior Research Fellow in Intellectual History at Wolfson College, Oxford in 1990–1993.

Teaching at the University of Haifa since 1993, Oz-Salzberger was appointed Associate Professor in 2009. Her book Israelis in Berlin, which was published in 2001 in Hebrew and German (ISBN 9783633541713), became a prism of Israeli–German dialog.[2] She has taken part in media panels and interviews, commenting on politics, culture and literature, and contributed opinion articles to major newspapers and journals in Israel and globally. She is active on advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and the German-Israeli Future Forum.

Oz-Salzberger is married to Professor Eli Salzberger. They have twin sons.[3]

In November 2012, the book Jews and Words (ISBN 9780300156478), co-authored by Oz-Salzberger and her father, was published by Yale University Press. The book is an essay on Jewish history from a secular Israeli vantage point, reflecting an ongoing dialog between father and daughter, novelist and historian.

At the University of Haifa, Oz-Salzberger served as joint editor in chief of the Haifa University Press (1996–99). She is director (since 2003) of the Posen Research Forum for Jewish European and Israeli Political Thought.

Oz-Salzberger was Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (1999–2000). Between 2007 and 2012, she held the Leon Liberman Chair in Modern Israel Studies at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.[4] In 2009–10 she was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University.

Oz-Salzberger has published essays in the history of ideas and political thought, most recently on translation in the European Enlightenment, on the biblical sources of John Locke, and on intercivilizational conflict. Her opinion articles on politics, culture, and current affairs appeared in Israeli, European and American periodicals, including Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Ha’aretz.

Oz-Salzberger was chosen to serve as the director of Paideia - The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden.[5] In 2020 she became an honorary doctor at Uppsala University. [6]

• 'The Scratch' - First prize in the Ha'aretz Short Story Competition for 1999

• Kristin Eliasberg, An Ancient Constitution, Tablet Magazine (3 December 2003)
• What we're reading On the Middle East, The Economist (29 July 2011)
• Maya Sela, "In new book, Israeli writer Amos Oz looks for a Jewish essence", Haaretz (8 May 2012)
• Oz-Salzberger Profile at the University of Haifa School of Law