Chairperson

Shmuel Feiner is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, member of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel, former Chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute, and historian of European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (especially the Jewish Enlightenment and the trends of secularization and counter-modernity). Recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2012).

Author of Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Hebrew, 1995; English, 2002); The Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew, 2002; English, 2004); Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005; German, 2009; English, 2010; Chinese, 2014); The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hebrew, 2010; English, 2011); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1700–1750 (Hebrew, 2017; English, 2020); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1750–1800 (University of Indiana Press, 2023); The Jewish Eighteenth Century: A European Biography, 1750–1800 (Hebrew, 2021, English 2023); The Emotional Experience of Jewish Secularization since the Early Modern Era (2026).