Karma Ben-Johanan is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and serves as head of the international office at the Faculty of Humanities. 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 is PI of the ERC-funded project: “Christosemitism: European Christian Anti-antisemitism, 1945-2020. She 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 and the Catholic Media Association Award for a book on interreligious relations. The book’s Hebrew version won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History.