Karma
Ben Johanan

Dr. Karma Ben Johanan is a senior lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

She is a historian of late modern Christianity and Jewish–Christian Relations, specializing in how conservative religious communities interact with each other and negotiate their traditions in changing political and cultural settings.

As an Azrieli Fellow, Karma will research the global Roman Catholic discourse on Mission and evangelization in light of secularization processes and postcolonial critique.

Karma 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 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she served until the summer of 2022. Karma’s book, Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian–Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Tel Aviv University Press, 2020), won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History in 2021. Karma is an associate editor for the journal Political Theology. When not engaged in research, Karma can be found with her children, Lavi, Boaz, and Dror.