Rachel Elior
Visiting Professor of Israel Studies
Rachel Elior is John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of numerous works on Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism. Her works include The Paradoxical Ascent to God: the Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: SUNY 1992); The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Littman 2004); The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (Oxford: Littman 2006); Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom (Oxford: Littman 2007) and Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore (NewYork: Urim 2008).
She was previously the Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied and got her Ph.D. Summa cum Laude (1976) and where she taught between 1977-2011. She was a research fellow and visiting professor at University College London, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Oberlin College, The Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Case Western University, Yeshiva University-New York, Tokyo University, Princeton University and Doshisha University in Kyoto. Professor Elior is the recipient of many honors, among them the Fridenberg excellence award of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Yigal Alon-Brecha fellowship, Rothschild award, Lucius Littauer prize, Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Warburg Prize. She was awarded the 2006 Gershom Scholem Prize for the Study of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism by The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Professor Elior will offer a class in the Spring of 2013 on Major Issues in the Study of Jewish Mysticism: Between Kabbalah and Hasidism.
