Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the director of the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry (1993-2006), and the academic chairman of the Project of Jewish Studies in Russian at the Hebrew University (1997-2003). He served as the co-director of the Center for Jewish Studies and Civilization at Moscow State University (19907-2003). In 2003 he has been appointed to serve as the academic chair of the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the HU. Since September 2006 he serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University .
Professor Bartal taught at Harvard, McGill, University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers , as well at Moscow State University (MGU). He was for many years a faculty member of the Open University of Tel Aviv and has contributed to the development of its teaching programs. Bartal is one of the founders of Cathedra , the leading scholarly journal on the history of the Land of Israel , and had served as its co-editor for over twenty years. Since 1998 he is the editor of vestnik , a scholarly journal of Jewish studies in Russian. From 1995 to 2003 he chaired the Israeli history high-school curriculum committee.
Bartal has published many books and numerous articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry, Jewish nationalism and the Jews of Palestine in the pre-Zionist era. Among his recent publications: Poles and Jews: a Failed Brotherhood (with Magdalena Opalski, Hanover, University Press of New England, 1992); Exile in the Land (published in Hebrew, Jerusalem, ha-Sifriya ha-Tsiyonit, 1994); From Corporation to Nation: The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881 (Tel Aviv, Misrad ha-Bitahon Publishing House, 2002); A Century of Israeli Culture (editor, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University Magness Press, 2002); Kehal Yisrael vol. 3 (editor, Jerusalem, Merkaz Shazar, 2004); The Jews of Eastern Europe. 1772-1881 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, 2006, translated into Russian, Moscow 2007); The Varieties of Haskalah (editor, with Shmuel Feiner , Jerusaelm, the Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005) Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism , (Am Oved Publishers, Tel Aviv 2007). He is co-editor (with Antony Polonsky) of Polin, vol. 12 (1999), which focuses on the Jews in Galicia , 1772-1914.