Max Cooper Professor (Emeritus) in Jewish Thought, Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

is Max Cooper Professor (Emeritus) in Jewish Thought, Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He authored several dozen of academic publications, including Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale 1988), Messianic Mystics (Yale 1998), Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (Yale 2002), Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (Continuum 2007), Old Worlds, New Mirror: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, (Penn UP, 2010). Professor Idel lectured at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, College de France etc. He has received numerous prestigious awards, among them the EMET Prize (2002), the Israel Prize (1999); the Gershom Scholem Prize; the Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Literary Award; the Jewish National Book Award (2007).