Anthony David Skinner, Ph.D.

Anthony David is an historian, teacher, author, and translator of nine books, most recently Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future, which he wrote for Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Israeli Shin Bet. Ayalon turned to David for his memoir after reading Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), the biography David wrote for Ayalon’s Palestinian partner in a peace movement, Sari Nusseibeh.

Trained as an historian in Berlin (MA, Freie Universität Berlin 1993), Chicago (University of Chicago Ph.D. 2000), and Jerusalem (Fritz Rosenzweig Center at Hebrew University 2000-2003), David’s academic books include Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters (Harvard University Press, 2003); The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken (Henry Holt & Company, 2004); Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

His current projects include a biography of the Russian-Jewish writer, Svetlana Boym; and a book about a leader of the German conspiracy against Hitler during WWII.