Amotz Asa-El

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Amotz Asa-El, the Jerusalem Post's senior commentator and former executive editor, is a fellow at the Hartman Institute and a senior editor at the Jerusalem Report.

Asa-El's weekly column in the Jerusalem Post, Middle Israel, appears regularly for the 25th year now, and is a unique attempt to present in English mainstream Israelis’ view on anything, from politics and foreign affairs to business and religion. His five-part series in the Jerusalem Report (Aug-Sept 2017) about the future of the Jewish people won the Bnai Brith Journalism Award.

Asa-El's book Mitzad Ha'Ivelet Ha'Yehudi ("The Jewish March Folly," Yediot Sefarim, 2019), an revisionist history of the Jewish people's political leadership from antiquity to modernity, became a bestseller within a month of its publication. The book was praised by novelist A.B. Yehoshua as "convincing and accurate" and "reviving Jewish history with dramatic, literary scenes," and by Hebrew University philosopher Prof. Moshe Halbertal as "inspired writing that adds historic and intellectual depth to Israel's political debate."

Asa-El's previous book, The Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Universe, 2004), a geographic history of the Jews, was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal as "an engaging history of the Jewish experience" that "vividly captures the creativity and nomadic quality of the Jewish people."

Having originally joined the Jerusalem Post as its business editor, Asa-El was later the Post's news editor and editor-in-chief of its overseas edition, the International Jerusalem Post, before serving as the Jerusalem Post's executive editor.

Since joining the Jerusalem Post Asa-El has been a frequent commentator of Middle Eastern affairs on BBC, NPR, CNN and Israel TV, as well as a regular contributor to Dow Jones' MarketWatch, analyzing macro-economic, financial and social developments in Israel, the Arab world, Iran and Turkey. Asa-El has been quoted or published along the years by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, TIME magazine, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, Le Figaro, L'Express, Azure, Harvard Political Review, the Australian, the Australia Financial Review, Jornal do Brasil, the India Times, Politiken and others.

Asa-El holds graduate degrees in journalism from Columbia University, in Jewish history from the Hebrew University, and in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Nurit and their three children. Follow @MiddleIsrael