Dina Porat is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at the Department of Jewish History, Head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, and holds the Alfred P. Slaner Chair for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. Since 2011 she has served as Chief Historian of Yad Vashem.
In 2004 she was named "Best Teacher" by the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, and in 2012 she was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg Centennial Medal, by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. In 2013, she was listed as one of the leading researchers in Israel by the daily Ha'aretz newspaper.
From 2005-2010, Prof. Porat served as Academic Advisor of the ITF, the International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research – now IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. She has been a visiting professor at many prestigious institutions of learning, including Harvard, Columbia and New York Universities. She has lectured a number of times at the Vatican on the topic of Angelo G. Roncalli (Pope John XXIII) and his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Her wide-ranging research deals with a range of aspects regarding the history of the Holocaust, Zionism, and antisemitism. However, her main focus has been the study of the Holocaust in Lithuania, from the viewpoint of the relationship between the Zionist youth movements, the yishuv (Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel) and Israeli society to the Holocaust and its survivors; antisemitism at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century (including Holocaust denial); and the changing relationship of the Catholic Church to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.
Among her most prominent publications are: An Entangled Leadership: The Yishuv and the Holocaust 1942-1945 (Am Oved, 1986, Hebrew), which won the Yad Ben-Zvi and the Arie Kubovitzki awards in 1988. The book was printed in English by Harvard University in 1990 as The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 and was nominated for the US National Jewish Book Award in 1991; and Beyond the Reaches of Our Soul: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Am Oved and Yad Vashem, 2000) which was awarded the Buchman Memorial Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of Holocaust commemoration by Yad Vashem. In 2009, the book was published in English by Stanford University, winning the National Jewish Book Award in 2010. In addition, she was the academic editor and wrote an introduction to Avraham Tory's Surviving the Holocaust, which was published in English by Harvard University Press in 1990.
