Yair Auron (, Ya'ir Oron; born April 30, 1945) is an Israeli historian, scholar and expert specializing in Holocaust and genocide studies, racism and contemporary Jewry. Since 2005, he has served as the head of the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication of The Open University of Israel and an associate professor.

Biography

Yair Auron completed his bachelor's degree in history and sociology at the Tel-Aviv University. He earned a master's degree from The Hebrew University, and a Ph.D. from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris (France).

Academic career

From 1974 to 1976, Auron worked as the director of the Education Department inside the Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem). In the 1980s, he worked as a researcher at the Melton Center for Jewish Education of the Hebrew University and also as an academic director of European Section at the Israel-Diaspora Institute, an external institute of Tel-Aviv University. From 1996 to 1999 he was a senior lecturer and head of the Division of Cultural Studies at the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel. Auron is an associate director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem. He is also a member of the academic board of directors at the Zoryan Institute (an NPO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US) and an advisory board member of The Genocide Education Project (also known as GenEd, an NPO) in San Francisco (US).

Published works