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.

Asa-El's column in The Jerusalem Post appears continuously since 1995, when jpost.1eye.us was among the world’s first 10 news sites. Asa-El is is thus among the most veteran online columnists in the world. 

Slugged “Middle Israel,” the column is a unique attempt to present in English mainstream Israelis’ view on anything, from politics and foreign affairs to business and religion. 

Asa-El's book Mitzad Ha'Ivelet Ha'Yehudi ("The Jewish March Folly," Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a 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 historian Yuval Noah Harari as "a well-written and thought provoking book which artfully connects the Jewish past with the present's concerns.”

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."

Asa-El’s five-part series in The Jerusalem Report (Aug-Sept 2017) about the future of the Jewish people won the Bnai Brith Journalism Award.

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. 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 the couple has three children. A native of Jerusalem who spent some of his childhood in New York and London, Asa-El is the only senior editor in the Post’s 91 years to have never held a foreign passport.