Oz-Salzberger was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Hulda, the eldest daughter of writer Amos Oz and his wife Nily. She is the great-great-niece of historian and literary scholar Joseph Klausner. Oz-Salzberger was educated in kibbutz schools and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces. She completed her BA in history and philosophy and MA in modern history at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral thesis on the Scottish and German Enlightenments was written at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. John Robertson and mentored by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. She was a Senior Scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a Hornik Junior Research Fellow in Intellectual History at Wolfson College, Oxford. Teaching at the University of Haifa since 1993, Oz-Salzberger was appointed Associate Professor in 2009. Her book Israelis in Berlin, which was published in 2001 in Hebrew and German, became a prism of Israeli–German dialog. She has taken part in media panels and interviews, commenting on politics, culture and literature, and contributed opinion articles to major newspapers and journals in Israel and globally. She is active on advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and the German-Israeli Future Forum. Oz-Salzberger is married to Professor Eli Salzberger. They have two sons. In November 2012, the book Jews and Words, co-authored by Oz-Salzberger and her father, was published by Yale University Press. The book is an essay on Jewish history from a secular Israeli vantage point, reflecting an ongoing dialog between father and daughter, novelist and historian.
Academic career
At the University of Haifa, Oz-Salzberger served as joint editor in chief of the Haifa University Press. She is director of the Posen Research Forum for Jewish European and Israeli Political Thought. Oz-Salzberger was Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin. Between 2007 and 2012, she held the Leon Liberman Chair in Modern Israel Studies at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. In 2009–10 she was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Oz-Salzberger has published essays in the history of ideas and political thought, most recently on translation in the European Enlightenment, on the biblical sources of John Locke, and on intercivilizational conflict. Her opinion articles on politics, culture, and current affairs appeared in Israeli, European and American periodicals, including Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Le Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Ha’aretz. Oz-Salzberger was chosen to serve as the director of - The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden.
