Dan Avnon

Dan Avnon was born in 1954 in Stockholm

Dan Avnon was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1954. His father, Yaakov Avnon, was an Israeli diplomat from Vilnius, and his mother, Poria Avnon, was born in Haifa. He grew up in the United States, Sierra Leone and Jerusalem, and studied at the military boarding school near Herzliya Gymnasium and at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem.

He served as a fighter in Sayeret Matkal and fought in the Yom Kippur War. In 1979 he was director general of the Jerusalem International Book Fair. In 1982 he helped Nahum Barnea found the newspaper Koteret Rashit and served as its director general.

In 1990 he completed a doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at Stanford University, he joined the Hebrew University. He was part of the team that founded the Israel Democracy Institute and led its political reform program from 1993.

In 2001 he founded the Gilo Center for Civic Education and Democracy at the Hebrew University. He later headed the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government. In 2017 he became head of the political science department.

His research covers political philosophy, the social thought of Martin Buber, and civic education. Since 2016 he has chaired the political science subject committee at the Ministry of Education.