José Brunner

José Brunner was born in 1954 in Zurich

José Brunner was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1954 and grew up there. He came to Israel in 1973 and spent his first year in the country at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

He earned a B.A. in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977. He then completed a D.Phil. in Politics at St Antony's College, Oxford, writing on the political content of Freud's theory under the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski.

Brunner taught political science at Tel Aviv University and later became a professor at its Faculty of Law and its Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas. He headed the Minerva Institute for German History from 2005 to 2013 and the Cohn Institute from 2015 to 2018. In 2011 he co-founded Israel's first Legal Clinic for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors.

His research looks at how mental health theories explain the link between politics and the human mind. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard, McGill, Jena and ETH Zurich, and in 2008 he advised the state committee on aid to Holocaust survivors.

He became professor emeritus in 2018. From 2021 to 2023 he was academic director of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust. He is married with 3 children.