Yuval Noah Harari

Biography

Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He trained as a medieval military historian — his PhD at Oxford focused on medieval warfare and the experience of individual soldiers — before pivoting to macro-historical synthesis. He is openly gay, practices Vipassana meditation (which he credits as transformative for his thinking), and is vegan. He has described himself as 'a historian who writes about the future,' and his public persona — TED talks, Davos panels, meetings with world leaders — has made him arguably the most influential public intellectual of the 2010s. He lives with his husband Itzik Yahav on a moshav near Jerusalem.

Yuval Noah Harari at a glance