Gil Z. Hochberg

Gil Z. Hochberg is a writer and scholar whose work bridges the political and the artistic. Trained in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she is now the Ransford Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at Columbia University in New York. She is the author of four books, several art catalogs, and numerous essays and is widely recognized as a leading scholar of Palestine and Zionism, and as a public intellectual. Her latest book, My Father, The Messiah, a memoir of her father, was just published by Duke University Press in 2026.

At the Institute, Z. Hochberg will be researching Christian Zionism: The Long Making of a World Order. Although the great majority of Zionists across the globe today, as in the past, are Christians, most scholarly and popular accounts of the phenomenon continue to associate it exclusively with Judaism.  This book project argues that we cannot begin to understand Zionism without first acknowledging it as a global Christian project that, by the 21st century, had spread across Latin America, the African continent, East Asia, Europe, and the United States.