Rate My Professor Daniel Heller

Dr. Daniel Heller is the Kronhill Senior Lecturer in East European Jewish History at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation within the Faculty of Arts. With training in both history and psychology, he earned his PhD from Stanford University in 2012, receiving the department’s annual prize for the best written dissertation. Prior to Monash, he held the position of Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies at McGill University, where he was awarded the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2016 and the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2017, the latter recognizing one assistant professor across all university faculties.

Heller’s research specializations include East European Jewish history, Israeli-Palestinian relations, the psychology of conflict and cooperation, history of Zionism and the State of Israel, and history of humanitarian aid and international development. His book, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism (Princeton University Press, 2017), garnered the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Modern Jewish History and Culture: Europe and Israel (2018), the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship (2018), and the J.I. Segal English Non-fiction Award on a Jewish Theme (2018). Key publications feature “Mental Health in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Psychological Interventions in Jewish Displaced Persons Camps” (Journal of Contemporary History, 2024), “Israeli Aid and the ‘African Woman’: The Gendered Politics of International Development, 1958-1973” (Jewish Social Studies, 2020), and “Gender, development and the Arab-Israeli conflict: the politics of study tours for women from the Global South in the State of Israel, 1958–1973” (History Australia, 2020). He is authoring The Pedagogy of Conflict: Teaching Controversial Issues in University Classrooms, under contract with Princeton University Press. As co-director of the Brave Conversations Project, Heller fosters dialogue on contentious issues. He has given public lectures on the Holocaust, Arab-Israeli conflict, and ancient Jewish responses to pandemics, and accepts PhD students.