Ofer Aderet

Ofer Aderet is an Israeli journalist, Haaretz’s history correspondent and the writer of the newspaper’s obituary column, After Death. His work combines historical research, investigative journalism and human storytelling, bringing decisive chapters in Jewish, Israeli and European history into public conversation.

Since 2012, Aderet has covered history for Haaretz. For several years he also wrote the weekly historical puzzle Who Was the Man Who Was? for the paper’s weekend supplement, inviting readers to identify a historical figure from a series of clues. The feature reflected a wider purpose in his journalism: making the past approachable while preserving its complexity.

From military intelligence to journalism

Aderet was born and raised in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Amal Lady Davis secondary school, including an extended course of history, and later earned a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy and a master’s degree in history from Tel Aviv University.

From 1999 to 2002 he served in the Research Division of the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Directorate, receiving a certificate of distinction from the division’s head, Brigadier General Amos Gilad. Between 2003 and 2007 he worked as an editor and reporter for the Walla! website. In 2007 he joined Haaretz, first as an editor on the news desk and later as an editor at the Weekly supplement.

In 2010 he spent time in Berlin on the Ernst Cramer and Teddy Kollek journalists’ exchange fellowship, and in 2011 took part in the Bundestag’s internship programme in Berlin. This combination of historical training, research experience and editorial practice has shaped his method: precise about evidence, but written for readers far beyond the academy.

Jewish history in public life

Aderet writes extensively about Jewish history, the Holocaust and Nazism. His subjects are not limited to major events. He also follows the people, documents and overlooked stories that show how history was made and experienced. In doing so, he gives Jewish memory both a personal dimension and a place in contemporary public life.

One of his most notable investigations concerned Franz Kafka’s lost literary estate. In a series of Haaretz articles, Aderet revealed how Kafka’s literary and biographical papers passed, after Max Brod’s death, to Brod’s secretary, Esther Ilse Hoffe. She treated the material as her own, restricted access to it and sold items from the collection. The affair eventually reached the courts; after five years of proceedings, the papers were ordered to be transferred to the National Library.

The case demonstrated how journalism can help protect cultural property and return it to a public institution. It also raised enduring questions about memory, stewardship, access to sources and the preservation of Jewish and European heritage for future generations.

In 2011 Aderet served as content editor of the film Kafka’s Last Story. He also writes for Yekinton, the journal of the Association of Central European Jews in Israel, continuing his engagement with the relationship between journalism, history and communal memory.

Stories of courage in his books

In 2023, Aderet published Seven of Our Legends, a book about seven episodes of fighting in Zionist history. Its subjects include the battle of Tel Hai, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Lamed-Heh convoy and the battle of Nitzanim.

The book treats military events as part of a broader history of memory, identity and nation-building. By revisiting familiar and less familiar episodes, it examines how battles become founding legends and what those legends preserve of fact, human experience and the meanings later generations attach to them.

Family roots and a commitment to memory

Aderet is descended from Rabbi Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Teomim, known as the Aderet, who served as rabbi of Ponevezh and Mir, immigrated to the Land of Israel in the nineteenth century and became Jerusalem’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi. His father, attorney Giora Aderet, is a leading lawyer in the field of white-collar crime, while his paternal grandfather, attorney Yitzhak Aderet, was among the country’s first lawyers. His mother, Rivka Aderet, works at the Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot.

This family background does not define Aderet’s independent work, but it gives it a resonant context. His sustained interest in people, documents and the ways communities tell their own stories belongs to a broad, layered tradition of Jewish and Israeli remembrance.

Why Ofer Aderet merits inclusion in the archive

Ofer Aderet merits inclusion in Moreshet because he has played an important role in making Jewish and Israeli history accessible to the public. Through reporting, investigations, historical puzzles, film editing and books, he turns the materials of the past — testimonies, estates, battles and overlooked lives — into knowledge that can be shared and understood.

His contribution is especially clear in the connection he draws between journalism and heritage preservation. His reporting on Kafka’s estate helped bring the manuscripts to the National Library, while his book on seven episodes of fighting continues the Israeli conversation about memory, courage and identity. Moreshet.com documents people who deepen our understanding of the past and shape the cultural life of the present; Aderet belongs among them because he does so through rigorous work that reaches a broad readership.