Rachel Elior is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the chair of the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University and has been a research fellow and a visiting professor at University College London, the University of Amsterdam, Oberlin College, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Case Western University, Yeshiva University, Tokyo University, and Princeton University. She is the author of numerous works on Jewish mysticism and hasidism, including The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (1992). Three of her books were published by the Littman Library: The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism (2004), The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (2006), and Jewish Mysticism: The Infinite Expression of Freedom (2007). The recipient of many honours, she was awarded the 2006 Gershom Scholem Prize for the study of Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.