Immanuel Etkes is emeritus professor of history of the Jewish people at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on religious and cultural movements among Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Allan Nadler describes his biographies of the Vilna Gaon, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, and Rabbi Israel Salanter, as "definitive." He was awarded the Bialik Prize in 2010.