Ranen Omer-Sher­man is The Jew­ish Her­itage Fund for Excel­lence Endowed Chair in Juda­ic Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville. He is the author or edi­tor of six books includ­ing Dias­po­ra and Zion­ism in Jew­ish Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture (2002), Israel in Exile: Jew­ish Writ­ing and the Desert (2006), The Jew­ish Graph­ic Nov­el: Crit­i­cal Approach­es (2008), Nar­ra­tives of Dis­sent: War in Con­tem­po­rary Israeli Arts and Cul­ture (2013), Imag­in­ing Kib­butz: Visions of Utopia in Lit­er­a­ture and Film (2015), and Amos Oz: The Lega­cy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond (2023), as well as numer­ous essays on Jew­ish writ­ers from Israel and North Amer­i­ca. He also serves as co-edi­tor of Sho­far: An Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Jour­nal of Jew­ish Stud­ies. He was a founder of a desert kib­butz, served as a com­bat sol­dier in the IDF and worked for many years as a desert guide in the Sinai and Negev.