Prof. Livnat Holtzman completed her B.A. with honors in the Departments of Arabic Language and Literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her M.A., also with honors, in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University, where she wrote her master’s thesis under the supervision of the late Prof. Michael Winter. She completed her Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Abrahamov.

Throughout her studies and academic career, Prof. Holtzman received numerous scholarships and awards for academic excellence, including the President’s Doctoral Fellowship (2000), the Rector’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2011), and the Rector’s Award for Scientific Innovation (2019). Since 2006, she has been awarded three research grants from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and an additional grant from the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF). In 2016, she was a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2019, she was a visiting scholar at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Madrid. In the 2025–2026 academic year, she will lead an international research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in her field of research.

Prof. Holtzman teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University, offering introductory courses on Islam, the Qur’an and its interpretation, as well as seminars in her areas of specialization. She also supervises graduate research students in her fields of expertise. In 2020, she recorded the full series of introductory lectures on Islam in the multimedia studio of Bar-Ilan University, enabling students to attend remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, she teaches these introductory courses in regular in-person lectures, integrated with the recorded materials.

In addition to her teaching, Prof. Holtzman leads a large ISF-funded research project focusing on the conceptualization and analysis of the gestures and body language of the Prophet Muhammad as reflected in Hadith literature. An overview of this research can be seen in her lecture, “The Body Gestures of the Prophet Muhammad: Personal and Public Space in Hadith Literature.”

Prof. Holtzman maintains productive research collaborations with scholars abroad. The book A Scholar in the Shadow, which she co-edited with a colleague from the University of Bologna, Italy, was published in the journal Oriente Moderno. The book was translated into Arabic under the title عالم في الظل and published in 2022 by Dar al-Rafed (Beirut).

From 2012 to 2018, Prof. Holtzman served as Head of the Department of Arabic. From 2020 to 2022, she served as co-editor of HaMizrah HeHadash (“The New East”), Israel’s leading journal in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, published by the Israeli Association for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (IAMES). She is currently a member of the executive board of the Israeli Association for the Study of Religions and of the Rene Costa Center for Yiddish Studies in the Department of Jewish Literature at Bar-Ilan University. She also serves on the editorial boards of Al-Karmil – Studies in Arabic Language and Literature (University of Haifa) and Folia Orientalia (Committee of Oriental Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków branch). As part of her work with IAMES, she is a member of the steering committee of the Forum for the Study of the Islamic World in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Prof. Holtzman is a member of IAMES, the Israeli Association for the Study of Religions, the Historical Society of Israel, AFIK – The Forum of Women Professors in Israeli Universities, and the Abrahamic Religions Forum at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.