Mark Braverman is a Jewish American with deep family roots in the Holy Land. He was raised in the Jewish tradition, steeped in religious observance and liturgy, scripture, and Jewish history. Growing up in the years after the establishment of the State of Israel, Mark was raised in the potent combination of rabbinic Judaism and political Zionism that continues to dominate contemporary Jewish identity. Mark’s midlife encounter with the Palestinian people and with Jewish Israeli peace activists caused him to radically challenge his understanding of what it means to be Jewish today. The liberation theology of the Palestinian Christians set him on a path of study of Christian scriptures and theology and to an intense involvement with the global church movement that has grown up in response to the 2009 “Moment of Truth” Kairos document of the Palestinian churches. In 2011 Mark and colleagues from churches, seminaries and universities formed Kairos USA, an ecumenical organization responding to the 2009 Palestinian call, where he serves as Executive Director. Mark serves on the International Coordinating Committee and the Theology Working Group of the Global Kairos for Justice Coalition, headquartered in Bethlehem. He is Research Fellow in Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and is affiliate faculty at St. Stephen’s University in St. Stephen, Canada.
Mark has lectured and trained extensively in the United States and internationally on Kairos theology, Christian Zionism, post-holocaust theology, and Christian-Jewish relations. He is the author of two books: Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land and A Wall in Jerusalem: Hope, Healing, and the Struggle for Peace in Israel and Palestine and numerous articles and book chapters. His paper “Theology in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Revisiting Bonhoeffer and the Jews” appeared in 2022 in Theology Today. Mark’s sermons and other writings can be found at markbraverman.org.
Mark is fluent in Biblical and modern Hebrew and dabbles in Koine Greek. His joys include teaching, writing, a weekly study group on the Book of Psalms, British, Irish and American poetry, pruning fruit trees, growing vegetables, working on a bucket list of very long books to re-read (think Moby Dick, Don Quixote, War and Peace, and Ulysses), and sharing with students, colleagues and friends those writers and thinkers who have changed his mind and spoken to his heart. He lives on a homestead in NW Washington devoted to restorative agriculture with his wife, son, son in law, one dog, one cat and five goats.
