Benjamin Moser is a distinguished American biographer, translator, and literary critic. Born in 1976 in Houston, Texas, to a Jewish family, he studied history at Brown University and earned his doctorate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he has lived for many years.
Moser is best known for his biographical works and translations of Brazilian literature. His biography of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector” (2009), helped initiate a global critical re-evaluation of her work, leading to his appointment as the editor of new English translations of her books for New Directions. In 2019, he published “Sontag: Her Life and Work,” an authoritative biography of Susan Sontag, which was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
As a public intellectual, Moser frequently critiques the use of cultural institutional pressure and political censorship against pro-Palestinian speech. He supported the “Strike Germany” campaign, an international initiative by artists and writers calling for a boycott of German state-funded cultural institutions over the censorship and cancellation of individuals expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Moser opposes leveraging historical memory of the Holocaust to justify military action in Gaza or restrict domestic political debate. In line with this intellectual focus, Moser has been writing a history of Jewish anti-Zionism, aiming to sharply delineate Zionism from Judaism and Jewishness while highlighting the long historical tradition of Jewish dissent against Zionism and Israeli state policy.
Moser is also one of the signatories of the 2025 public statement, “Global Jewish Call on the UN and World Leaders to Sanction Israel.”