Yonatan Mendel is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and head of the Arabic Language and Culture Division. His main research interests are the position, status, and teaching of Arabic in Israel; Jewish–Arab relations as reflected in language and culture; and the sociology, politics, and practice of translating from Arabic into Hebrew. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute he has initiated and advanced many projects, the most important of which is Manarat- The Van Leer Center for Jewish–Arab Relation (2015), which he also headed for several years. Today he is the director of the Translators Forum at the Institute and the associate editor of the Maktoob series, which is devoted to the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew. Among his translations is
Walking on Winds by late Palestinian writer Salman Natour and Goodbye Acre by Ala Hlehel.