Israel W. Charny is the director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem which he founded together with Elie Wiesel and the late Shamai Davidson, MD, a specialist in treatment of Holocaust survivors in 1981 in anticipation of the First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in 1982.  Charny, an American and Israeli, is widely known in the USA, Europe and Israel particularly as a leader in genocide studies and prevention, but also that his work is anchored in his continuing clinical practice and professional leadership as a clinical psychologist and family therapist.  He is a founder and first president of the Israel Family Therapy Association, a past president of the International Family Therapy Association, and a co-founder and past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Three of his works have been awarded “Outstanding Academic Book of the Year” by the American Library Association: Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (1988), Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999-2000), and Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind (2006).  His next book is entitled: The Genocide Contagion: How We Commit and and Prevent Holocaust and Genocide. The book is described as “a book for learning about ourselves B E F O R E.”

Most recently, in April 2021, he has published a new book which is being widely hailed, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, and Truth versus Politicization of History.

Israel Charny and Yair Auron, the Associate Director of the Institute, have both been recipients of the President of Armenia Prize – at the time, they were the only two non-Armenians who were honored in this way. The official award to Israel Charny is “for his decades-long academic work on the Armenian Genocide and activities contributing to its international recognition, as well as for his significant research into the field of Genocide denial.”