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Leon Volovici (10 August 1938 - 1 December 2011) was a Romanian-Israeli historian, essayist, and literary critic. Author and editor of several books on Romanian literature, historian of Romanian Jewry, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.

Leon Volovici was born in Iași in 1938. He studied Romanian literature at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, and completed a PhD titled ‘The Emergence of the Author in Romanian Culture”, which was published in book form in 1976. Between 1964 and 1984 he worked as a researcher at the Alexandru Philippide Institute of Philology at Iasi, where he was involved in the publication of the Dictionary of Pre-1900 Romanian Literature.

In 1984, Leon Volovici immigrated with his family to Israel. He worked as a researcher at the Yad Vashem archives between 1984-1989, and in 1989 joined the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a senior researcher.

In 1991 he published the monograph Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, the first book-length study of fascist and antisemitic currents in interwar Romania. The book appeared in 2012 in Polish. In 1996, Volovici edited and annotated the diary of Romanian-Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian. The diary documented the prevalnce of antisemitism in the years 1935-1944 and offered a unique perspective on Jewish life under in Bucharest during the Second World War. The publication stirred controversy and debate in Romania, and was subsequently published in various languages.

Volovici was a member of the Wiesel Commission, convened by the Romanian government in 2003 to examine the history of the Holocaust in Romania and offer a program for Holocaust education in Romania. He also edited the section on Romanian Jewry in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, published in 2008. Since the fall of Romanian communism, Volovici has been an active contributor in Romanian intellectual debates. In Jerusalem, he organized decades together with Cinematographer Costel Safirman a series of public meetings with Romanian intellectuals and artists. The transcripts of these meetings appeared in 2001, 2007, and (posthumously) 2014.

In 2007, Volovici published in Romanian the book From Iasi To Jerusalem and Back, which includes a number of autobiographical essays and a series of conversations with Romanian philosopher Sandu Frunza. The book was translated in Polish. Another collection of his essays appeared posthumously in Romanian under the title Essays on Delicate Matters.

Volovici died in Jerusalem in 2011.