Professor Gabriel Motzkin was the Executive Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 2007 through 2016. He is Ahad Ha’am Chair Emeritus in Philosophy at the Hebrew University, and is also a member of the Departments of History and German Literature. He has served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (2001-2004), and as Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (1996-1999 and 2006-2007). 

In 2018-2019 Prof. Motzkin was Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology, and simultaneously a Visiting Fellow at the Huntington Library. In 2019 he was a Visiting Fellow at the ETH Zürich.  

Motzkin has previously been a Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Siemens Foundation, the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the Einstein Forum, the Wiener Institute at Tel Aviv University. The Max-Planck-Institute for History, the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin), and the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (Bielefeld). 

He has been a Visiting Professor and/or Visiting Scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the University of Giessen, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Konstanz, and the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.