Prof. Yaakov Malkin was an intellectual, educator, writer, literary critic, and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University. Malkin worked and wrote on a variety of fields, including cinema and aesthetics, the Bible as literature and Judaism as culture, community life free from religion, and more.

​

Malkin was a professor at Tel Aviv University, among the founders of its Film and Television Department and of the Jerusalem and Haifa cinematheques. He worked to cultivate the democratic discourse in Israel, through his work in the fields of rhetoric and lecture. He founded the Israel Institute of Speech Culture and published multiple books, as an author and educator. Felice Pazner Malkin's paintings appear on the covers of most of his books. 

 

Together with his daughter, Rabbi Sivan Maas, he founded "Tmura-Israeli Judaism: The International Institute for Humanistic Secular Judaism," which trains active secular Jewish leadership and secular humanist rabbis. He also authored many books on the topic of secular humanistic Judaism.