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Bernard Avishai was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1949. The son of the late Ben Shaicovitch, president of Canada's Zionist Men's Association during the 1950s, he volunteered for farm work on an Israeli collective during the Six Day War, an experience that affected many of his generation. He and his first wife, the artist Susan Avishai, moved to Israel in 1972 while he was still working on a doctorate in political economy for the University of Toronto, and began writing about Israel, the history of Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the October War of 1973, he published a series of searching political essays in The New York Review of Books, to which he contributed regularly until the mid-1980s. His reports anticipated the 1977 election that brought Menachem Begin and the Israeli right to power for a generation.

Avishai earned his doctorate in 1978, writing mainly on the work of Hobbes and Marx under C. B. Macpherson. He moved to Boston in 1980, where he taught humanities at MIT, and joined Dissent magazine’s editorial board. His first book, The Tragedy of Zionism, was published in 1985 to considerable controversy, since it suggested that Israel’s occupation was a symptom of a democracy plagued by anachronistic Zionist institutions and ideas. The controversy led to his being denied tenure at MIT, which he left for the Harvard Business School in 1986, where he took up a position as an editor of Harvard Business Review. He was by then the father of three children, Ben, Elisheva, and Tamar. In 1987, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for continuing work on the writer Arthur Koestler, which led to eventual articles in the New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Salmagundi. His second book, "A New Israel", was published in 1990.

His years at HBR...where he became the magazine’s technology and strategy editor...changed the direction of his work considerably. He brought to publication dozens of articles on computer based manufacturing, the implications of burgeoning information networks, and globalization. While preparing to branch off into knowledge management consulting, he began to consider the implications of high technology for Israel’s economy and society. In 1991, his last at HBR, he published “Israel’s Future: Brainpower, High tech...and Peace” in the magazine, the first to predict Israel’s economic opportunity. Then he joined Monitor Group as its head of product development, and became International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG LLP in 1998. During these years in management consulting, he continued to contribute articles, mainly on Israeli politics and economy, to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The American Prospect, Fortune, and many other magazines.

In 2002, he married Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, a professor of literature at the Hebrew University, and returned to Israel and teaching Saving Israel from itself: A secular future for the Jewish state, By Bernard Avishai (Harper's Magazine), becoming director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program, at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. Bernard Avishai Dot Com: Take A Buck In 2005, he wrote the widely cited article “Saving Israel from Itself” in Harper’s Magazine, which led to his latest book, The Hebrew Republic. This book argues that Israel’s professional elites have made a success of globalization, and have become a natural constituency for a successful peace process; but that Israeli democracy’s continuing neglect of its Arab minority, now 1/5 of the country, and the special privileges accorded to Israel’s ultra Orthodox, also 1/5 of the country, is sowing the seeds of a disaster which only a settlement with the Palestinians can prevent. As he puts it in his book, “Israel cannot have an economy like Singapore’s through a nationalities war like Serbia’s.”

Recently, Avishai was Visiting Professor at the Fuqua School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he taught courses of the new economy and public policy . He remains active as a consultant associated with Monitor Group, and has taught entrepreneurial business planning in Libya and other venues under their auspices. He divides his time between homes in Jerusalem and Wilmot, NH.