Zohar Atkins is the Founder of Lightning, an AI-native education platform for life-long learners.

He holds a DPhil in Theology from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and semikha from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. He received both an MA and BA from Brown University.

The winner of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry and a Hiett Prize in the Humanities, Zohar is the author of An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Nineveh (Carcanet, 2019) and Etz Hasadeh (Deuteronomy, 2025).