[1] Though a sociologist by training, Kimmerling was associated with the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who question the official narrative of Israel's creation.
[2] His family narrowly avoided the Holocaust by escaping from Turda in a Romani wagon in 1944, after rumors of the imminent deportation of the Jews began circulating.
[4] Despite his significant disabilities, which caused Kimmerling to experience motor difficulties and speech problems, his parents raised him as a typical child and encouraged him to strive high.
[4] Exempt from conscription into the Israel Defense Forces, Kimmerling enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963, and obtained his PhD in 1973 as a sociologist.
[3] In August 1975, he married Diana Aidan, a Libyan-born immigrant from Italy who had moved to Israel from Naples in 1967, and was a doctoral student under Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.