Nitai Hershkovits started on clarinet at twelve and switched to piano three years later, studying jazz in Tel Aviv under Amit Golan and, notably, under saxophonist Yuval Cohen — another Israeli jazz musician profiled separately in this system, making Hershkovits one of his documented students rather than only a peer. His classical training came from Dr. Menahem Weisenberg, Shoshana Cohen, and Amir Pedorovits. Between 2004 and 2010 he was awarded the America-Israel Cultural Foundation's top scholarship four years running, and in 2009 he received the Chase Scholarship, funding a bachelor's degree at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music.

The relationship that shaped his early career started in 2011, when he began working with bassist Avishai Cohen — the same bassist whose trio had already launched pianist Shai Maestro's career a few years earlier. Hershkovits recorded Duende, a piano-and-bass duo record, with Cohen in 2012, then stayed in the group through Almah and From Darkness between 2013 and 2015, touring internationally the whole time. BBC Music called him a "genuine prodigy" during this stretch.

He moved to New York in 2016 and released his own debut as a leader, I Asked You a Question (Raw Tapes Records, 2017), a full-band session featuring guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow, and drummer Amir Bresler. A second record, New Place Always (Yellowbird, 2018), followed as a close collaboration with producer Rejoicer rather than strictly solo piano. A piano-trio record, Lemon The Moon (2019, enja & yellowbird, with bassist Or Bareket and drummer Amir Bresler), and a further Rejoicer collaboration, Cinema Royal (2025, Rhythm Section International), fill out the catalog between his acoustic and studio-production work. In 2020 he took an unexpected turn into Apifera, an experimental group signed to Stones Throw Records — the Los Angeles label built on hip-hop and beat music rather than jazz — releasing Overstand.

Alongside his own records, Hershkovits has been a standing member of saxophonist Oded Tzur's quartet, appearing on the ECM albums Here Be Dragons (2020) and Isabela (2022) alongside bassist Petros Klampanis and drummer Johnathan Blake; a lineup change brought in drummer Cyrano Almeida for 2024's My Prophet, with Hershkovits and Klampanis remaining. His own solo turn on ECM came in November 2023 with Call on the Old Wise, a largely improvised solo piano record recorded in 2022 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher. It won Germany's Record Critics' Award for Jazz Album of the Year in 2024.

One more connection is worth naming directly: Hershkovits is the pianist on part of saxophonist Daniel Zamir's 2015 album Redemption Songs, playing on the tracks recorded in 2015 alongside drummer Amir Bresler and bassist Gilad Abro — a smaller, real point of overlap between two Israeli jazz careers profiled separately in this system.

Critic John Fordham has described Hershkovits's playing as somewhat reminiscent of Hank Jones, a comparison that points at his lyrical, unhurried touch rather than any specific technical resemblance. His own catalog moves across jazz, ambient music, jazz fusion, and funk, and the range shows in how differently his projects sound from each other: the spare, exacting solo-piano language of Call on the Old Wise sits a long way from the beat-music and studio-production world of Apifera. What holds his work together is a background split between rigorous classical training and years of real bandstand time — five years in Avishai Cohen's trio, ongoing work in Oded Tzur's quartet — that shows up as a strong sense of space and pacing whether he's playing solo or with a band.