Roni Ben-Hur was born Roni Bohobza on July 9, 1962, in Dimona, a development town in Israel's Negev desert. He was the youngest of seven children of Tunisian-Jewish parents who had arrived in Israel in 1955, and the family legally took the name Ben-Hur when he was ten. His teenage listening ran through the American guitar tradition, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Joe Pass, Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell, with the Spanish classical guitarist Andrés Segovia alongside them. He worked his way up through wedding bands and clubs in Tel Aviv, and began teaching jazz in Israel in 1981, before he was twenty.

In 1985 he moved to New York, where he has lived ever since. What he found there set the course of the next four decades: Barry Harris, the Detroit pianist who from 1982 to 1987 ran the Jazz Cultural Theatre on Eighth Avenue, a combination school and performance space where he taught by day and presented working musicians by night. Ben-Hur became part of that circle and stayed in it. "I was so lucky to learn at the elbow of Barry Harris," he later said of the apprenticeship.

His first record under his own name states the relationship on the cover. Backyard, cut at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio in March 1995 and released by the Swiss label TCB Records, is billed as "Roni Ben-Hur With The Barry Harris Trio": Harris on piano, Lisle Atkinson on bass, Leroy Williams on drums, with the singer Amy London, whom Ben-Hur later married, on part of the date. Harris and Williams were both back six years later for Anna's Dance (Reservoir, 2001), recorded in New York on November 29, 2000, with Walter Booker on bass and Charles Davis on tenor saxophone. The Village Voice called that record one of the best jazz albums of 2001. By 2004 the relationship had come full circle: Ben-Hur produced and played guitar on Time Is..., the Leroy Williams Quartet's own album for Jazz Child Records.

There is an earlier record still. In 1994, a year before Backyard, the small label Fivecat released Two For The Road, credited to Amy London and Roni Ben-Hur, with Chris Anderson at the piano. Anderson (1926 to 2008) was the blind Chicago pianist whom Herbie Hancock sought out as a teacher after hearing him play once. Ben-Hur's first two recordings were therefore made in the company of two of the most consequential piano teachers in postwar American jazz.

Alongside the bebop lineage, a second stream opened almost immediately. Not long after reaching New York, Ben-Hur discovered the Brazilian guitarist and composer Baden Powell, and Brazilian and Latin music became a permanent second half of his catalog rather than an occasional detour. Mojave (Motéma, 2011) is co-billed with the Brazilian bassist Nilson Matta; Our Thing (Motéma, 2012) pairs him with Santi Debriano and the Brazilian drummer Duduka Da Fonseca, a trio that recorded again as a band under the name Our Thing for Manhattan Style (Jazzheads, 2016); Alegria De Viver (2014) is co-billed with the Brazilian singer Leny Andrade, who returned as a guest on Samba Do Arraial (Tratore, 2020). Since 1994 his own records have appeared on eight labels: Fivecat, TCB, Reservoir, Motéma, Jazzheads, Tratore, Dot Time and Mighty Quinn.

The 2020s brought his most visible work. Stories (Dot Time Records, March 5, 2021) assembled Ingrid Jensen, George Cables, Harvie S and Victor Lewis around him. Wondering followed in 2022 and Love Letters in 2023. Then, on February 14, 2025, Dot Time released Portrait Now, credited to Sheila Jordan with Roni Ben-Hur and Harvie S. Jordan, an NEA Jazz Master born in 1928, was 96; Ben-Hur and Harvie S were the only two musicians accompanying her. The album's title answers Portrait of Sheila, the Blue Note debut she made in 1962, and the two records share repertoire. It was released on the same day as Jordan's final live performance, and it was the last album she recorded. She passed away at her New York apartment on August 11, 2025. Ben-Hur is performing Sheila Jordan tribute nights at Monkfish in Boston on November 12, 2026, and at Dizzy's Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, on November 17, 2026.

His most recent record moved the whole operation to Cuba. Abriendo Puertas (Dot Time Records, June 26, 2026) was recorded in Havana with an all-Cuban band: Alejandro Falcón on piano, Pedro Pablo Gutiérrez on bass, Ruy López-Nussa on drums, Octavio Rodríguez Rivera on percussion, Emir Santa Cruz on tenor saxophone and Osdalgia Lesmes on vocals. It is the second release of Cuban Notes, a project Ben-Hur conceived with Dot Time founder Johanan Bickhardt, following pianist Alejandro Falcón's Falcón in Blue. The title means "opening doors." Ben-Hur's own description of the aim: "Authentic Cuban rhythms, performed by some of Havana's finest musicians, come together naturally with jazz, without either style trying to change the other." He brought a sextet version to Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center on June 25, 2026, with Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, Ray Gallon on piano, Martin Wind on bass, Jason Tiemann on drums and Marianne Solivan on vocals.

Teaching has run in parallel with the playing for his entire career, and it follows the Harris model directly. In 1994 Ben-Hur founded the jazz program at the Kaufman Music Center's Lucy Moses School in Manhattan, and he still directs it more than three decades later. He established jazz programs at the Professional Performing Arts School and the Coalition School for Social Change, and he has run residential jazz camps for over two decades, currently in Vermont, in Provence, and in Havana, where Falcón and López-Nussa are among the faculty. He is the author of the instruction book Talk Jazz: Guitar (Bohobza Music, 2003) and the instructional DVD Chordability (Motéma, 2011). He won the Jazziz readers poll for Best New Talent in 2000. He lives in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Ben-Hur is a bebop guitarist by training and temperament, working from the vocabulary Barry Harris spent his life codifying: voice leading, clean bebop cadences, and a warm, unhurried tone that critics reach for the word "lyrical" to describe. Time Out New York called him "a formidable and consummately lyrical guitarist," and Gary Giddins, writing in The Village Voice, described him as "a limber and inventive guitarist" who "keeps the modernist flame alive and pure." The New York Times noted his "crisp, fluid style."

His guitar influences are the American postwar mainstream, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Joe Pass, Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell, with Andrés Segovia accounting for some of the tonal care he brings to a single line. Baden Powell, discovered after his move to New York, opened the Brazilian side of the catalog. Ben-Hur has connected his attraction to minor-key standards and to deep rhythmic traditions back to his own Tunisian family background and the Moorish, Jewish and Brazilian music he grew up around and later sought out.

The result is a player who moves between two idioms without treating either as a guest appearance. The bebop records and the Brazilian, Latin and Cuban records have alternated across his catalog since 2011, and the Havana recordings of the 2020s are the furthest extension of that second line rather than a departure from the first.