Stanford University, PhD '03

BIOGRAPHY

Scholarship:

I am a historian of Jewish politics, culture, literature, and thought from the 18th century to the present. My chief scholarly interests include the transformations of Jewish politics and identities in the age of nationalism; the history and afterlives of efforts to create secular Jewish cultures and selves in Yiddish and Hebrew; the political sociology of Israel and the intertwined fates of Jews and Palestinians in Israel and Palestine; and the sources and trajectories of the intense conflicts and questions defining Jewish life today in Israel and the United States. To date, much of my work has asked how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade, or recast across the 20th century from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to Palestine, Israel, and the US, and what happened to Jews in the process. However, although I remain deeply engaged with this set of questions – I am, for instance, now writing book on the making and afterlives of Yiddish secular culture in the 20th century – I am now turning much of my attention to the history of the Jewish present and the conflicted Jewish life of our own time, with special interest the crises in Israel and Palestine, the rapidly shifting Jewish situation in the US, and how the tensions playing out in Jewish life are interacting with larger global crises of liberalism, capitalism, climate, and humanism.

The first arc of my research asked how the East European Jewish experience speaks to three global histories: the history of modernity’s dreams of a new kind of human freedom and self-determination through culture and how these dreams were both shaped and trammeled by nationalist and revolutionary ideas; the history of progressive social thought’s ongoing struggle to make sense of the unexpected powers of the politics of hate and fear; and the history of minority confrontations with majority pathologies they cannot cure. This focus has yielded two monographs and two major edited works alongside shorter pieces. My 2009 Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press) examines the competing and intersecting bids for Jewish cultural renaissance in Yiddish and Hebrew that took shape from the 1880s in what is now Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia and found fullest expression, ironically, in the 1914-1921 era of total war and revolution. I sought to recover the terms and intensity of the Hebraist and Yiddishist engagement with the humanist ethos of art and culture as vehicles of freedom while also tracing how Jewish commitments to nationalism and/or revolutionary socialism both powered and undermined the bid for a belated Jewish Renaissance.  Jewish Renaissance received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and has now appeared in revised Hebrew translation as Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023). My 2021 book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press), examines how pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community confronted nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the problem of choice under conditions of powerlessness and danger. Combining intellectual and social history, An Unchosen People examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching Zionist and Diasporist thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, the crisis of culture, and the limits of resistance while also recovering a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves—in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Supported by a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, An Unchosen People received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council, the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA), and honorable mention for the 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). It is now being translated into Polish. Along the way, I co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (University of Pennsylvania, 2021), a volume of scholarly essays on political, social, cultural, and religious connections between the East European Jewish experience and Jewish society-formation in Ottoman and British Palestine. And in 2023, I co-edited with Israel Bartal National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, volume seven of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization (Yale; editor in chief Deborah Dash Moore). Comprising an annotated collection of over 900 primary sources selected to address every major trend and genre in Jewish cultural production around the globe during the 1880-1918 period, the volume also offers our monograph-length portrait of the global and regional forces, ideological and aesthetic commitments, and political, economic, and cultural conditions that shaped Jewish creative life in this stormy era. 

Currently, I am pursuing two further major projects in this vein while turning most of my research attention to the conflicted Jewish life of our own time, with equal interest in Israel and Palestine, the US, and the global conditions transforming Jewish life. I am currently a co-editor of the Historical Atlas of the Jewry of Galicia and Bukovina, forthcoming in Hebrew and English. And I am writing a history of the making and unmaking of modern Yiddish literature and culture in the 20th century and the afterlives of that culture in our own time. This research has yielded several essays published and forthcoming on the projects and dilemmas of Yiddish poets in the 1920s and 1950s: “‘Du vest mayn libshaft nisht mevayesh zayn, Amerike!’” in Afn Shvel (2023); “From Yiddish Culture to the Jewish Question: Bolshevism, Zionism, National Need, and David Hofshteyn’s Search for a Politics of Jewish Salvation, 1922-1926,” forthcoming in a volume on Dovid Hofshteyn edited by Gennady Estraikh and Harriet Murav; and “‘For us, poetry is breath, life’s meaning, everything’: Arn Glants-Leyeles, Malka Heifetz Tusman, and the Prerogatives of Yiddish Poetry after the Holocaust,” forthcoming in a special issue of Shofar in honor of Samuel Kassow, edited byCecile Kuznitz and Barry Trachtenberg.

At the same time, and primarily, I am embarked on a history of the Jewish present – a Jewish history for the 21st century organized not by the horizons and hopes of the 18th and 19th century (above all Enlightenment and Emancipation) but by the need to better understand the forces that are recasting Jewish life today. Currently, I understand this to involve five main lines of inquiry, all focused on trying to make sense of phenomena still emerging. First, I want to better understand the sources and workings of the extremist ethnonationalist and religious-nationalist political projects that have gained hegemony in Israeli Jewish life, what they have wrought in Palestine and Israel, and how they are being advanced and contested by actors in Israeli society and among diaspora Jews. I want to understand how and with what effects so much of Jewish public life is being ‘recoded’ in expressly religious terms, and perhaps particularly in terms drawn from the most illiberal, anti-rational, and anti-universalist strands of early modern Judaism. I want to understand how terms of diaspora Jewish life are being redefined by events and trajectories on the ground in Israel and Palestine, by criticism from without and within of the ideals that have dominated mainstream Jewish public life since the 1940s, and by new forms and intensities of hostility toward Jews and questioning of their place in global public life. I want to understand how newly and unexpectedly intense political and moral pressures bearing on diaspora Jewish life will both speed and complicate already long-standing efforts by younger diaspora Jews to develop post-ethnic, post-nationalist, and post-secular forms of Jewishness suited to what was until recently perceived as an age of possibility for Jewish self-definition as much as one of crisis. And I am interested in Jewish roles in – but also new and disturbing representations within – humanity’s most pressing debates about global precarity, inequality, and disaster. The 2016 “Thinking through Religious Nationalism” essay on the relations between religion and nationalism both in Judaism and in a comparative vein, written with Roger Friedland for Words: Religious Language Matters, eds. Asja Szafraniec and Ernst van den Hemel (Fordham University Press, 2016, captures some of my lines of thought about the first and second of these dimensions, as does an expanded version of the conclusion to my first book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, written in 2022 for the Hebrew translation thereof. Currently, much of my work for this book focuses on particularly on the first two chapters, as I try to chart how Israeli social scientists have made sense of what is going on in Israel and Palestine over the past three decades and examine the history of intellectuals and civil society actors seeking alternatives to what is embodied in the current Netanyahu government.

From 2014 to 2020, I coedited the journal Jewish Social Studies with Tony Michels and Sarah Stein. I have also written comprehensive encyclopedia articles on the biography of Y. L. Peretz and the history of Jewish printing and publishing. And, as befits a historian of modern Jewish history, I’ve written on St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and the construction of Irish American identity. My work has appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese. Between 2003 and 2021, I taught Jewish history in the city where Shaul Tshernikhovski's poetry first appeared in print.

TEACHING INTERESTS

I teach courses and seminars on many aspects of modern Jewish history, thought, and culture from the 18th century to the present as well as coursework on nationalism, religion and secularity, the sociology of culture, the history of modern Europe, and modern and contemporary thought. My teaching in Jewish history includes introductions to Jewish modernity in multiple forms; at the University of Chicago, I have helped to redesign and regularly teach the second course in the Jewish Civilization track, focusing on Jewish politics, culture, and thought from the 16th century to the present. I offer or have offered more advanced undergrad seminars on the sociology and ethnography of contemporary Jewish life; global Jewish history since the 1960s; 20th century Jewish history; the religious, social, and political history of East European Jewry; the history of Palestine and Israel from the Mandate period to the present; 20th century Jewish politics and political thought; 20th century social theory; the history and sociology of nationalism; the transatlantic history of racial and national minorityhood 1880-1939 (with Michael Hanchard); Jewish religion and secularity since the 18th century; the history of the Holocaust; and the history of the idea of Jewish culture in the 20th century. In 2026-27 I will introduce a new seminar on “Diaspora, State, and Nation in Modern Jewish Life” an dwill also begin teaching in the Power, Identity, and Resistance track (20th century) in 2026-27. At the graduate level, I regularly Jewish historiography and have twaught specialized seminars on modern Jewish politics; Mandate Palestine; Zionism and its effects and contestations in Israeli culture (with Na’ama Rokem); histories of nationalism; the institution of culture; and theories and histories of secularism and religion in modernity and the present. In summer 2026 I will teach a week-long seminar on Yiddish literature from the 1920s to the 1950s for the Goldrich Program at Tel Aviv University and intend to teach more directly on Yiddish and Hebrew literature in coming years. I also intend to teach more extensively on contemporary Israel and Palestine through a political-sociology lens.