Department Faculty

"I study American religious history and modern Jewish history and focus on immigration, ethnicity, and religious identity in the United States. My research explores the construction of Jewishness as a political, religious, ethnic, and class marker in twentieth-century America. My current book project, titled American Jews in the Making: Rabbis, Scholars and the Terms of a Public Identity, is about the ways Jews worked to explain themselves to non-Jews in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s. I argue that rabbis and social researchers were crucial architects of a new, sociological model of Jewishness that subsumed earlier religious and racial models. I am also working on another book, tentatively called Sprawling Judaism: Authenticity in the American Suburb. In addition to teaching in the university classroom, I enjoy leading seminars and classes for adult learners. Finally, I am interested in creative writing and ways that the tools of creative writing can also be applied to historical scholarship."