Faculty

Rutie Adler

Lecturer in Hebrew Language
Coordinator of Hebrew Language Instruction
radler@berkeley.edu

Robert Alter

Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1962.
Professor Alter has taught at Berkeley since 1967. He has published widely on the modern European and American novel, on mdern Hebrew Literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible.
The 1995 recipient of the Scholarship Award for Social and Cultural Studies of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Prof. Alter is the author of two prize winning volumes on literary aspects of the Bible, his works include Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The World of Biblical Literature (1992) and Hebrew and Modernity (1994). His most recent works are Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000) and Imagined Cities (2005).
altcos@berkeley.edu

Deena Aranoff

Assistant Professor of Medieval Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union

Ph.D. Columbia University, 2006.
Prof. Aranoff teaches courses on Jewish society and culture in the medieval and early-modern European context. Her interests include rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. She is particularly interested in linguistic speculation as a means by which Jewish scholars articulated cultural affinities and boundaries in ancient, medieval and modern times. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 in the department of history at Columbia University with a dissertation titled, In Pursuit of the Holy Tongue: Jewish Conceptions of Hebrew in the Sixteenth Century.
Professor Aranoff's homepage
daranoff@gtu.edu

Chava Boyarin

Lecturer in Hebrew

Chava Boyarin is interested in Biblical Hebrew and Literature. She is currently studying the Syriac (Aramaic) langauge, and developing a course for the language and culture of Mishnaic Hebrew. Chava continues to teach Modern Hebrew and tries to bring to the course new movies, cartoons and newspaper articles.
chava@berkeley.edu

Daniel Boyarin

Taubman Professor of Rabbinic Culture

Ph.D. Jewish Theological Seminary.
Talmud, cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, including issues of gender and sexuality, the Jews as a colonized people and Diaspora theory, Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity.
Author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1996). His most recent books are Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999) and Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004).
boyarin@berkeley.edu

Yael Chaver

Lecturer in Yiddish Language

Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2000.
Prof. Chaver works at the intersection of modern Yiddish and Hebrew cultures and literatures, with a particular interest in the Zionist Yiddish culture of pre-statehood Israel and in interwar European Yiddish poetry.
ychaver@berkeley.edu

John Efron

Koret Professor of History and Jewish Studies

Chair, Program in Jewish Studies

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1991.
His academic focus is on the cultural and intellectural history of modern Jewry, with emphasis on the Jews of German-speaking Europe. He is interested in the history of Jewish anthropology, the intersection of medicine and Jewish identity and the role that sceince has played in the modernization of the Jews.
Author of Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1998), and Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1994).
efron@berkeley.edu

Bluma Goldstein

Professor of German

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1962.
Interests include Jewish life and culture in 19th and 20th century Austria and Germany. German-Jewish and Yiddish literature, and women's studies.
Author of Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in the European Wilderness (Harvard, 1994).
blumag@berkeley.edu

Emily Gottreich

Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies
Vice Chair, Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Ph.D. Harvard University 1999
Research interests include Jewish-Muslim relations and Judeo-Islamic culture, with a focus on Moroccan and North African Jewish history. Related interests include Islam, Sephardic studies, Jewish space, Arab Jews, and historiography.
Author of The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City (2007); Co-editor, with Daniel Schroeter, of Rethinking Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (forthcoming).
emilyrg@berkeley.edu

Erich Gruen

Professor of History and Classics

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1964.
Focus includes Roman and Greek history, Jews in the Greco-Roman world.
Author of Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992) The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (1984); and Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (1990). His most recent work, Diaspora: Jews Amidst the Greeks and Romans, was published in 2002.
gruene@berkeley.edu

Ronald Hendel

Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1985.
Author of The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel (1987) and The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (1998). His most recent work, Remembering Abraham : Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible, was published in 2005.
Professor Hendel's homepage
hendel@berkeley.edu

Chana Kronfeld

Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature

Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1983.
Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She is interested in modernism, minor literatures, the politics of literary history, feminist stylistics, intertextuality, and translation studies.
Professor Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism (1995), which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1998 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open (2002), won the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Syrkin Awards. In 2005-6 Kronfeld and Bloch received the top NEA award for their translation of The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Chana is currently preparing for publication a monograph titled "The Full Severity of Compassion": The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai" and a collection of essays in collaboration with graduate students titled Rewriting the Land as Woman.
kronfeld@berkeley.edu

Miryam Sas

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies

Ph.D. Yale University, 1995.
Miryam Sas is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Japanese in 1995 from Yale. Her first book Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism was released by Stanford University Press in 2001. Areas of interest in include Japanese, French, and English twentieth century literature, performance, film, and critical theory; gender studies, performance studies, theories of subjectivity, and messianism. Related to Jewish studies, she regularly teaches courses on Walter Benjamin's critical writings, memorial and trauma, and post-Holocaust literature and film. She is completing a book on postwar experimental Japanese arts.
mbsas@berkeley.edu

Naomi Seidman

Professor of Jewish Culture, Graduate Theological Union

Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1993.
Yiddish, modern Hebrew literature and the Midrashic imagination, feminist and literary theory and their applicability in literary analysis. Naomi Seidman is Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997. Her second, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, was published in 2006.
Professor Seidman's homepage
naomi@gtu.edu

Holger Zellentin

Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Late Antique Judaism, Graduate Theological Union

Ph.D. Princeton University, 2007.
Holger Zellentin is Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Late Antique Judaism at the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His dissertation, in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, was titled Late Antiquity Upside Down - Rabbinic Parodies of Christian and Jewish Literature (2007). He is the editor, together with Eduard Iricinschi, of Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck, 2007), and has published several articles on Jewish adaptations of Greco-Roman literature.
Professor Zellentin's homepage
hzellentin@gtu.edu