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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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
Click here to go to Professor Hendel's homepage
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.
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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.
Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1993.
Yiddish, modern Hebrew literature and the Midrashic imagination, feminist and literary theory and their applicability in literary analysis.
Prof. Seidman is the translator (and co-editor with Prof. Chana Kronfeld) of The First Day and Other Stories by Dvorah Baron, and Conversations With Dvora by Amia Lieblich.
In addition, she is the author of A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, all published by University of California Press.
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.