Robert Alter has taught at Berkeley since 1967.   He has published widely on the European and American novel, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible.  He has done several award-winning translations with commentary of the Bible.  In 2009 he received the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime contribution to American letters.   His two most recent books are Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Version (2010) and The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary (2010).

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.

Benjamin Brinner is Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently holds the Henry and Julia Weisman Schutt Chair in Music. He has taught ethnomusicology courses and co-directed UC Berkeley's Gamelan Sari Raras since 1989. He has also taught at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem Music Center, as well as Colorado College. He earned the PhD and MA degrees in the ethnomusicology program at UC Berkeley (1985 and 1979) after completing a BA in musicology at the Hebrew University (1977).
Brinner is interested in issues of musical cognition, particularly questions of musical memory and how musicians know what they know and how that influences their interactions with one another in performance. He has conducted research in Indonesia (Central Java and Bali) and Israel, with the support of two Fulbright fellowships and various research grants from the University of California. In addition to articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicans and in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, he has written three books. The first, Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of Musical Competence and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1995), won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 1996. This was followed by a textbook, Music in Central Java, for Oxford University Press’s Global Music series. The most recent book, Playing Across a Divide: Musical Encounters in a Contested Land on musical collaborations between Jews and Arabs in Israel (Oxford University Press, 2010), was awarded the 2010 Alan P. Merriam Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology by the Society for Ethnomusicology.

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).

Research interests in Hellenistic Judaism, Jews in the Greco-Roman world, Greek history, Roman history. Recent publications include Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998); Diaspora: Jews Amidst the Greeks and Romans (2002); (ed.) Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (2005); (ed.) Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean (2011); Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (2011).

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and l996); Marxism and Totality (l984); Adorno (l984); Permanent Exiles (l985); Fin-de-Siècle Socialism (l989); Force Fields (l993): Downcast Eyes (l993); Cultural Semantics (l998); Refractions of Violence (2003); Songs of Experience (2004); The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying In Politics (2010) and Essays from the Edge (2011). His research interests are in modern European Intellectual History, Critical Theory and Visual Culture.

Chana Kronfeld is an Israeli scholar of Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature and a translator of modern Hebrew literature into English. Her principal academic interests are: Modernism in Hebrew, Yiddish and English poetry, intertextuality, translation studies, literary historiography, stylistics and ideology, gender studies, political poetry, marginality and minor literatures, literature & linguistics, negotiating theory and close reading, theory of metaphor. Her new study, The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

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.