Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in...
Karen Barkey was born in Istanbul, Turkey. After she graduated from the Lycée Notre Dame de Sion, in Istanbul, she moved to the United States for her college education. She got her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. She then got a M.A. degree from The University of Washington and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
She is married to Anthony W. Marx, currently the President of the New York Public Library, and they have two children, Josh and Anna-Claire.
Karen Barkey has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of the state, with special focus on its...
Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism
Professor Bieder teaches digital reporting, producing, and storytelling for television news. Before coming to Berkeley, she was a producer for ABC Network News and a faculty member at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Bieder’s recent course, Reporting on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, produced work for television, documentary, radio, and print. Her research area focuses on the history of the Baghdadi Jewish community in Singapore, an orthodox group of traders that arrived in the 1830s whose descendants still survive today led by a rabbi with...
Professor, Department of Music; Interim Faculty Director, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
Professor Brinner has chaired Berkeley’s music department since 2009 and held the Henry and Julia Weisman Schutt Chair in Music from 2010 to 2013. He has taught ethnomusicology courses and co-directed UC Berkeley’s Javanese music performing ensemble Gamelan Sari Raras since 1989. He 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. In addition to articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians...
Dr. Yael Chaver teaches Yiddish language and literature at U. C. Berkeley and in the community. Her 2004 book What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine was published in Hebrew in 2005. She works at the intersection of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and has a particular interest in the Zionist Hebrew and Yiddish culture of pre-statehood Israel. Her most recent publication is “The End of Language Wanderings? Yiddish in David Grossman’s Ayen Erekh: Ahava and Aharon Megged’s Foiglman,” Journal of Jewish...
Claude Fischeris Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1972. He has studied and published books in the areas of urban sociology, social networks, the history of technology, and inequality. His most recent books are Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (with Michael Hout, 2006), Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (2010), and Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970 (...
Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies
Professor Hendel has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1999 and has served as chair of Jewish Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Graduate Program in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Hendel approaches the Hebrew Bible from a variety of angles – history of religions, textual criticism, linguistics, comparative mythology, literature, and cultural memory. He is the editor-in-chief of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, a new critical edition of the Hebrew text, whose first volume (Proverbs, by Michael V. Fox) was published...
Bernie H. Williams Professor of Modern Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature
Chana Kronfeld, Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley, 1983) Bernie H. Williams Professor of Modern Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature Department of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies
Professor Swidler has engaged in influential work on culture, religion, and American society, including the now-classic article, “Culture in Action,” Organization Without Authority (1979), and Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, 2001). She is co-author of Habits of the Heart, The Good Society, and Inequality by Design. She has won teaching awards at both Stanford and Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, French-American Foundation Professor of...
