Jeffrey Shandler
Jeffrey Shandler is a scholar of modern Jewish culture who specializes in Yiddish culture, Holocaust remembrance, and the ethnography of contemporary Jewish life, especially in America. His work also focuses on Jewish visual culture and the roles that broadcasting, photography, film, and other media play in modern Jewish life.
His most recent book, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (2009), examines the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on the religious life of American Jews over the past century, ranging from early recordings of cantorial music to hasidic outreach on the Internet. He is also the author of Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture, and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (1999). Among other titles, he is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002) and co-author/co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (2003). Currently he is writing an intellectual history of the shtetl and co-editing a volume of essays on how Anne Frank’s life and work are revisited in a wide array of media, including literature, films, broadcasts, theater pieces, musical compositions, visual art, memorials, educational programs, and other cultural works.
At Rutgers, Professor Shandler teaches courses on Holocaust literature and media, American Jews and media, the ethnography of contemporary Jewish life, Yiddish literature and culture, and Jewish art.
