Emeritus Faculty

• Jeffrey Shandler 
• 
• Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies
• Schools:   Ph.D. Columbia University, M.A. Columbia University, B.A. Swarthmore College
• Email Address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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  Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He received a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. Shandler has also been a visiting scholar at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Center, Tel Aviv University; the Center for Religion and Media, New York University; the Jewish Studies Program, University of California Berkeley; the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation; the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University; the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University; the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania; and the Center for Jewish History, New York.

  Shandler is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture; Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), which analyzes the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on American Jews’ religious life; Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), an examination of how Jewish life in East European provincial towns has become the subject of extensive memory, creativity, and scholarship; Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017), which explores memory practices in the largest online archive of video interviews with Holocaust survivors; Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024), which examines a pioneering effort, undertaken during World War II, to create a museum in New York memorializing Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012). His essays have appeared in French, German, Polish, Yiddish, and six other languages.

  Shandler’s translations of Yiddish literature include Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (Roaring Brook, 2006). He has curated exhibitions for the Jewish Museum of New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Shandler served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and as a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Research Interests

• Jewish memory practices, centering on remembering the Holocaust and prewar Jewish life in Eastern Europe
• Jewish cultural history, centering on the role of communications media, museums, tourism, and visual culture
• Intellectual history of Jewish Studies, especially ethnographic studies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America
• Digital humanities in Jewish Studies, centering on archiving, narrative, inventory as a practice of modern Jewish culture
• Yiddish language, literature and culture, centering on language and culture, translation, language learning, Yiddish after World War II

Publications

Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum

University of Indiana Press, 2024

Yiddish: Biography of a Language

Oxford University Press, 2020

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices

Stanford University Press, 2017

Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory

Indiana University Press, 2012

Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America

New York University Press, 2009

Emil and Karl

Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006

Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture

University of California Press, 2005

While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust

Oxford University Press, 1999

• Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024)
• Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017).
• Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014).
• Co-editor, with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, of Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory
  (Indiana University Press, 2012).
  
• Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009).
• Translator, of Emil and Karl, by Yankev Glatshteyn (Roaring Brook Press, 2006).
• Adventures in Yiddishland:  Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005).
• Co-author/co-editor, with J. Hoberman, of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press/The Jewish Museum, New York, 2003).
• Editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press/YIVO Institute, 2002).
• Co-editor, with Hasia Diner and Beth S. Wenger, of Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Indiana University Press, 2000).
• While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Co-editor, with Dina Abramowicz, of Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II by Hirsz Abramowicz, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Wayne State University Press/YIVO Institute, 1999).
• Co-author/co-editor, with Beth S. Wenger, of Encounters with the Holy Land: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (Brandeis University Press/Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania /National Museum of American Jewish History, 1997).
• Editor of The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History by Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, trans. Judith Vowles (Indiana University Press/YIVO Institute, 1991).

Professional Affiliations

•  American Academy for Jewish Research: Fellow, 2012 - present.
• American Jewish Historical Society: Academic Council, 2001 – 2015; Executive Committee of the Academic Council, 2006 – 2008.
• Association for Jewish Studies: Board of Directors, 2003-2007, 2009-2015; Vice President for Publications, 2009-2011; President, 2011-2013.
• Center for Jewish History, New York, Academic Advisory Council, 2004 – 2014; Co-chair, 2006 – 2011.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Academic Committee, 2024 – present.

• Leslie E. Fishbein
• 
• Professor Emerita in American Studies and Jewish Studies
• Web Page: https://amerstudies.rutgers.edu/people/core-faculty/people-details/170-emeriti/500-fishbein-leslie

Leslie Fishbein is professor emerita in American Studies and Jewish Studies and was an affiliated faculty member of Jewish Studies, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies.

Her book, for which she won the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Award, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917, is a study of the simultaneous, and often schizophrenic, commitments to socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, Freudianism, feminism, and bohemians of radicals who lived in Greenwich Village during the Teens and published a socialist literary and political magazine. Her research interests have included documentary film, the history of social deviance, film and history, and Women's Studies. She currently is at work on a book on the self-representation of prostitutes and madams.

In 1986-1987 Fishbein served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Festival since its inception and is a lecturer for the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

Her teaching interests included the history of deviance, the culture of American women, New York metropolitan culture, the history of Freudianism in America, Greenwich Village, the history of sexuality, the culture of the Sixties, the history of childhood, and Jewish-American women's self-representation in memoirs and film.

Rebels in Bohemia : the radicals of the Masses, 1911-1917

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1982

• Judith Gerson
• 
• Professor Emerita of Sociology, Women’s Gender Studies and Jewish Studies
• Web Page: https://sociology.rutgers.edu/people/faculty/core-department-faculty/core-department-faculty-member/154-gerson-judith

Judith Gerson, Professor Emerita, held a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, and was an affiliate faculty in Jewish Studies. She taught courses in gender theory; interdisciplinary research methods; narrative analysis; and diaspora, trauma, and collective memory. She also taught in the Gender Studies Program at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway. In 2012, she received an award from the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers for her distinguished contributions to undergraduate education.

She is presently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory. Focused on the forced emigration and resettlement of German Jews in the U.S. during World War II, the project relies on memoirs, interviews, and correspondence to examine how this group of refugees recalled, evaded, and forgot their past. She compares these personal testimonies to one another, the historiographic record, and to refugee aid organization documents to discern narrative patterns. She is the co-editor with Diane Wolf of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007) and more recently has published on practices of masculinity among German Jewish immigrants, and on the relevance of gender theory in Jewish studies. A former research fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Study at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in 2017 -2018, she was the Ina Levine Senior Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Study at the USHMM. In 2019, she co-taught the Silberman faculty seminar on Displacement, Migration, and the Holocaust at the USHMM. She regularly gives public lectures on collective memory and forgetting to various public gatherings of survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants.

Faculty Article(s):
Gender Theory, Intersectionality, and New Understandings of Jewishness
Faculty Bookshelf:
Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas

Duke University Press, 2007