Professor Rebecca Kobrin’s “Credit to the Nation” Featured in The Wall Street Journal

Professor Rebecca Kobrin’s new book, Credit to the Nation: East European Jewish Bankers and American Finance, 1870–1920, was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal. The review highlights the book’s account of how Jewish immigrant bankers extended credit to new arrivals while helping shape economic and communal life in the United States during a period of mass migration.

Published by Harvard University Press, Credit to the Nation explores the networks of trust, migration, finance, and entrepreneurship that connected Eastern Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Read the full Wall Street Journal article here.

IIJS Professor Rebecca Kobrin Receives 2026 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching

Prof. Kobrin delivers remarks at the IIJS 75th Anniversary Celebration

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is delighted to share that Professor Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, has been named a recipient of Columbia University’s 2026 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

This prestigious honor recognizes exceptional dedication to teaching and mentorship across the University. Professor Kobrin was selected following strong endorsement from the faculty nominating committee, which praised her thoughtful, often innovative approach in the classroom and the profound and lasting impact she has had on her students. Testimonials from past and present students spoke to the depth of her mentorship and the meaningful influence of her teaching on their academic paths and personal development.

We warmly congratulate Professor Kobrin on this well-deserved recognition of her outstanding contributions to teaching and mentorship.

"A Woman Is Responsible for Everything" Receives Two National Jewish Book Awards

We are delighted to share that A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025), co-authored by IIJS Co-Director and Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society Elisheva Carlebach and Prof. Debra Kaplan (Bar-Ilan University), received two National Jewish Book Awards! The book was awarded the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship and the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies.

In A Woman Is Responsible for Everything, Carlebach and Kaplan draw on meticulous research and extensive archival and material sources to reveal Jewish women’s lives across three centuries, revealing how women were central to the economic, religious, and communal life of their communities. Richly documented with archival images, the work illuminates the lives of women whom scholars have long overlooked, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a broader understanding of the Jewish past.

To learn more about the award, please visit the Jewish Book Council’s announcement page. Additional information about the book is available through Princeton University Press.

New Research by Professor Rebecca Kobrin on October 7 and Its Impact on Israeli Students at Columbia

We are proud to share recent research by IIJS Co-Director Professor Rebecca Kobrin, examining the events and aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. This work offers critical insight into the surge of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents on U.S. college campuses, including the experiences of Israeli students at Columbia.

Her study examines how the October 7 Hamas attacks and ensuing campus activism affected Israeli students’ sense of belonging at Columbia University, arguing that the concept of “anti-Israelism” is essential to understanding these dynamics fully. 

Read her research in detail, linked below:

Anti-Israelism, Social Media and the College Campus in the Aftermath of October 7: The Case of Columbia

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, specializing in modern Jewish migration, immigration history, urban studies, and business history. She earned her B.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and NYU. Kobrin is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, and has edited several volumes, including Chosen Capital and Salo Baron. Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), explores the world of East European immigrant bankers in America. She has received Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her exceptional teaching and mentoring and is a principal investigator of the award-winning Historical NYC Project, a digital humanities initiative mapping New York City’s demographic shifts from 1850 to 1940.

IIJS Co-Director, Elisheva Carlebach, receives AJS Gender Justice Caucus Mentorship Award

Elisheva Carlebach, the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society and IIJS Co-Director, has been honored with the Association for Jewish Studies “Gender Justice Caucus Mentorship Award.” This award recognizes outstanding service in the profession through the mentorship of women scholars in Jewish Studies.

A leading professor in early modern European Jewish history, Professor Carlebach is celebrated for her transformative impact as a mentor, particularly her dedication to supporting women in the field. She has been a tireless advocate for emerging female scholars, offering guidance on navigating institutional gender biases and fostering their academic and personal growth. Her commitment to mentoring extends far beyond academic achievements, as she inspires confidence, nurtures intellectual curiosity, and creates supportive networks that uplift the next generation of scholars. Professor Carlebach’s unparalleled dedication has shaped countless careers and left an indelible mark on Jewish studies.

IIJS Professor and Director Emeritus Jeremy Dauber on Satanism, Psychopaths, and the Real American Horror Story

Columbia Magazine’s Julia Joy interviews Professor Jeremy Dauber about his new book, American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, which traces the nation’s enduring fascination with the macabre. Dauber reflects on why the horror genre deserves serious attention, the historical events that shaped it, and the reasons people are drawn to its dark and unsettling stories.

Read the full article via this link.

IIJS Lecturer Wins Top Faculty Honor

We are delighted to announce that Agnieszka Legutko, Senior Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages, has been awarded Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

The Lenfest Award is “given annually to faculty of unusual merit across a range of professional activities, including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement — with a primary emphasis on instruction and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students.”

According to Dean of Arts and Sciences Amy Hungerford’s announcement, Dr. Legutko was recognized “for her exceptional record of teaching and mentoring students through dynamic and interactive classes and field engagements, her innovative course design that integrates digital tools into the study of Yiddish language and culture, and her contributions to the ongoing success and expansion of the Yiddish language program at Columbia.”

Dean Hungerford’s announcement, as well as the full list of 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award recipients, can be viewed on the Columbia Arts and Sciences website.

Director Emeritus Jeremy Dauber Featured in Columbia Magazine

On June 12, 2023, Columbia Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Dauber, the Director Emeritus of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. Dr. Dauber discusses the inspiration behind, and content of, his latest book, a biography of Mel Brooks titled Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press Jewish Lives, 2023).

The interview touches on Mel Brooks’ lasting relevance, the power of humor as a weapon against hate, and Brooks’ life in the context of the American Jewish story. An excerpt from the interview is quoted below; you can view this interview in full on Columbia Magazine’s website.

Your book is part of the Jewish Lives biography series, which spotlights a pantheon of greats — Einstein, Anne Frank, Wittgenstein. Why include the man who gave us Blazing Saddles?

The short answer is “because they asked.” But really because Brooks did so much to shape not just Jewish comedy and American comedy, but also how American Jews thought about themselves in the second part of the twentieth century. With all the documentaries and books we’ve seen, that story is still under told. 

The Institute Welcomes Alumni Back to Campus for Reunion 2023

On Friday, June 2, the Institute hosted Columbia alumni for a special event at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Elisheva Carlebach, Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and Michelle Margolis, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, discussed the history of Jewish Studies at Columbia and walked guests through centuries-old selections from the Alexander Library of Jewish Studies.

Dr. Margolis brought out an exciting array of treasures from the Library’s collections, sorted into the following categories:

• New Acquisitions

• Columbia History

• Jews in the East (Near and Far)

• Women

• Yiddish

• Early Printing

Columbia alumni and families from all backgrounds had the opportunity to directly explore and interact with manuscripts as old as the fifteenth century that represented the diversity of Jewish history and culture throughout time and across the world.

IIJS Faculty Member Jeremy Dauber Releases New Biography of Mel Brooks

We are pleased to announce the release of a new book by Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press Jewish Lives, 2023) is a spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy.

Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream.

In Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, Jeremy Dauber considers Brooks’s extensive body of work, illuminating the man behind Your Show of Shows, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs. Dauber argues that Brooks has seen the most success when he has found a balance between his unflagging, subversive, manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores.

Dauber also explores how Brooks’s American Jewish humor went from being solely for niche audiences to an essential part of the American mainstream, paving the way for generations of Jewish (and other) comedians to come. This is a book for anyone interested in movies, humor, American culture, or Jewishness.

The book is available for purchase through Yale University Press.

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Agnieszka Legutko's interview with Columbia's Language Resource Center (LRC)

Agnieszka Legutko was interviewed by LRC's Said & Done podcast. Tune in to the full interview to learn about Agi’s background, Yiddish at Columbia, and other programs including Mapping Yiddish New York and the Naomi Fellowship. Stay tuned for Part II, coming soon.

Faculty in Columbia News

• “A glimpse into New York City at the turn of the 20th century can now be viewed at an exceptional level of detail: 6.5 million unique census records from 1850, 1880, and 1910 are pinpointed to residential addresses on the recently launched website Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas.” IIJS Professor Rebecca Kobrin was part of the project’s leadership team in this multi-year collaboration between Columbia’s Department of History and the Center for Spatial Research (GSAPP). Read more here.

• Columbia News caught up with Jeremy Dauber to interview him about his latest book, American Comics: A History, as well as which comics he read as a child, what he’s teaching this year, and who he would like to sit next to at a dinner party. Read more here.

Faculty in the News: American Comics: A History

"It’s a thorough—and thoroughly entertaining—work." Read more about American Comics: A History, Prof. Jeremy Dauber's latest book in Publisher's Weekly and The Wall Street Journal.

Want to hear more? Tune into a conversation about American Comics on KQED.

Faculty in the News: Remembering Paula Hyman and a Review

• Rebecca Kobrin and other noted scholars reflect on the legacy of “the Feminist Scholar Who Remade Jewish Studies”, Paula Hyman, who taught at Columbia from 1975-1982. Read here.

• The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6: Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, is critiqued in the Jewish Review of Books.

Faculty in the News: Mapping Project and COVID and Dybbuks

• Prof. Rebecca Kobrin, along with principal investigators Mae Ngai, Laura Kurgan, Gergely Baics, Leah Misterlein, and staff members Wright Kennedy and Dan Miller have been awarded a major grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation to create an online, interactive atlas of historic New York City spanning the years 1820 to 1940. The project is a collaboration of Columbia’s History Department and the Center for Spatial Research in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

  Using census data and historical maps, the project digitally displays changes in demography and land use over time. Users will be able to visualize the magnitude of changes that took place in New York City during this time period, including the arrival of new immigrants and the incorporation of parts of Long Island into the city. The project leads hope to also map the entire region at 1820, which would allow them to show the presence of enslaved African Americans, as slavery was not abolished in NY State until 1827.

  No other use of geographic information systems (GIS) has created digital mapping of New York City at this level of detail. The map of Manhattan and Brooklyn 1850-1910 is currently in a beta version, with plans for a public launch of a website this fall. The team at Columbia will continue to expand the site as they collect and refine data for other neighborhoods.

• Read Agnieszka Legutko’s take in this article Fact Check: Does COVID Backwards Mean 'Possession by an Evil Spirit' in Hebrew?

In the News: Medieval Studies Annual Conference and more

• Dr. Isabelle Levy will be taking part in the upcoming Medieval Studies Annual Conference. Her presentation titled “Mixed Metaphors, Mixed Forms: Across Medieval Hebrew and French Prosimetra” will be part of the French in the World of Medieval Hebrew session.

• Read an interview in The Current with the 2020-21 Rabin-Shvidler Joint Post-Doctoral Fellow Alon Tam by Sophie Levy, BC '21.

Institute in the News

• Yale University Press published The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6: Confronting Modernity, 1750-1880, edited by Prof. Elisheva Carlebach. This volume covers a momentous period, described by Carlebach as a time “in which every aspect of Jewish life underwent the most profound changes to have occurred since antiquity.” The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is comprised of The Posen Digital Library (PDL), available at posenlibrary.com, and a 10-volume print anthology of Jewish culture.

• Read Prof. Clémence Boulouque’s New York Times book review of Norman Lebrecht’s Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947.

• Francine Klagsburn, author of Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, shared her thoughts on the Institute’s conference History and Memory: The Legacy of Yosef H. Yerushalmi in the New Jersey Jewish News.

• Tablet Magazine shared our upcoming screening of The Pawnbroker followed by a Q&A with Prof. Maura Spiegel.

Faculty in the News: Jewish Life in Rhodes

• Adjunct Lecturer Isabelle Levy collaborated on an exhibition titled Los Corassones Avlan: Conversations on Jewish Life on the Island of Rhodes. The project is a collaboration between Kehila Kedosha Janina, the American Sephardi Federation, and Centro Primo Levi. The exhibit at 148 West 4th Street runs through November 24 is free and open to the public. For more information visit http://primolevicenter.org/.

• Prof. Jeremy Dauber on his newest book, what he's working on, and who he'd invite to a dinner party.

• Prof. Rebecca Kobrin lectured on the legacy of Jewish immigrants at the New City Jewish Center. Read more here.

Faculty in the News: The Washington Post and Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism

• "This week, as we mark the 25th anniversary of the greatest single loss of Jewish lives outside Israel since the Holocaust, it is imperative that we grapple with anti-Semitism as a global issue. An ideology that combines racism and right-wing politics, anti-Semitism has long pervaded Europe and the United States - and South America." Read more in the Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Rebecca Kobrin and Prof. Federico Finchelstein (The New School).

• Prof. Beth Berkowitz’s essay “The Slipperiness of Animal Suffering: Revisiting the Talmud’s Classic Treatment” was published in Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism.

Faculty in the News: 'The Lehman Trilogy' and More

• Rebecca Kobrin's essay, "A Jewish American Success Story" was featured in the playbill of The Lehman Trilogy now playing at the Park Avenue Armory.

• On March 28, Rebecca Kobrin briefed Mayor Bloomberg on the current rise in global anti-Semitism at Bloomberg News and on April 10, she was invited to participate in a small, high-level consultation with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief about the trajectory of antisemitism in the United States at the American Jewish Committee.

• Rebecca Kobrin spoke about Jewish migration to the United States at The Global Forum of the National Library of Israel (held March 17-19 in Jerusalem). 

• Jeremy Dauber gave a lecture on his latest book, now in paperback, Jewish Comedy, A Serious History at Ursinus College. Read about the lecture here.