Jeffrey Shandler
About
Jeffrey Shandler is professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He currently serves as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and was recently elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Shandler received a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. He 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; and the Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California.
He has written and lectured widely on modern and contemporary Jewish culture in America and Eastern Europe, specialising in Holocaust remembrance, Yiddish culture, and the roles that broadcasting, photography, film, and other media play in Jewish life, among other topics. His work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Polish.
Shandler’s most recent book, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), examines the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on the religious life of American Jews over the past century, with examples 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 (University of California Press, 2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture, and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002), co-author/co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012). Forthcoming is an intellectual history of the shtetl, to be published in 2014 by Rutgers University Press.
Shandler’s translations of Yiddish literature include Mani-Leyb’s children’s classic Yingl Tsingl Khvat (Moyer Bell, 1986) and 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.
