Jay R. Berkovitz

Jay R. Berkovitz is Distinguished Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An expert in the early modern period, he specializes in the history of Jewish law, family, ritual, and communal governance. His major publications include The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Tradition and Revolution: Jewish Culture in Early Modern France [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2007); and Protocols of Justice: The Metz Rabbinic Court, 1771-1789 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014), which won the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award presented by the Association for Jewish Studies. His forthcoming books include Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Authority, and Family in Early Modern Metz (Brill), and Jewish Law in Early Modern Europe: Community, Religion, and the Dynamics of Social Change (Cambridge Univ. Press).

Professor Berkovitz lectures widely in the U.S., Europe, and Israel and has held visiting appointments at Bar Ilan University, Harvard University, University of Connecticut at Storrs, Trinity College, Yeshiva University, and as the Lady Davis Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University. He was the Inaugural National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Scholar Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in 2011-2012. He is currently a Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (2018-2019). In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Jewish History.