Debra Kaplan

Debra Kaplan is the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Bar-Ilan University.

Kaplan's most recent book, authored together with Elisheva Carlebach, is entitled A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025). A groundbreaking work using previously untapped archival sources, it explores the integral role of women in early modern Jewish communities, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and the Jewish past.

She is also the author of The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), an intimate portrait of early modern Jewish communities. Looking at men and women of all classes, from the wealthy patrons to the homeless poor, it uses charity as a lens into the dynamics of the community.

Kaplan is also the author of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford University Press, 2011), analyzes the impact that the Protestant Reformation had upon the Jewish communities of the Holy Roman Empire, focusing in particular upon the rural Jews of Alsace who entered major urban centers on a daily basis. A Hebrew translation was published in 2016 by Merkaz Zalman Shazar.

In 2007, Kaplan was voted the Lillian F. and William L. Silber Professor of the Year at Yeshiva College. She was awarded the prize of outstanding lecturer at Bar Ilan in 2018.

Kaplan received her doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA from Barnard College.