Steve Zipperstein

Steven J. Zipperstein is currently completing a cultural history of the Jews of Russia at the turn of the 20th century.  For sixteen years, beginning in 1991, Zipperstein was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. In fall 2007-8, he was the Weinstock Visiting Professor in Jewish History at Harvard University, where he held the Schyler Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2008-9. He has held a research appointment for several years at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

Zipperstein's most recent book, Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, was published in 2009 by Yale University Press was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in biography, autobiography, and memoir.  In it, he uses a cache of mostly previously unknown letters, manuscripts, and journals to examine the life and work of writer Isaac Rosenfeld, who, before he died relatively young and obscure, was considered more promising than Saul Bellow, his closest friend.

Zipperstein has taught at Oxford (for six years), and at universities in France, Russia, and Poland. His first book, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford University Press, 1985) won the Smilen Prize and was named the outstanding book on Jewish history published that year. It has been translated into Russian. His second book, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (University of California Press, 1993) won the National Jewish Book Award. In 1998, it appeared in Israel in a Hebrew translation published by the Ofakim series of Am Oved.  His third book, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (University of Washington Press, 1999), was based on the Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies that he delivered at the University of Washington, Seattle.   His articles are reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Dissent, Partisan Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Jewish Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

Zipperstein is an editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society with his Stanford colleague Aron Rodrigue and Derek Penslar from the University of Toronto Together with Tel Aviv University's Anita Shapira, is series editors of the "Jewish Lives" biography series at the trade division of Yale University Press.  It is anticipated that some 100 books will be published under its aegis in a project funded by the Leon Black Foundation; a dozen books in the series have already appeared.

Professor Zipperstein has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, at Wolfson College, Oxford, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew Studies, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, and the Stanford Humanities Center. He is President of the Conference on Jewish Social Studies, he was Vice President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and he served for seven years as Chair of the Koret Book Awards.  He is the recipient of the Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal from the American Friends of the Hebrew University, and the Koret Prize for outstanding contributions to Jewish life. He has been the J. B. Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the United Memorial Holocaust Museum, in Washington D.C, has given the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in the Humanities at the Weizmann Institute, and endowed lectures at dozens of universities including Harvard, Princeton, and Wesleyan.  He sits on the academic advisory boards of journals and institutions in the United States as well as in Israel, Germany, and Russia, and is the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, in New York.