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Steven Zipperstein

Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History

E-mail: szipperstein@aol.com

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At Stanford Since 1991

B.A., Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles

Bio Sketch

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History. For sixteen years, beginning in 1991, he was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. As of fall 2007-8, he has been appointed Weinstock Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies at Harvard University;  he has held a research appointment for several years at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Zipperstein 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. He has co-edited three volumes, including (with Jonathan Frankel) Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and The Worlds of S. An-sky (with Gabriella Safran) (Stanford University Press, 2006). Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity -- based on the Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies – appeared with the University of Washington Press in 1999. Zipperstein's most recent book, "I Have Not Told Half of What I Saw": On Reading Isaac Rosenfeld, will be published in 2008 by Yale University Press. He has also started work on a cultural history of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia from the 18th century to the present that will be published by Houghton Mifflin. Together with his Stanford colleague, Aron Rodrigue, he has edited for twelve years the journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society.

Professor Zipperstein, together with Tel Aviv University's Anita Shapira, are now the series editors of the "Jewish Lives" biography series at Yale University Press.  It is anticipated that some 30-50 books will be published under its aegis in a project funded by the Leon Black Foundation.

Professor Zipperstein’s 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 on the Conference on Jewish Social Studies, he was Vice President of the Association for Jewish Studies, and 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 given the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in the Humanities at the Weizmann Institute, and endowed lectures at Wesleyan, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Indiana University at Bloomington, Brown, Tulane, Franklin and Marshall, Rutgers, UC Berkeley, University of Texas, Austin, University of Oregon, University of Florida, and Northwestern. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Jewish History, in New York, a member of the executive board of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a member of the academic advisory board of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, an editorial board member for the Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and he is on the international editorial board of the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization. He is on the board of several academic journals in Israel, Germany, and Russia. In 2002, he was J. B. Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the United Memorial Holocaust Museum, in Washington D.C.

Zipperstein has published some forty articles and many review essays in a wide range of journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, Ha-Aretz, Forward, The New Republic, Partisan Review, and Dissent.

Research Interests

  • Modern Jewish History
  • History of Zionism
  • Russian and East European Jewish History
  • Biography

Courses Taught

  • Jews in the Modern World
  • Zionism, and its Critics
  • Biography and History
  • Russian Jewish History
  • Graduate Seminar in Modern Jewish History
  • Core Colloquium in Modern Jewish History: 20th Century Historiography

Selected Publications

  • "I Have Not Told Half of What I Saw": On Reading Isaac Rosenfeld (2008)
  • The Worlds of S. Ansky, edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (2006)
  • "On the Secrets of Isaac Babel," Dissent, Summer 2003
  • "Isaac Rosenfeld and Literary Biography," Partisan Review, Winter 2002
  • "Goodbye to All That? Elegies for the Book," Dissent, Summer 2000
  • Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (1999)
  • Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (1993)
  • Assimilation and Community in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (1992)
  • The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (1985)