About UCI's Center for Jewish Studies
Led by Matthias B. Lehmann, the Center for Jewish Studies is hosted by the UCI School of Humanities.
Jewish Studies on campus is currently anchored by the endowment that supports the Teller Family Chair in Jewish History, held by Lehmann, and includes affiliated faculty from various departments. In addition to our existing faculty in history, comparative literature, English and political science, the School of Humanities has recently authorized a new position in the study of Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewry.
Each year, we teach hundreds of students and have developed a number of initiatives that we plan to build on: with support from the UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence, we have started an initiative to educate students about and confront antisemitism; we have an annual “New Horizons in Jewish Studies” graduate essay prize that receives a growing number of submissions each year from current and recent Ph.D.s in many of the top universities in the U.S.; and we have hosted several international conferences, including on Jewish and mediterranean studies, Holocaust research in the Social Sciences, and on contemporary Jewish literature.
About Matthias B. Lehmann
Matthias B. Lehmann, Teller Family Chair in Jewish History, is founding director of UCI’s Center for Jewish Studies. A historian of modern European and Mediterranean Jewish history, he has taught at UCI since 2012. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, co-editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, and author of several books, including The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 2022); Emissaries from the Holy Land (Stanford University Press, 2014); Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005); The Jews: A History (Routledge, third edition, 2019), written together with John Efron and Steven Weitzman; and Jews and the Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited with Jessica Marglin. His course on the Holocaust enrolls to the maximum each year.
