SUNY Albany

Faculty Member, History / Judaic Studies

Associate Professor/Director, Judaic Studies

College of Arts and Sciences

About

Associate Professor in the Department of History, Barry Trachtenberg was trained in Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D.), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University (Post-graduate Diploma) and also holds degrees from the University of Vermont (M.A. in U.S. history) and Rowan University of New Jersey (B.A. in English). His book, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008) examines the impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution on the formation of Yiddish scholarship. His current project, on the only attempt to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia in the Yiddish language, considers a broad range of historiographical questions on the shifting agenda of Yiddish-language research and the ways that the Nazi Holocaust shaped Jewish historians’ understanding of their task. In support of this project, he has been awarded a Summer Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the spring of 2009, he was a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. In the summer of 2009, he was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum. He teaches classes on the Nazi Holocaust, antisemitism, modern and medieval Jewish history, and Jewish nationalism. Currently, Professor Trachtenberg serves as Judaic Studies Program Director and Interim Director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

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