Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History; Judaic Studies, Religious Studies and History
Elli Stern received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2008. From 2009-2010 he was Junior William Golding Fellow in the Humanities at Brasenose College and the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He researches the transformation and development of traditional and religious worldviews in Western life and thought. In particular, he focuses on modern Eastern European Jewry, Zionism, secularism, and religious radicalism. Currently, he is finishing a book entitled The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism to be published by Yale University Press in 2012. His courses include Secularism: From the Enlightenment to the Present, Modern Jewish Intellectual History, and Law and Ethics in Modern Judaism. His most recent article is “Genius and Demographics in Modern Jewish History,” JQR (Summer, 2011). He is a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.