Christine Hayes
Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Religious Studies
Yale University

Christine Hayes is the Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University and specializes in talmudic-midrashic studies. She previously held a faculty position in the NELC department at Princeton University and has held visiting faculty positions at Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law and the University of Pennsylvania law school. She was a 2018 fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include: What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (2015, winner of three major awards); Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (2003, National Jewish Book Award finalist); and Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (1997, Salo Baron prize) as well as two introductory volumes. Edited volumes include: The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law (2017) and Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History (2018). She has served as co-editor of the AJS Review and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and President of the Association for Jewish Studies.

Selected Publications

What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015) winner of National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship; 2016 PROSE award for Theology and Religious Studies from the American Publishers Association; 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association of Jewish Studies.

Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (Oxford University 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist);

Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (1997 Salo Baron prize)

Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History, editor.