John Efron
Koret Professor of Jewish History
UC Berkeley

John M. Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley; he specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. In his work, Efron has focused on the way German Jewry attempted to reinterpret and reinvent Jewish culture in the wake of its complex encounter with modernity. His work has focused on the German-Jewish engagement with science, medicine, anthropology, and antisemitism. He has also written on Jewish political and popular culture in Central Europe, on Yiddish political satire in Poland and Israel, and the role of sport in the modern Jewish experience. His most recent work is a study modern German Jewry’s attraction to the aesthetics of medieval Sephardic Jewry.

Selected Publications

German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (2016)

Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001)

Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1994)

The Jews: A History with Matthias Lehmann and Steven Weitzman (3rd ed., 2019)

“From Lodz to Tel Aviv: The Yiddish Political Satire of Shimen Dzigan,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 102, 1 (Winter 2012): 50–79.