Samuel Heilman
Distinguished Professor of Sociology
City University of New York

Samuel Heilman holds the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York. He received his BA from Brandeis University, his MA in Sociology from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania (under the direction of Erving Goffman). He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem, a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the People’s Republic of China where he lectured at Nanjing, Henan, and Shanghai Universities,and in Poland where he lectured at Wroclaw, Warsaw and Jagellonian Universities. He has also been Scheinbrun Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, visiting professor of social anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne in Australia. He is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, most recently in Moment Magazine on the subject of Messianism. Heilman was born in Germany and grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Selected Publications

Who Will Lead Us: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America (2017 U. of California Press)

The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (2010 Princeton University Press) with M. Friedman

Defenders of the Faith: Inside UltraOrthodox Jewry (1999 U. of California Press)

When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son (2001 U. of California Press)

Sliding to the Right (2006, U. of California Press)

Synagogue Life (1976, U. of Chicago Press)