Kenneth Benjamin Moss
Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College
University of Chicago

Kenneth Benjamin Moss is a historian of Jewish modernity whose main scholarly interests include the transformations of Jewish politics and identities in the age of nationalism; the history and afterlives of efforts to create secular Jewish cultures and selves in Yiddish and Hebrew; the political sociology of contemporary Israel and Palestine; and Jewish conflicts today in Israel and the United States. He received his BA from Rutgers College and his PhD from Stanford University. Currently the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History at the University of Chicago, where he is also director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, he was previously the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins from 2003 to 2021, where he also ran the Stulman Center for Jewish Studies from 2010-2017. Alongside many articles and essays, he has written two books, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009; co-winner of the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the National Jewish Book Council; revised and expanded Hebrew edition as Yemei ha-ma’asim, 2023) and An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard, 2021; 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History; the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America; honorable mention, 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; forthcoming in Polish for the Bibliotheca Judaica). In 2023, he co-edited with Israel Bartal volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918. From 2014 to 2020, he co-edited Jewish Social Studies with Tony Michels and Sarah Stein. His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of Modern History, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, the Journal of Social History and many other venues, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese. He is currently co-editing the Historical Atlas of the Jewry of Galicia and Bukovina, researching the history of Israeli critical social thought since 1995, writing a history of 20th century Yiddish literature and its afterlives, and working toward a history of the Jewish present in Israel/Palestine and the US.  

Selected Publications

Co-edited with Israel Bartal, National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918 [Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: Anthology of Primary Sources, Documents, Texts, and Artifacts in 10 Volumes, v. 7]; editor in chief Deborah Dash Moore (Yale University Press, 2023).

An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard, 2021).

Co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi, From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

Co-authored with Roger Friedland, “Thinking through Religious Nationalism,” in Words: Religious Language Matters, eds. Asja Szafraniec and Ernst van den Hemel (Fordham University Press, 2016), 419-462.

“At Home in Late Imperial Russian Modernity – Except When They Weren’t: New Histories of Russian and East European Jews, 1881-1914,” in Journal of Modern History, v. 84, 2 (June 2012): 401-452.

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009; co-winner, 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, National Jewish Book Council; revised and expanded Hebrew edition Yemei ha-ma’asim, Shazar, 2023).