Nancy Sinkoff
Professor of Jewish Studies and History; Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life
Rutgers University
Nancy Sinkoff is a historian of the Jews of Eastern Europe, focusing on Poland and the Polish-Jewish diaspora. She received her AB in Social Studies from Harvard College in 1982, an MA in Judaic Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1989, and her MA, MPhil, and PhD in Jewish history from Columbia University in 1996. She held a post-doc at New York University before being hired at Rutgers University in 1998. Dr. Sinkoff is a recipient of several fellowships, including from the Mellon Foundation, the IIE Fulbright Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Beinecke Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study; and several book awards, including the Outstanding Book Award from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society (2019); the Natan Notable Book award and National Jewish Book Award for Biography (2020); and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA)’s Anna M. Cienciala Award for Best-Edited Multi-Authored Scholarly Volume (2024). Her exhibit on Mendel Lefin of Satanow is in the eighteenth-century gallery (“Encounters with Modernity”) of Polin: Museum of the History of the Jews of Poland, Warsaw.
Selected Publications
From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (2020; pb 2023)
Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004; 2nd ed., digitized, 2020)
Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, co-edited with Rebecca Cypess (2018)
Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery, co-edited with Halina Goldberg (2023)
A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History, co-edited with Jonathan Karp, Howard Lupovitch, and James Loeffler (2024)