Headshot of Rebecca Kobrin

Rebecca Kobrin

Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, Columbia University

Biography

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, where she is the co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies and Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University and her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize for best book in modern Jewish history concerning the Americas, along with a National Jewish Book award. In 2019 she served as the Joseph Engel Visiting Professor of American Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Her writing on anti-Semitism and immigration regularly appears in The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, and Bloomberg News.