Sarna receives Martin Marty award

Photos/Mike Lovett

Jonathan Sarna

Jonathan Sarna, chair of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program and the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis, has received the 2011 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion.

The Marty Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the public understanding of religion. According to the academy's website, the award goes to those "whose work has a relevance and eloquence that speaks not just to scholars but to the broader public as well."

Sarna is author or editor of more than 20 books, including "The American Jewish Experience," and "Jews of Boston," a highly successful volume of local history that was made into a television documentary. He serves as chief historian of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and writes widely about issues affecting the Jewish community of the United States, on which he is considered an eminent authority.

Marty taught in the University of Chicago's Divinity School and Department of History from 1963 to 1998, focusing chiefly on American religious history in the context of Atlantic culture. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Marty's six-year "Fundamentalism Project" for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988-1994) led him to enlarge his focus to global inter-religious concerns.