Biography
Jehuda Reinharz was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1944. He received his high school education in Germany and immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1961.
Dr. Reinharz earned concurrent bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He earned a master’s degree in medieval Jewish history from Harvard University in 1968 and a doctorate in modern Jewish history from Brandeis University in 1972.
Dr. Reinharz was the first professor of Jewish history at the University of Michigan, from 1972 to 1982, where he established the program in Judaic studies.
In 1982, he became the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. Two years later, he was named director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis, and eight years later he founded the Jacob and Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel. From 1991 to 1994, Dr. Reinharz served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. In 1994, he was named the seventh president of Brandeis University.
Dr. Reinharz is the author of more than 100 articles and 23 books in various languages. His book "Jew in the Modern World" (3rd edition 2009) is one of the most widely adopted college texts in modern Jewish history. His two-volume biography of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, has won many prizes in Israel and the United States, and his book, co-authored with the late Ben Halpern, "Zionism and the Creation of a New Society," was published in 1998 and reissued in a revised paperback edition in 2000.
His latest books are "Glorious, Accursed Europe," co-authored with Yaacov Shavit, which analyzes the relationship of Jews to Europe from the 18th century to the present. His book "Israel in the Middle East" (second revised edition), co-edited with Itamar Rabinovich, was published in December 2007. His most recent book, "Darwin and His Kind," co-authored with Yaacov Shavit, will be published in 2009, in Hebrew.
Dr. Reinharz is the recipient of honorary doctorates from Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Fairfield University, Ben Gurion University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 1992, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 1995, Dr. Reinharz was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1999, he was elected a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, he serves on a large number of boards and advisory committees.
Dr. Reinharz is married to Shulamit Reinharz, professor of sociology and director of the Women’s Studies Research Center and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University. They have two daughters, Yael and Naomi.