About

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University. She specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the Jews in Early Modern Europe. Her research areas include the intersection of Jewish and Christian culture and its influence on notions of tolerance, religious dissent, conversion, messianism, and communal governance. She has authored several books, including The Pursuit of Heresy, which received the National Jewish Book Award, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Early Modern Germany, and Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, which won the Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize. Dr. Carlebach has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities twice and has been a Fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, a Tikvah Fellow at NYU Law School, and a Fellow at the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She has served as Editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review, chaired the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, and has been President of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Currently, she is the Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. In 2017, she was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

Research topics

• History
• Ancient history
• Art
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art history
• Materials science
• Classics
• Aesthetics
• Gender studies
• Law

Selected publications

• A Woman Is Responsible for Everything

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-10-14

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Unwanted Children and Invented Families in Early Modern Jewish Communities

  Jewish History · 2024-12-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Gorgias Press eBooks · 2023

  • Materials science

  Judaism in Context provides a platform for scholarly research focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished, from ancient times through the 21st century.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 13. The Last Trial of Jacob Emden: Community, Memory, Authority

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2023-12-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Character and Community: Aspects of Jewish Identity in Early-modern Germany

  2022-09-20

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Identity and its formation, its lived experience and cultural, biological, and intellectual aspects, are notoriously complex subjects. The topic of the workshop and this collective volume "Constructing and Experiencing Jewish Identity," presents a challenge to any historian, and perhaps more profoundly so for historians of the Jews. The chronological and cultural focus of my remarks are primarily Central European Jews in the early modern period. These Jews articulated various types of identity: individual, communal, and collective, each in turn comprised of many layers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sacred Sororities: Devotion and Death in Early Modern Jewish Communities

  Jewish History · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• <i>The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy</i>. By Alan Rosen. Jewish Literature and Culture. Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii+252. $80.00 (cloth); $35.00(paper); $14.99 (e-book).

  The Journal of Modern History · 2022-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Constructing and Experiencing Jewish Identity

  2022-10-05

  bookOpen access

  was considered the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century. He laid the ground work for how Jews perceive themselves and are perceived by others. The present series publishes new perspectives in the research on the Jewish experience of both distinguished and aspiring scholars who continue Salo Baron's work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sacha Stern, The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921/2 CE, with the collaboration of Marina Rustow, Nadia Vidro, and Ronny Vollandt

  Speculum · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Sacha Stern, <i>The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921/2 CE</i>, with the collaboration of Marina Rustow, Nadia Vidro, and Ronny Vollandt. (Time, Astronomy, and Calendars 7.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxi, 576; 20 color and 4 black-and-white plates, 9 color and 3 black-and-white figures, and 13 tables. $203. ISBN: 978-9-0043-8866-6.

  Speculum · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art history
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Brenner

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  5 shared

• Kerstin Mayerhofer

  University of Vienna

  5 shared

• Rachel Blumenthal

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  5 shared

• Michael Miller

  Penn Center for AIDS Research

  5 shared

• Daniel M. Herskowitz

  University of Oxford

  5 shared

• Armin Lange

  5 shared

• Jacob J. Schacter

  Yeshiva University

  3 shared

• David Nelson

  Gorgias Press (United States)

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• National Jewish Book Award (1990)
• Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize (2011)
• Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2017)