Professor Peter Haas is the Abba Hillel Silver Professor of Jewish Studies and the Chair, Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He also directs the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies. Professor Haas received his B.A. in Ancient Near East History from the University of Michigan in 1970 and then attended Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, from where he received ordination as a Reform rabbi in 1974. After ordination, he served as an active U.S. Army chaplain for three years. Upon completion of active duty, Rabbi Haas enrolled in the graduate program in religion at Brown University, earning a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies in 1980.
Joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 1980, Professor Haas taught courses in Judaism, Jewish ethics, the Holocaust, Western religion, and the Middle East Conflict. He joined the faculty of the Department of Religion at Case Western Reserve University in January, 2000, and was appointed chair of the department in 2003. He is also a visiting professor at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, IL.
Prof. Haas is a prolific writer and speaker in both the academic and public spheres. He has published several books and articles dealing with moral discourse and with Jewish and Christian thought after the Holocaust. Rabbi Haas has taught in the United States, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Israel. His most recent work is on human rights in Judaism.
Professor Gary Rendsburg holds the Blanche and Irving Laurie Chair in Jewish History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He serves as chair of the Department of Jewish Studies and also holds an appointment in the History Department.
Dr. Rendsburg majored in English as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina and graduated in 1975. He then pursued graduate work in Hebrew Studies at New York University and received his Ph.D. in 1980.
He previously taught at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY (1980–1986) and at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (1986–2004).
Prof. Rendsburg's areas of special interest include literary approaches to the Bible, the history of the Hebrew language, the history of ancient Israel, and the literature and culture of ancient Egypt.
Dr. Rendsburg has held a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship; and he has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, at Colgate University, and at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is a frequent guest of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where twice he has served as visiting research professor and twice he has held the position of visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies.
Dr. Rendsburg is the author of five books and over 120 scholarly articles. His most popular book is a general survey of the biblical world entitled The Bible and the Ancient Near East, co-authored with the late Cyrus H. Gordon (1997). In addition, Prof. Rendsburg has produced a course on The Book of Genesis for the Teaching Company, while a second course on The Dead Sea Scrolls is currently in production.
In the course of his scholarly work, Dr. Rendsburg has visited all the major archaeological sites in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan; and he has participated in excavations at Tel Dor and Caesarea. In addition, he has lectured around the world, including Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Professor David Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Ruderman was educated at the City College of New York, the Teacher’s Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He received his rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1975.
Prior to coming to Penn, he held the Frederick P. Rose Chair of Jewish History at Yale University (1983–1994) and the Louis L. Kaplan Chair of Jewish Historical Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (1974–1983), where he was instrumental in establishing both institutions’ Judaic studies programs. At the University of Maryland he also won the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in 1982–1983 and in 2008, he won an award for distinguished undergraduate teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Ruderman has served as the president of the American Academy for Jewish Research and on the boards of many other academic bodies. He chaired the task force on continuing rabbinic education for the Central Conference of American Rabbis and HUC-JIR (1989–1992). For five years he directed of the Victor Rothschild Memorial Symposium in Jewish studies, a summer seminar for doctoral and post-doctoral students held by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, in Jerusalem and presently serves as a member of the academic advisory board of the Mandel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the Hebrew University. In June 2001, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored him with its lifetime achievement award for his work in Jewish history.
Professor Ruderman is the author of The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol (for which he received the JWB National Jewish Book Award); Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician; and A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham Ben Hananiah Yagel. He is co-author, with William W. Hallo and Michael Stanislawski, of the two-volume Heritage: Civilization and the Jews Study Guide and Source Reader prepared in conjunction with the showing of the PBS television series of the same name. He is also the author of Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (for which he received the Koret Book Award), and Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England. His most recent book to be published next year is a broad interpretation of early modern Jewish culture. He has also produced two courses on Jewish history for the Teaching Company on both medieval and modern Jewish history.
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