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Usa history department mahan lecture with david sorkin
David Sorkin is an award-winning author and professor specializing in the intersection of Jewish and European history. Sorkin has published several prominent books on Jewish studies and is the current professor of modern Jewish History at Yale University.
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Career
Sorkin graduated from University of Wisconsin in 1975. In 1977 he received a Masters degree from Berkeley University, and in 1983 he was awarded a PhD in History from University of California.
From 1983 to 1986 he worked as assistant professor of Judaic studies at Brown University. In 1986 he became a lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University, and from 1992 to 2011 he worked as professor of Jewish studies and professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2011 to 2014 he served as professor of History at City University of New York, and since 2014 he has worked at the Yale History faculty where he currently teaches Modern Jewish History.
Sorkin has published several prominent works on Jewish studies. His first book, The Transformation of Germany Jewry, 1980-1840 published in 1987 observed the formation of Jewish culture in the German states, which he described as a “subculture.” In 1996 he wrote Moses Mendlessohn, and the Religious Enlightenment, a study of Mendelssohn's complete writings where he examined the composer’s German and Hebrew writings. The book has been translated into French, German, and Italian.
In 2000 he wrote The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought: Orphans of Knowledge. The book argued that the Haskalah should be understood within the context of the wider Central European religious and intellectual changes. In his most recent book, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) published in 2008, Sorkin reconceived the relationship of the Enlightenment period to religion.
Sorkin has also co-edited three volumes that includes Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998), New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001), and What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004). He also served as associate editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), which won the National Jewish Book Award.
Reception
Sorkin’s books have generally received positive reviews. The American Historical Review described Sorkin’s The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna as a work that makes “very interesting discoveries about the parallel developments within different religions in the eighteenth century." Similarly, the New York Times described it as a “persuasive work” about how “Europe’s major religions produced movements of religious reform compatible with the enlightenment.” The Central European History reviewed it as a book of "very great importance, for early modernists and modern historians alike."