Ethan Katz is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies and the Director of the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies. A historian who specializes in the Jews of modern Europe and the Mediterranean, Ethan’s scholarship has focused in four principal areas: the history of Jewish-Muslim relations and the nature of belonging and exclusion in modern France and the Francophone world; the history of Jews in colonial societies; Holocaust Studies; and the relationship between the secular and religion in modern Jewish life. He is the author or co-editor of four books, including the multiple-prize winning The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015), and most recently, When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash (forthcoming from Routledge). Since 2021, he has served as the Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Student Life and Campus Climate. In the spring of 2019, he co-founded the Antisemitism Education Initiative (AEI) at Berkeley, for which he has served for 4 years as co-director. Ethan helped build the AEI into a major presence in campus, local, and national conversations about how to assess and combat antisemitism in universities today. In 2022, Ethan was one of four professors chosen as an inaugural 2022-2023 Matrix Faculty Fellow; this fellowship program aims to help faculty pursue research that has a significant impact in multiple disciplines in the social sciences.
