Samuel Heilman

Samuel Heilman holds the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York. He has also been Scheinbrun Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, visiting professor of social anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne in Australia. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, Harvard University, the University of Maryland, Carelton College, Sydney University, Spertus College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brandeis University, among others. In 1993 he gave the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures at the University of Washington.

Literary works

He is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as ten books: Synagogue Life, The People of the Book, The Gate Behind the Wall, A Walker in Jerusalem, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (co-authored with Steven M. Cohen) , Portrait of American Jewry: The Last Half of the 20th Century, When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son and Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy. He is also editor of the Death, Bereavement, and Mourning (Transaction Books, 2005).

A number of these books are recently reissued and all are currently in print. He is a frequent contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Jewry.

Awards

In 2004, Heilman won the Marshall Sklare Memorial Award for his lifetime of scholarship from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry he also was awarded the highest university rank of Distinguished Professor of Sociology by the City University of New York. His book, The Gate Behind the Wall was honored with the Present Tense Magazine Literary Award for the best book of 1984 in the "Religious Thought" category. A Walker in Jerusalem received the National Jewish Book Award for 1987 and Defenders of the Faith was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for 1992. Portrait of American Jewry: The Last Half of the 20th Century was honored with the 1996 [first] Gratz College Tuttleman Library Centennial Award. When a Jew Dies won both the Koret Award in 2003 and the National Jewish Book Award in 2004. Heilman is also recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Mellon Foundation. He received a Distinguished Faculty Award from the City University of New York in 1985 and 1987. He is listed in Who's Who in the East, Contemporary Authors and Who's Who in World Jewry. He has been a member of the board of the Association for Jewish Studies and the YIVO Annual and the Max Weinreich Center.