Address/Office Hours

NAU 281 / Tuesdays, 2-4 pm

Fields/Specialties

East European Jewish History; Hasidism; Poland; History of Gender and Sexuality

Education

Ph.D., Brandeis University
M.A., McGill University
B.A., Brandeis University

Biography

Glenn Dynner, Ph.D., is a Polish Jewish historian with specialties in social and economic history, gender, and Hasidism. He is author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Koret Publication Prize), which studies the socioeconomic underpinnings of Hasidism in the 19th-century Kingdom of Poland; Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014, finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award), which examines the Jewish-Christian economic symbiosis in the Polish lands through the iconic figure of the Jewish tavern-keeper; and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024) a study of the Hasidic revival in Poland during the last years of Polish Jewish civilization. He is also Co-Editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, and has won fellowships from Fulbright, the National Endowment for Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive, and the John Simon Guggenheim foundation. He is currently doing research on Polish Jewish responses to anti-Jewish violence from medieval through modern times. Before coming to UVA, Dynner was the Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University and Director of the Bennett Center.

Post-Tenure Publications (Highlights)

January, 2024              The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press)

December, 2013          Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press). Finalist: Jordan Schnitzer Book Award

Edited Volumes:

Forthcoming               Editor, with Jessica Lang, Zalman Newfield, and Joshua Shanes, On the Margins of Orthodoxy: A History of Exit (Academic Studies Press)

Forthcoming               Section Editor, “Partitioned Poland,” Josh Zimmerman, ed., The Jews of Poland: A Documentary History (University of Wisconsin Press)

June, 2024                   Editor, with Susannah Heschel and Shaul Magid, New Paths: Festschrift in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson (Purdue University Press)

December, 2022          Editor, with Elissa Bemporad, Jewish Women in Modern Eastern Europe (Special Issue, published as a monograph by Springer Press)

October, 2021             “Pogroms in Poland, 1918-1946,” in Eugene Avrutin and Elissa Bemporad, eds., Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press).

February, 2021            Friendship and Betrayal in 20th-Century Polish Hasidism”, in L. Fine, ed., Friendship in Jewish History (Penn State University Press).

March, 2020                Co-Editor, “Jewish Women in Modern Eastern Europe” (with Elissa Bemporad), special issue of Jewish History 33.

October, 2017             “Jewish Piety & Devotion in Eastern Europe” in A. Sutcliffe and J. Karp, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism (Cambridge University Press), 607-624.

November, 2015         “Jewish Quarters: The Economics of Residential Segregation,” in Adam Teller and Rebbeca Kobrin, eds., Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press), 91-111.

May, 2015                   Co-editor, with Francois Guesnet. Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Antony Polonsky (Brill).

May, 2015                   “The Garment of Torah: Clothing Decrees and the Warsaw Career of the Gerer Rebbe,” Dynner and F. Guesnet, eds., Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Antony Polonsky (Brill), 91-127.

January, 2015              Co-editor, with Antony Polonsky and Marcin Wodzinski. POLIN: A Journal of Polish Jewish Studies 27 (Jews in the Kingdom of Poland).

October, 2011              Editor, author of Introduction, Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press).

October, 2011              “Hasidism & Habitat: Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland, in Dynner, ed., Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press), 104-130.

Journal articles

October, 2018             “Those Who Stayed: Jewish Women, Tradition, & Traditionalism in Eastern Europe,” Volume in Honor of the Opening of the Polin Museum of Jewish History in Poland, 295-312.

June, 2018                   “Replenishing the ‘Fountain of Judaism’: Traditionalist Jewish Education in Interwar Poland,” Jewish History 31:3-4, 229–261.

December, 2016          “Jewish Traditionalism in Eastern Europe: The Historiographical Gadfly,” Polin 29, 285-299.

Summer, 2014             “Brief Kvetches: Notes to a 19th-Century Miracle Worker,” Jewish Review of Books, 33-35.

December, 2013          “‘A Jewish Drunk is Hard to Find’: The Myth of Jewish Sobriety in Eastern Europe,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103.3, 9-23.