Rebecca Kobrin

Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies

Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History
212-854-9017
rk2351@columbia.edu

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia.

Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies.  She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University.  She earned a Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania.  She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6).  Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010), was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012).  She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).  In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her outstanding teacher and her inspirational mentoring of her students.    

Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation: Jewish Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2023), brings together scholarship in Jewish history, American immigration studies, and American economic history. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.