Shaul Kelner
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology
Affiliated Faculty, American Studies, and German, Russian and East European Studies
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology
Affiliated Faculty, American Studies, and German, Russian and East European Studies
Shaul Kelner is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology. His research focuses on transnational Jewish solidarity and the intersection of culture and politics in Jewish life.
His newest book, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024) was written with grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and won a National Jewish Book Award.
His first book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010), won the Association for Jewish Studies’ inaugural Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and received an Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Culture Section’s Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book.
As a sociologist, Prof. Kelner works across subfields, drawing together the study of cultural production and consumption, travel and tourism, social movements, religion, education, diaspora, and youth. An enthusiast for mixed methods, he has conducted ethnographic field work, designed and analyzed surveys, published statistical and social network analyses, conducted oral history interviews, and engaged extensively in archival research.
Prof. Kelner has been a Fellow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, as well as a visiting scholar in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He has served as a board member of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. He received his Ph.D in 2002 from the CUNY Graduate Center, which he attended as a Wexner Graduate Fellow.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science recognized him with an Innovative Teaching Award for Creating Engaging In-Person Learning Environments.
Specializations
American Jews; Culture; Social Movement
Representative Publications
Kelner, Shaul. 2024. A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews. New York: New York University Press.
Kelner, Shaul. 2020. “Foreign Tourists, Domestic Encounters: Human Rights Travel to Soviet Jewish Homes,” Ch. 5 in Sune Bechmann Pedersen and Christian Noack, eds. Tourism and Travel during the Cold War: Negotiating Tourist Experiences across the Iron Curtain, London: Routledge. Pp. 98-122.
Kelner, Shaul. 2019. “À la rencontre des juifs de l'autre côté du rideau de fer : récits de voyage de juifs américains et représentation du judaïsme en Union soviétique” [“Encountering Jews on the other Side of the Iron Curtain: American Jewish Travel Writing and the Representation of
Judaism in the Soviet Union”], in Andreas Nijenhuis-Bescher, Susanne Berthier-Foglar, Gilles Bertrand and Frédéric Meyer, eds., Frontières et altérité religieuse : La religion dans le récit de voyage. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires De Rennes. Pp. 253-273.
Kelner, Shaul. 2018. “The American Soviet Jewry Movement’s ‘Uneventful’ 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest and the Politics of the Long Haul.” American Jewish History 102(1), 5-35.
Kelner, Shaul. 2016. “Veneration and Critique: Israel, the Sociology of American Judaism and the Problematics of Sovereignty.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 23, 194–221. Kelner, Shaul. 2014. “American Jewish Sociology.” Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies. Ed. David Biale. New York: Oxford University Press Kelner, Shaul. 2011. “In Its Own Image: Independent Philanthropy and the Cultivation of Young Jewish Leadership.” Pp. 261-321 in The New Jewish Leaders: Reshaping the American Jewish Landscape, edited by J. Wertheimer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Kelner, Shaul. 2010. Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press.