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Professor Benny Kraut
Professor of History
Director of the Jewish Studies Program
Director of the Center for Jewish Studies


 Having retired as Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati after almost twenty-two years, Benny Kraut joined the Queens College faculty in February, 1998 as Professor of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program and the Center for Jewish Studies. A summa cum laude graduate in philosophy from Yeshiva University, he holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Jewish history from Brandeis University. Kraut has published widely in the fields of modern and American Jewish history and Judaism--three books, more than three dozen scholarly essays and book chapters, and close to one hundred fifty book reviews--and is former book review editor of American Jewish History. A winner of prestigious grants and fellowships, he is the only University of Cincinnati faculty member to date to have won both the Dolly Cohen Award for Teaching Excellence and the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, two of the University's most celebrated teaching prizes.


Upon Kraut's retirement, the University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees honored him with the rank of Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies, acknowledging his notable contributions to teaching, scholarship, administration, and community service.

  Personal Statement -

My academic interests lie the areas of modern European and American Jewish history, the history of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and Holocaust studies. The courses I teach and the subject matter I explore in the classroom reflect these interests.
I am deeply committed to students and the educational enterprise, as well as to the proposition that studying Jewish civilization is an intellectually challenging, personally compelling, and utterly satisfying endeavor regardless of one's background or professional goals. I try to share my enthusiasm with my students and to imbue them with that same passion and with an appreciation for how an analytically rigorous academic approach to Jewish ideas and perspectives can resonate in their lives.

My research concentrates primarily on issues in American Jewish history and Judaism. I am intrigued by the modern phenomenon of diverse Jewish religious self-definitions and self-perceptions and how they play themselves out in Jewish cultural and social life, as well as in Jewish intergroup and interreligious relationships.

 

My previous publications have contributed to the understanding of a variety of subjects, including: the Ethical Culture Movement and its founder, Felix Adler; the evolution of American Reform Judaism and its relationship to liberal Christianity; Jewish religious triumphalism; the ambiguity of Jewish ethnic religion; American Jewish leadership; and Jewish survival in Protestant America.
Currently, I am working on a monograph on the North American collegiate organization, Yavneh, the National Jewish Religious Students Association, which flourished on many North American campuses between 1960 and 1980. In many respects, this Orthodox Jewish organization was intellectually and religiously revolutionary, and it presaged a whole slew of Orthodox and even non-Orthodox Jewish social, religious, educational, and attitudinal trends that surfaced nationally by the 1970s. This work represents one key chapter in a much more ambitious goal of writing a comprehensive study of the evolution of American Orthodox Judaism in the post-WWII era.


Recent Publications

       
From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: 
The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler.

Hebrew Union College Press, 1979		 Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World - (Contributor)
A Unitarian Rabbi? The Case of Solomon H. Sonnenschein.

Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1987		 Jews and Founding of the Republic - Edited by: Benny Kraut
Jonathan Sarna
Samuel Joseph,

Markus Wiener Publishing, 1985		 From Holocaust To Life- The Holocaust, Christianity, Poland:
A Response -

Xavier University, 1995
Minority Faiths and
the American Protestant Mainstream-
(Contributor)
Jewish Survival in Protestant America.

University Of Illinois Press, 1998		 German-Jewish Orthodoxy in an Immigrant Synagogue: Cincinnati's New Hope Congregation and the Ambiguities of Ethnic Religion -

Markus Weiner Publishing, 1988
Between The Times - The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960
(Contributor)
A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics and the Protestant Goodwill Movement.

Cambridge University Press, 1989		 The American Synagogue, a Sanctuary Transformed-
(Contributor)
Ethnic-Religious Ambiguities in an Immigrant Synagogue:The Case of New Hope Congregation.

Brandeis University Press, 1987		  



 

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