Katz Family Associate Professor of American Jewish History

Phone: 898-5702
Office: 320 College Hall
Teaching Schedule: MW 12-1
Office Hours: M 1:30-3 and by appt.
E-mail:

JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

Beth S. Wenger is the Katz Family Term Chair in American Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania where she serves as Director of the Jewish Studies Program.  She is the author of New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Yale University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Salo Baron Prize in Jewish History from the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Wenger is also the author of The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America (Doubleday Press, 2007), which was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. The Jewish Americans is the companion volume to the six-hour PBS documentary of the same name, broadcast in January 2008.  In addition to writing The Jewish Americans, Wenger served on the board of distinguished scholars advising the PBS series.

Beth Wenger is co-editor of Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Indiana University Press, 2000), As curator of a museum exhibition, in collaboration with Jeffrey Shandler, Wenger also co-authored the accompanying catalogue: �gHoly Land:�h Place, Past, and Future in American Jewish Culture (1997) that received honorable mention as one of the American Library Association's Exhibition Catalogue Awards for Excellence. Princeton University Press will publish her forthcoming book, History Lessons: The Invention of American Jewish Heritage.

Wenger has published numerous scholarly articles, including contributions to the journals American Jewish History, Jewish Social Studies, the Journal of Women's History as well as several essays in collected volumes and anthologies.

Wenger's teaching interests vary widely from broad surveys of modern European and American Jewish history, to courses on Holocaust memory, contemporary Jewish culture, American religious history, gender and Jewish history, as well as many other courses. A specialist in American Jewish history, Wenger's interests also include European Jewish culture, American religion and ethnicity, and cultural, social and gender history.

Beth Wenger currently serves on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and its Women�fs Caucus.  She is also a member of the academic advisory boards of New York's Center for Jewish History, the University of Pennsylvania�fs Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Jewish Women�fs Archive, and the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. Wenger serves as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and as historical consultant to the National Museum of American Jewish History.

Beth Wenger received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1992. She holds Masters Degrees in History from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University. In 1993, her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Jewish History Center's Prize as the Best Doctoral Dissertation in American Jewish history. Wenger has been awarded several academic grants and fellowships, including a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and fellowships at Princeton University's Center for the Study of American Religion, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale University, and the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.