ABOUT
From his groundbreaking research on the Jews of Eastern Europe to his work as a consultant for Moscow’s Jewish Museum, Professor Natan Meir has earned an international reputation as a scholar of Jewish social, cultural, and religious history. His latest book, Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939, which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, recovers the histories of Jewish Eastern Europe’s social outcasts -- the disabled, the mentally ill, orphans, and beggars. He is currently engaged in a new project on folklore, magic, and gender in European Jewish culture. He strives to make his classroom an inspiring intellectual space. He also speaks or reads eight languages, leads study tours of Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and is probably pondering questions of historical causality—and what to make for dinner—while trail-running.
COURSES TAUGHT
JST 201: Introduction to Judaism
JST/HST 318U: Jewish History II from the Middle Ages to the Present
JST/HST 380U: The Holocaust
JST/HST 381U: Kabbalah: The Jewish Mystical Tradition
HST 491/492: Colloquium and Seminar in East European Jewish History (The Shtetl)
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020).
Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914 (Indiana University Press, 2010).
Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, co-editor (Indiana University Press, 2010).
DEGREES
Ph.D. Jewish History, Columbia University, 2004
M.Phil. Jewish History, Columbia University, 1999
B.A. History, Columbia University, 1994