Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger has been named the new director of the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

Veidlinger, who is U-M’s Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies, will succeed Deborah Dash Moore, the Frankel Center’s director for the past decade.

“Jeff's appointment will bring a wonderful blend of vision and energy that will take the Center to new heights in all aspects of teaching and research, including such important areas as digital humanities,” Dash Moore remarked. “It's great to know that the Center will be in his competent hands.” 

Veidlinger is a renowned scholar of Russian and Eastern European Jewish history. He is the author of the award-winning books The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (2000) and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2009). His most recent highly-acclaimed book, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (2013), is based on hundreds of interviews conducted with Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe. Videos of those conversations are included in the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (aheym.org), which Veidlinger established. He is also editor of the forthcoming Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, and is currently working on a book about the pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War.

Veidlinger earned his PhD in history from Georgetown University. Before joining U-M, he served as director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program and as the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at Indiana University.

"Jeffrey Veidlinger is a national leader on research into marginalized Jewish populations, and his work with the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories project has created a groundbreaking, publicly accessible oral history,” noted Andrew D. Martin, dean of U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts. “As an esteemed historian and a former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, he is ideally suited to lead the Frankel Center’s important work."  

Veidlinger is associate chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Jewish Studies. 

“I am truly honored to be serving in this position,” he said, “and look forward to working with the students, faculty, staff and alumni who have helped make the Frankel Center such a dynamic and intellectually exciting place.”