Ivan Marcus

Ivan G. Marcus is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History, Professor of History and of Religious Studies at Yale University. He received his BA from Yale University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, his MA from Columbia University, and his MHL and PhD from The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Before joining the Yale faculty, he was Professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where he was Dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies (1976-1981) and Provost (1991-1994). He has also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Lady Davis Fellow and at Princeton where he served on the Advisory Council of the Department of Religion.

He has written Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (E. J. Brill, 1981), which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Culture and Acculturation in Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 1996); The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (University of Washington Press, 2004) based on the 1998 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures. His book Sefer Hasidim and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) is a study in the history of the book in medieval Europe. His most recent book is, How the West became Antisemitic (Princeton, 2024), and his translation and edition, A Sefer Hasidim Anthology: The World of Early Ashkenaz, is under review.

He has received numerous fellowships including a translation grant and a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.