David Biale

David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of six books: Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Harvard University Press, 1979), Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (Schocken Books, 1986) and Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Basic Books, 1992, University of California Press, 1997), Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007), Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011), and most recently Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah (Yale University Press, 2018). He is also the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History (Schocken Books, 2002). His books have won the National Jewish Book Award three times and he has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lady Davis Foundation. Most recently, he won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He also recently completed Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018) where he served as the Project Director of an international team.