Rebecca Kobrin

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies, business history, East European history and American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University and her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Salo Baron: Using the Past to Shape the Future of Jewish Studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022) and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her outstanding teaching and graduate student mentoring. Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2024), looks at the lost world of immigrant banking and brings together the literature on American banking, East European Jewish history, and immigration studies. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.