Judy Baumel-Schwartz

Prof. Judy Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, the Abraham and Edita Spiegel Family Professor in Holocaust Research, the Rabbi Pynchas Brener Professor in Research on the Holocaust of European Jewry, and Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry.

Born in New York in 1959, she immigrated to Israel with her parents in 1974 and completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Bar-Ilan University (PhD History 1986). In 1980 she joined the staff of the Institute for the Study of Diaspora Jewry and after its inception in 1981, she worked in the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research until 2002. She directed the Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism (2009-11), the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism (2011-17), and the Helena and Paul Schulmann School for Basic Jewish Studies (2013-18), all at Bar-Ilan University.

She has written and edited numerous books and articles about religious life during and after the Holocaust, gender and the Holocaust, Holocaust commemoration and public memory in the State of Israel. She is married to Prof. Joshua Schwartz and has two daughters.