Dr. David Shneer
Dr. David Shneer, a co-founder of Jewish Mosaic, is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Called a “taboo-breaking scholar” by Tikkun magazine, Shneer’s work concentrates on modern Jewish society and culture, especially Yiddish culture, Russian Jewish history, and Jews and sexuality. He is the former director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. His books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, that has sparked discussion in publications like the Economist and the Jerusalem Post. |
His newest book project, Bearing Witness: Soviet Jewish Photographers, World War II & the Holocaust (Rutgers, 2010), looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. He has lived and worked as a scholar and writer in Russia, Germany, and Israel and has written for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as magazines dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Illinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He has been named educational consultant of the Genesis Philanthropy Group’s Davai! program, which supports programs to build Jewish identity among global Russian Jewry, serves as consultant to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity, and serves on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He speaks Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. Shneer earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley. |