BIO

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish literature and American Studies at Columbia University, where he has also served as director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. He received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Harvard and his doctorate from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. His previous books include In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern, also Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, and  Jewish Comedy: A Serious History; the last two were finalists for the National Jewish Book Award. (As “J.A. Dauber,” he is also the author of the YA novel Mayhem and Madness: Chronicles of a Teenaged Supervillain, which was a Young Adults’ Choice of the Children’s Book Council.) He frequently lectures on topics related to American popular culture, Jewish literature, history, and humor at venues throughout the United States and internationally.

​Jeremy grew up about ten minutes away from the George Washington Bridge, in a modern Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey; went to Harvard, where, upbringing notwithstanding, read authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth for the first time and got hooked; went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and wrote about Hebrew and Yiddish literature – and while there, wrote the libretto for an opera that played in Boston and a movie that screened at the Cannes market (you can still find it bouncing around the lower cable channels late at night); came back to America and took a job at Columbia, where he now teaches about, among other things, Dostoevsky, Mel Brooks, graphic novels, and Sholem Aleichem. He used to write a column for the Christian Science Monitor on TV and movies that was recognized, a few years back, by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.