The blog curator

Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at The George Washington University, where she also created and now directs two graduate programs in Jewish culture and the arts, the first of their kind in the country.

The author, among other things, of The Wonders of America, which received the National Jewish Book Award in History, and of the critically acclaimed A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character and the Promise of America, she writes a monthly column for Tablet magazine and, until recently published a monthly column on American Jewish culture for the Forward that ran for sixteen consecutive years. Her reviews and essays have also appeared in the Jewish Review of Books, the New Republic, Material Religion and Gastronomica.

Her latest book, Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments, has been hailed as “fascinating,” “incisive,” “imaginative,” and a “delight.” “Great stuff,” said one critic. “Thou shalt read,” declared another.

In addition to teaching and writing, Jenna Weissman Joselit has enjoyed an active career as a museum curator and consultant. Her most recent exhibition, Sholem-bayes: Reflections on the American Jewish Home, is on view at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.

A former senior fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of American Religion, on whose Academic Advisory Board she sits, Joselit has also been a fellow at Michigan’s Frankel Institute, Penn’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Yale’s Center for American Art & Material Culture. Most recently, she has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, where she worked on her Ten Commandments project.