On the Margins of Orthodoxy

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press).

Joshua Shanes is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He has published widely on modern Jewish history, religion, politics, and antisemitism in both academic and popular journals. His second manuscript, A History of Jewish Orthodoxy, will appear with Rutgers University Press in 2026.

Jessica Lang, Professor of English, is the former Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College and the inaugural Dean of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University. Her research focuses on the Jewish American experience and on Holocaust Literature. She co-edited the volume Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism and authored the monograph Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2017), which focuses on understanding the experience of reading and trauma. She has published on the interaction of reading and identity in Jewish, American, and Holocaust texts.

Glenn Dynner, Ph.D., holds the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History at the University of Virginia. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006); Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also Co-Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.