Samuel (Shai) Secunda

Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism

Primary Academic Program: Interdisciplinary Study of Religions

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies

Academic Expertise: Jewish Studies

Area of Specialization: Rabbinic Literature

Biography:

Shai Secunda is Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard College. He received a bachelor’s degree from Ner Israel Rabbinical College, a master’s from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA/PhD from Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Talmud in its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstruation and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context (Oxford University Press, 2020). His work uses philological analysis of the Talmud—the work which sits at the center of the classical Jewish canon—to reveal the rich cultural and religious worlds of late antique Babylonian Jewry and their neighbors in Sasanian Iran, especially the Zoroastrians. He has also published widely on Jewish studies scholarship and contemporary culture in the Jewish Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. Before coming to Bard, he taught at Yale and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Bard since 2016.
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