Shulamit Reinharz is the Brandeis University Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology Emerita, having taught there from 1982 to 2017. In 1991, Reinharz became Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Brandeis, and in 1997 she established the Hadassah Brandeis Institute with the mission of promoting research in the intersection of Jews and gender. In 2001, she created the Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) with funds she raised; when Reinharz retired in 2017, there were 80 women scholars at the WSRC. Reinharz has written seventeen books, beginning with On Becoming a Social Scientist (1979, still in print); Psychology and Community Change (1983); Qualitative Gerontology (1987, with Graham Rowles); and the award-winning Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford University Press, 1992). Her books dealing with Jewish topics include Im ha-zerem ve-negdo: Manya Wilbushewitz Shohat: iggerot u-teudot (with Jehuda Reinharz and Moti Golani); American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise (co-edited with Mark Raider); The JGirl’s Guide: The Young Jewish Woman’s Handbook for Coming of Age (with Penina Adelman and Ali Feldman, Jewish Lights, 2005); Observing the Observer (Oxford University Press, 2010); Jewish Intermarriage Around the World (co-edited with Sergio DellaPergola, Transaction Books, 2009); Today I am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah around the World (co-edited with Barbara Vinick, Indiana University Press. 2011); One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Crises and Reinvention (co-edited with Michal Palgi) (Transaction Publishers, 2011, paperback version with new introduction, 2014); The JGuy’s Guide (with Rabbi Joseph Meszler, Elizabeth Suneby and Diane Heinman, Jewish Lights, 2013); One Hundred Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World, (co-edited with Barbara Vinick, Indiana University Press, 2022); and Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (Amsterdam Publishers, 2024). Hiding in Holland was a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards of 2025 in the category of Holocaust Memoir.
