David L. Graizbord

David Graizbord is a historian of early modern and modern Jews. To date his research has focused mostly on the Western Sephardi Diaspora of the seventeenth century. 

In particular, Graizbord's writing approaches questions of Jewish identity--cultural (including) religious, social, and political.  In his work, Graizbord has mostly explored how these questions shaped the lives of so-called "New Christians" or "conversos" from the Iberian Peninsula who became Jews in exile.  He has also written about Judeophobia and the culture of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; marginality and dissidence in Jewish and Ibero-Catholic societies of the seventeenth century; ethnicity and religion among Sephardim from medieval times to the 1700s; and converso trading networks in the Atlantic. 

More recently Graizbord has published research on Jewish ethnic identity and Zionism among American Jews. His book, The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish National Identity, and Israel, was issued by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020.  His latest book is Early Modern Jewish Civilization: Unity and Diversity in a Diasporic Society (London: Routledge/Tayor & Francis, 2024). In the latter work, Graizbord and his co-authors explore the ways in which Jewish culture evolved from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, and how that evolution gave rise to a diverse yet remarkably cohesive dissporic society, one whose continuities and discontinuities explain many aspects of modern Jewish life to this day.    

Graizbord teaches undergraduate courses on Jewish civilization; medieval and early modern Jewish history; modern Jewish history; Biblical Hebrew; The Hebrew Bible; Jewish mysticism (its history and principal phenomena); the Spanish Inquisition; and the history of Anti-Jewish hatred, including but not limited to Antisemitism.  His repertoire of graduate courses--offered primarily to students in the History Department's Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies--focuses on early modern Jewish history and Ibero-Catholic history.  

Graizbord serves as Program Co-Leader of the UofA's faculty-led Summer Study Abroad Program, "Arizona in Israel." He also serves on the UA President's Advisory Council on Jewish Life and Antisemitism, and as an official and unofficial faculty advisor to several student groups, including UA Olami.  

Projects

ed., Early Modern Jewish Civilization: An Introduction (pubication expected September, 2024)

Renouncing and Denouncing the Nation: Jews and Former Jews Against the Jewish People, from The Middle Ages to the Eve of Modernity (in progress).