DR. SARAH BUNIN BENOR APPOINTED ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CONTEMPORARY JEWISH STUDIES AT HEBREW UNION COLLEGE- JEWISH INSTITUTE
OF RELIGION/LOS ANGELES

Rabbi David Ellenson, President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has announced the appointment of Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor as Assistant Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at HUC-JIR/Los Angeles, where she will teach courses related to the sociology and anthropology of American Jews and advise students in the School of Jewish Communal Service on their theses and projects. In addition, she will teach courses on Jewish language, culture, and society, for HUC-JIR's Jerome H. Louchheim School of Judaic Studies, Los Angeles, which provides undergraduate courses in Judaic Studies for the University of Southern California.

Dr. Benor received her Ph.D. and M.A. from Stanford University, where she wrote her dissertation on "Second Style Acquisition: The Linguistic Socialization of Newly Orthodox Jews." The dissertation was an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of the integration of ba'alei teshuva into Orthodox communities, focusing on language socialization and language ideologies. She earned a B.A., Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa in Comparative Literature and Linguistics from Columbia College of Columbia University in New York City.

Dr. Benor’s research interests have and continue to focus on Jewish languages, sociolinguistic variation, language socialization, linguistic construction of identity, language contact, ethnography, Orthodox Jews and Jewish culture. She has published several academic papers, co--edited the book Gendered Practices in Language (CSLI Press 2002) and has been the recipient of numerous grants and honors including the Wexner Graduate Fellowship and dissertation scholarships from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Fluent in Yiddish and Modern Hebrew, amongst other languages, Dr. Benor is the founder, producer and editor of www.jewish-languages.org, a website devoted to academic research on Jewish languages. She has also taught linguistics courses at Stanford University and has taught Yiddish language in New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Dr. Benor is a member of the Association for Jewish Studies, The Linguistic Society of America, the American Anthropological Association and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry.