About

Shaul Kelner is Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University and one of the foremost cultural sociologists of American Jewish life working today. For three decades he has studied how American Jews forge solidarity with Jewish communities abroad — through activism, tourism, politics, and culture — and how these efforts, in turn, reshape American Jewish identity and experience.

His most recent book, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, tells the story of the most effective human rights campaign of the Cold War. For three decades, the Soviet state subjected Jews to systemic discrimination carried out under the banner of "antizionism" — and for three decades, American Jewish activists fought back with remarkable ingenuity. They enlisted Passover seders, bar and bat mitzvahs, fitness crazes, and B-grade spy movies into a mass mobilization campaign; they sent thousands of "tourists" across the Iron Curtain to smuggle aid to refuseniks. Their creativity and determination ultimately secured freedom for more than a million Soviet Jews.

His first book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010), winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, explores another dimension of American Jewish solidarity-building: the Birthright Israel program. Drawing on seven years of firsthand observation, the book reveals the creativity and contradictions of modern diaspora tourism.

A leading expert on antizionism as a sociological phenomenon, Prof. Kelner has traced a direct line from the Soviet Union's use of "antizionism" as ideological cover for anti-Jewish persecution to the antizionism now roiling American campuses, workplaces, and public life. His essay "Turning Critical Theory on Its Head" (SAPIR, 2024) generated widespread attention, and his follow-up, "American Antizionism" (Sources, 2025), offers a sweeping sociological account of antizionism as a distinct and dangerous form of anti-Jewish politics.