Steven Weitzman is the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and also serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. His recent publications include The Origin of the Jews: the Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, winner of a National Jewish Book Award; Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom, part of the award-winning Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press; and the coauthored The Jews: History, published in its third edition in 2019. He is currently writing a pandemic-inflected book that explores the role of the Ten Plagues story in how people in different ages understand and imagine disaster, provisionally entitled A History of Signs and Wonders.
Weitzman completed his graduate studies in Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department and went on to teach at Indiana University and Stanford before coming to Penn in 2014. His teaching focuses on the Hebrew Bible and its interpretive history, but he is interested in the study of religion more broadly and has also done research on American religious history, coediting a volume entitled The FBI and Religion(2017) with Sylvester Johnson. His Katz Center role includes co-directing a summer school for graduate students in Jewish Studies that alternates between Philadelphia, Jerusalem and Antwerp.