John Efron

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA from Monash University (1979), an MA from New York University (1981), and a PhD from Columbia University (1991). His research reinterprets Jewish culture through the lens of modernity, focusing on German Jewry's engagement with medicine, anthropology, and identity formation.

Research Interests: Efron investigates the cultural reinvention of German Jewry post-Enlightenment, with emphasis on:

• Medical anthropology and Jewish physicians' role in race science
• Sephardic cultural influences on Ashkenazi identity
• Antisemitism as a social and political construct
• Meat consumption as ethnic boundary marker (Germans vs. Jews)
• Sport's impact on modern Jewish self-perception

Scholarly Contributions: Authored pivotal works including German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, 2016) exploring medieval Spanish Jewish cultural models, and the forthcoming All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat (Stanford, 2025) analyzing dietary practices in identity conflicts.

Awards & Honors:

• Elected Fellow, American Academy for Jewish Research

Teaching: Regularly instructs graduate and undergraduate courses including History of the Holocaust (HISTORY 178), Jews in the Modern World (HISTORY 175B), and directs dissertation research in European history.