Rebecca Kobrin

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Full Professor of American Jewish
History at Columbia University, where she was also the co-director of Columbia’s
Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. She was also a member of Columbia’s
Antisemitism Task Force. She has taught at Yale University, Harvard University and
Brooklyn College.

Rebecca Kobrin teaches and researches in the fields of American Jewish history,
immigration studies, business history, and urban studies, specializing in modern Jewish
migration. Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora: (Indiana University Press, 2010)
was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize for best book in modern Jewish history
concerning the Americas (2012). She then became interested in American Jewish
economic history and edited Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American
Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of
Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015). She has also written Salo Baron: Using the Past to Shape the Future of Jewish
Studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022) which looks at the history of Jews
and Jewish studies at Columbia.

Her current book, Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American
Finance, 1870-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2026), looks at the lost world of
immigrant banking. Bringing together scholarship and archival sources in five
languages, she brings to life a lost chapter in American economic history and Jewish
history, in which Eastern European Jewish immigrants reshaped the businesses of
migration, banking, and real estate by providing credit and other financial services.

She is also one of the lead investigators of the award-winning digital humanities
Historical NYC Project, which visualizes the demographic and spatial changes
transforming New York City between 1850 and 1940. Mapping Historical New York
breaks new ground in its content, scale, and methodology. The project visualizes census
data and shows how New York’s rise as the world’s most populous city in the world was
a spatially contested process. Through mapping census materials from 1850, 1880, 1910
and 1940, when migration transformed New York City, Mapping Historical New York
provides data for all five boroughs, capturing the entire city like never before.

She is working on a book about Columbia University’s Seth Low Junior College, which
enrolled students between 1928 and 1938 to explore institutional antisemitism and
American higher education. She lectures widely on topics related to American Jewish
history, East European Jewish migration and US immigration history. Her writing has
also appeared in popular newspapers such as The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian,
and The Jerusalem Post.