Dr. David E. Kaufman was most recently a faculty member of the Religion Department at Hofstra University, holding the Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies from 2009-2014. From 2000-2009, he served on the faculty of the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College, and additionally taught in the undergraduate Jewish studies program of the University of Southern California. He has a B.A. from Columbia College with majors in Architecture and Hebrew Literature, an M.A. in Jewish Education from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a Ph.D. in American Jewish History from Brandeis University. Dr. Kaufman has published numerous articles on the social, religious, and architectural history of the American synagogue; a history of the seminal school of Jewish education in America, the Teachers Institute; and a major study of early 20th century Jewish communal institutions, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History (UPNE 1999). His latest book, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity (UPNE 2012), explores the nature of Jewish celebrity in the early 1960s, and includes chapters on Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, and Bob Dylan. Drawing on the wide range of Jewish studies courses he has taught, Dr. Kaufman has numerous lecture topics to offer, including: Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood, Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism, Modern and American Jewish history, Israel and the Holocaust, the history of American Judaism and American Jewish education, the sociology of American Jews and the American Jewish community, Jews in popular culture and American comedy, as well as his earlier research topics of synagogue architecture and synagogue transformation.