Education Weitzman was born in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from
Granada Hills High School, he attended
UC Berkeley. He went on to
Harvard University for graduate school where he received his
PhD with distinction in 1993 in the field of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. He is married to Rabbi Mira Wasserman.
Work Weitzman served as the Irving M. Glazer Chair of Jewish Studies at
Indiana University Bloomington, and, later, as Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and Religion at
Stanford University, directing the Jewish Studies programs of both universities. He now serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the
Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the department of Religious Studies, both at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Research Weitzman pursues research in three overlapping areas. His work draws on literary theory and religious studies to rethink questions of the Bible's meaning and contextualization, and to explore the history of the Bible's reception. A second line of research focuses on the emergence of Jewish culture in the centuries following the biblical age, a topic that encompasses
the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish-Greek writers like
Philo and
Josephus, and Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical works like
1 Maccabees. His third area of scholarly inquiry involves efforts to bridge between the study of Jewish antiquity and the broader study of religion and Jewish history. In recent years, Weitzman has also researched and published on American religious history, including the
FBI's treatment of religious minorities. He is currently pursuing a study of Penn's Positive Psychology Center and its ongoing impact on American religious life. Weitzman serves on the board of the journal
Prooftexts. == Bibliography ==