Nathaniel Deutsch

Deutsch attended the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. as well as his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees.

Deutsch was formerly a professor at Swarthmore College, a visiting professor at Stanford University, and the Workmen's Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professor in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute. In 2006, Deutsch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his research on the Jewish ethnographer S. An-sky.

In 2007, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece in which Deutsch called for the Bush administration to take immediate action to preserve the Iraqi Mandean community.[1]

Along with Michael Casper, Deutsch is the co-author of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, which will be published in May, 2021 by Yale University Press.

• A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (with Michael Casper)
• The Lost World of Russia's Jews: Ethnography and Folklore in the Pale of Settlement (forthcoming translation with Noah Barrera of Abraham Rechtman's memoir).
• The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011)
• Inventing America's 'Worst' Family; Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of The Tribe of Ishmael (2009)
• The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003)
  • Maiden of Ludmir
  • National Jewish Book Award finalist
• Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (2000, co-editor with Yvonne Chireau)
  • Black Jews and black-Jewish relations in the United States
• The Gnostic Imagination: Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and Merkabah Mysticism (1995)
  • Gnosticism, Mandaeism, and merkabah (early Jewish mystic beliefs)
• Guardians of the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (1999)
  • Vice-regency of angels in late antiquity

• "Swarthmore Professor Named 2006 Guggenheim Fellow" (Swarthmore press release)