Naomi Seidman

Naomi Seidman is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto, and was previously Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and the Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. In 2016, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2019, she won a National Jewish Book Award.

Biography Seidman comes from an Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking rabbinic family, and was a daughter of Hassidic Jewish writer Dr. Hillel Seidman, author of Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Sara Abraham Seidman. Her parents met in the displaced persons camp in Föhrenwald, where he was working for Agudah and she was teaching.

She was raised in Boro Park, Brooklyn and attended Bais Yaakov schools; she left Orthodoxy at 18, on the verge of an arranged marriage.

She received a B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1981, a M.A. from UC Davis in 1984, and a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1993. She has written extensively on Yiddish literature, translation, and the Haskalah. She is a leading scholar of the Bais Yaakov movement and the work and life of Sarah Schenirer. In 2024, she published Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish.

Selected works

. . . Seidman, Naomi (2016), The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature, Stanford University Press. Seidman, Naomi (2019), Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, Littman. Seidman, Naomi (2024), Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish, Stanford University Press.