John M. Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Institute for European Studies. He earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 1991 and taught at Indiana University for ten years before joining Berkeley's History Department in 2001. A specialist in the cultural history of German Jewry, his work has largely focused on the relationship between medicine and the formation of modern Jewish identity. He has published numerous articles on these issues in addition to the books Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001). He recently completed a new volume, The Jews: A History, of which he was the general editor and author of the section on the modern Jewish experience. He is currently at work on a new study, provisionally titled Orientalism and the Jews in the Age of Emancipation.