Beth A. Berkowitz

PhD, Department of Religion, Columbia University.
MA, University of Chicago Divinity School.
BA, Columbia College.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron prize for First Book in Jewish Studies); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud  (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017) and a contributor to it. Her newest book is What Animals Teach Us About Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature, published by University of California Press in 2026. 

She has published articles in the AJS Review, Biblical Interpretation, Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Law Association Studies, Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Ancient Judaism, Journal of Jewish Studies, and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. She has held post-doctoral fellowships in Yale University's Program in Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and New York University Law School's Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization. Before she came to Barnard in 2012, she was a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Her research interests include rabbinic literature, Bible exegesis, Jewish difference, and critical animal studies.