Sarah Bunin Benor

About Sarah Bunin Benor

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in Comparative Literature in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as many articles about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages (especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino). Dr. Benor has received several fellowships and prizes, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature, and the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity. In 2024 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and co-editor of Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Luminare Press, 2017). She founded and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which runs the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces. She is currently working on a project analyzing the names Jews give their children and their pets. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and have three young adult children.

Experience

1. Director

   Jewish Language Project

   Mar 2020 — Present

   The HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project does research and education about Jewish language use around the world and throughout history.

Education

• Columbia University

  Bachelor of Arts, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, Yiddish

• Stanford University

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Linguistics

  1998 — 2004

• Columbia University

  Bachelor's degree

• Columbia University

  Bachelor's degree, Comparative Literature

  1993 — 1997