Gregg Drinkwater

 Office: 262 Hellems
Office Hours: Tuesday 11am-12pm and Thursday 1-2pm

Lecturer in History and Jewish Studies and Associate Academic Director of the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collection

Courses: 

Jewish History to 1492 (JWST/HIST/RLST 1818)
Global History of Holocaust and Genocide (JWST/HIST/RLST 1830)

About Gregg Drinkwater:

Dr. Gregg Drinkwater received his PhD in History in May 2020 with a Graduate Certificate in Jewish Studies. Drinkwater’s research focuses on sexuality, gender, and Judaism in the modern United States. In spring 2021, Drinkwater served as the Norman and Syril Reitman Visiting Professor at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

His research has appeared in the journals Jewish Social Studies and American Jewish History (which awarded him the Wasserman Prize for the best article in that journal for 2020), as well as the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. He is currently working on a book on the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender synagogues and their role in incubating queer Jewish space. He is also completing a project exploring the ways in which the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer turned to the history and memory of the Holocaust, and to the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, to help him theorize the AIDS epidemic as a call to action for LGBTQ people.

Drinkwater’s newest research project centers the history of LGBTQ Jewish American engagements with Zionism and Israel from the 1950s through the mid-1990s and the emergence of a uniquely Jewish diasporic homonationalism.

Prior to entering academic life, Drinkwater worked for 10 years as a researcher and advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and social justice in the Jewish community through the organizations Jewish Mosaic and Keshet. He is the co-editor of the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (NYU Press, 2009).