Noam Pianko

Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies.

Pianko’s research interests include modern Jewish history, Zionism, and American Judaism. His first book, Zionism and the Roads not Taken: Rawidowicz Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) uncovers the thought of three key interwar Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism’s central mission as challenging the model of a sovereign nation-state. 

His second book, Peoplehood: An American Innovation (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015), won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book prize.  The book  traces the history of an idea that is deceptively straightforward and enduring. Peoplehood emerged at the beginning of the last century as an American-Jewish innovation calibrated to shape discussions of nationalism, Zionism, and American Jewish identity. Peoplehood’s successful integration of a nationalist paradigm into the American context created a powerful vocabulary for negotiating American Jewish identity in response to dramatic historical events of the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.

Read more about Noam Pianko's research and work here.