Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, and currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies in both the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Jewish Studies. Her areas of research and teaching include ancient Judaism and rabbinic literature, the study of time, the history of Jerusalem, interreligious polemics, and gender and sexuality.
Her book, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020), received a National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. Together with Lynn Kaye, she is the co-editor of Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction and co-author of “The Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies” and “Frontiers of Time in Babylonian Talmud Studies.” She has published articles about calendars and festivals, metaphors of eschatology, and gendered time in second temple and rabbinic sources. She is currently working on a project titled The Rabbis after Dark, which examines discourses of nighttime in rabbinic literature and in the broader ancient Greco-Roman and Sasanian worlds. Together with a group of colleagues, she is also co-writing a book about the history of the hour from ancient Egypt through the end of the Roman Empire. On the side, she is researching New York City’s Alternate Side Parking Suspension Calendar and the intersection of public policy, municipal politics, and religious pluralism.
Gribetz’s work on the history of Jerusalem has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A Queen in Jerusalem: The Enduring Legacy of Helena of Adiabene will be published by Princeton University Press in Fall 2027. Her next book, Jerusalem: A Feminist History, is under contract at Princeton University Press. At Yale, Gribetz regularly teaches a first-year seminar titled “Jerusalem: Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” which surveys the city’s history from its earliest archaeological remains through the twenty-first century, and which introduces students to Yale’s expansive special collections, including manuscripts, rare books, printed materials, ephemera, coins, and other artifacts at the Beinecke, Sterling Memorial Library, the Yale Divinity School Library, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
An additional area of research includes Jewish-Christian relations and interreligious polemics. Gribetz has published several articles about Toledot Yeshu, a set of satirical Jewish texts that narrate the life of Jesus and that circulated widely in Aramaic, Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and other languages. Relatedly, she has co-edited three compilations: Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context (Mohr Siebeck, 2016); Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck, 2013); and “Rabbis and Others in Conversation” (Jewish Studies Quarterly Special Issue, 2012).
Her work on gender includes articles about women’s piety, motherhood, biblical matriarchs, birth metaphors, and the role of gender in the transmission of traditions in second temple and rabbinic literature, including midrash, as well as in early Christian sources, including the Nag Hammadi Codices. A conversation about studying women in antiquity was hosted by the Women Who Went Before podcast (“Invisible Women and How They Make History”).
Gribetz has also published about sacred space, travel, prayer, and holiness in antiquity, and about the Talmud in Korea. Her pedagogical essays have appeared in Ancient Jew Review and other essays in Marginalia Review of Books. She co-edits the Journal for the Study of Judaism and the Brill Series in Jewish Studies.
Gribetz received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University’s Department of Religion. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2024, she spent a decade at Fordham University, where she served as Associate Professor of Classical Judaism in the Theology Department and Co-Director of Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies. She has taught at the University of Toronto and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and held fellowships at Harvard University, the Einstein Center Chronoi at the Berliner Antike-Kolleg, the Hebrew University, and the Israel Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded a Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise from the University of Heidelberg, fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and ACLS/Mellon, and teaching and mentorship awards from the Society of Biblical Literature and Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This year, she is a Whitney Humanities Fellow.