Leah Hochman, Ph.D.
Director, Louchheim School of Judaic Studies; Associate Professor of Jewish Thought
Contact Information
school/program: Louchheim School for Judaic Studies, Rabbinical School (US), School of Education, Zelikow School of Jewish Nonprofit Management
academic field: Contemporary Jewish Studies, History, Jewish Language and Literature, Philosophy/Theology
campus: Los Angeles
email: lhochman@huc.edu
phone: (213) 765-2114
Dr. Leah Hochman directs the Louchheim School for Judaic studies at the University of Southern California and serves as associate professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Los Angeles.
Raised in the Seattle area, she earned her undergraduate degree at Pitzer College and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in religion and literature from Boston University. Her dissertation explores Moses Mendelssohn’s theories of religion and language. Dr. Hochman spent a year in Berlin as a post-doctoral fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum and, pre-pandemic, returned to Germany regularly to research and lead classes. Before coming to HUC-JIR/Los Angeles in 2008, she was assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida and taught in the Great Books program at Boston University.
At HUC-JIR, she teaches classes in medieval and modern philosophy, American Judaism, modern history, and food ethics. At USC, she teaches classes on contemporary Jewish literature, Jewish identity, and the academic study of Judaism.
She is the author of The Ugliness of Moses Mendelssohn: Aesthetics, Religion and Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2014) and the editor of Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States (Purdue University Press, 2017).
Making the Jews Ugly & Beautiful: Jewish Faces and Modern Europe
Picturing God: Graphic Novels and the Divine
Pow! Ka-Blam! Hai-Ja! Comics, Graphic Novels and Jewish Superheroes for the 21st Century
American Anti-Semitism: From Gentleman’s Agreement to the Alt-Right
Scripture and Script: The Afterlife of the Bible in TV, Movies and Music
Ethics, Ethical Matrices, and Making (Jewish) Decisions
What Modern Jews Think (and Thought): Changing and Challenging Judaism
Add Women and Stir: Feminism, Women, Men and Judaism
Telling Our Stories: Jewish Auto/Biographies
Let’s Eat Already! Judaism and Food
Eating Jewish in America: Taking Out Chinese and Eating Kosher In
Maxwell House, Manischewitz, and Moses: The American Haggadah
Jewish Sports: Who’s First on Whose All Star List?
Televising Judaism: The Changing Face of American Jewish Icons
Jews in Germany? German-Jews and their/our Judaism
Modern Jewish Thought
Medieval Jewish Thought
Jewish Historical Experience
History and Evolution of the American Jewish Community
Tilling, Tending, Eating: Ethics, Food, and Judaism
Identity and Gender in Global Jewish Literature
M.A. and Ph.D., Boston University
B.A., Pitzer College
NEH Summer Fellow (Boston College; Edinburgh, Scotland)
Skirball Fellow (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Oxford University)
Dubnow-Einstein Fellow (Leipzig/Potsdam)
DAAD Annual Grant Recipient (Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum/University of Potsdam)
Leo Baeck Institute/DAAD Fellow (NYC)