Goldberg, Harvey E.
GOLDBERG, HARVEY E.
GOLDBERG, HARVEY E. (1939– ), U.S. anthropologist. Born in New York City, Goldberg received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1961 and his doctorate from Harvard in 1967. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1966 as an assistant professor, then from 1969 to 1972 as associate professor. He was a research fellow at Columbia University in 1968 and 1969, and a visiting scholar at Cambridge and at the University of Texas. From 1972 he was a member of the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was named the Sarah Allen Shaine Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Goldberg was also a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
A leading anthropologist of Jewish culture, Goldberg wrote numerous works that center on Jewish life in the Middle East, both in Israel and elsewhere. His books include Cave Dwellers and Citrus Growers: A Jewish Community in Libya and Israel (1972), Greentown's Youth: Disadvantaged Youth in a Development Town in Israel (1984), Jewish Life in Muslim Libya (1990), Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries (as editor, 1996), Life of Judaism (as editor, 2001), and Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life (2003).
Jewish Passages has been well received by a wide audience. In this work, Goldberg examines both individual practice and collective identity as he considers the ways in which Jews from many traditions celebrate the cycles of life. The work includes an exploration of Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions; it examines ritual, custom, and a range of events, from circumcision to identity-seeking tourism.
Goldberg wrote numerous articles for academic journals, including the Jewish Journal of Sociology, Hagar: International Social Science Review, and Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore. He also contributed to various texts and reference works, including the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), Global Religions (2003), and Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (2003). Goldberg's subsequent research focused on the Jews of Libya and Ethiopia, seeking to integrate historical and sociological perspectives in understanding cultural diversity within Israeli society.
[Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)]