Nathaniel Deutsch is Distinguished Professor of History, Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research spans modern Jewish history, Hasidism, religion, and ethnography. He is the author of several award-winning books, including The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Saul Viener Book Prize. He is co-editor, with Alma Rachel Heckman and Tony Michels, of Radical Jewish Politics: A Global Perspective.