Tanny, Jarrod M

Professor

positions

Professor, History , College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

Dr. Tanny is Associate Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Dr. received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on Russian and Jewish history. His first book, City of Rogues and Schnorrers (Indiana University Press, 2011), examines how the city of Odessa was mythologized as a Jewish city of sin, celebrated and vilified for its Jewish gangsters, pimps, bawdy musicians, and comedians. Since then, he has published many scholarly essays on Jewish Humor. His second book The Seinfeld Talmud (Academica Press, 2023) a satiric take on the hit TV series, in which the great rabbis of the Talmudic era gather in the Yeshiva to discuss and debate the issues raised in each Seinfeld episode weighed against Judaic law. He has also published numerous op-eds on antisemitism in The Forward, The Times of Israel, and The Jewish Journal, Tablet Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books. In 2022, Dr. Tanny founded the Jewish Studies Zionist Network.

Tanny, Jarrod M

Contact Info

tannyj@uncw.edu

910.962.7580

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Selected Publications

Academic Article
- "I Didn’t Know There Were Epsteins in Puerto Rico": Jewish Ethnicity in American Comedy. An Annual Review of the Casden Institute for the Study of American Life Annual Review: Beyond Whiteness: Revisiting Jews in Ethnic America. 21. 2023-12-01
- The Gonef’s Wedding. JewTh!nk. 2021-01-01
- A Pickler on the Roof.” Review of Seth Rogen’s An American Pickle. JewTh!nk. 2020-01-01
- Curb Your Orgasm: Larry David and the Schlimazel as Sexual Deviant. Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal. 7. 2020-01-01
- In My Country There Is Problem. Jewish Review of Books. 2019-01-01
- A Bad, Bold, Big-Nosed, Biblical Brother: Refashioning the Funny Jew in Post-World War Two America. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 16. 2017-01-01
- Alexander Z. Gurwitz, A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas. Southern Jewish History. 20. 2017-01-01
- Decoding Seinfeld’s Jewishness. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. 29. 2016-01-01
- On Kanter’s Lunch: Old Jews Slurping Soup and the Fate of Jewish Humor. Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal. 201-206. 2016-01-01
- The Anti-Gospel of Lenny, Larry, and Sarah: Jewish Humor and the Desecration of Christendom. American Jewish History. 29. 2015-01-01
- “Mit Odessy, żydowskiego miasta grzechu,”. Midrasz. 4. 2014-01-01
- Between the Borscht Belt and the Bible Belt: Crafting Southern Jewishness through Chutzpah and Humor. Southern Jewish History. 15:119-167. 2012-11-01
- Kvetching and Carousing under Communism: Old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish City of Sin. East European Jewish Affairs/Routledge. 39:315-346. 2009-12-01
Book
- The Seinfeld Talmud: A Jewish Guide to a Show About Nothing. Academica Press. 2023-01-01
Chapter
- Pfefferman’s Complaint: Transparent and the Tenacity of Jewish Familial Stereotypes -- Transparent and Queering the Jewish Family on TV. Rutgers University Press. 2024-09-01
- "'We’re Safe Here, but Poland is a State of Mind': Jewish Literature and the Exploitation of Holocaust Consciousness,” -- Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust. Wayne Strate University Press. 2020-01-01
- The Jews in the Land of the Russian Tsars, 1772-1917. The Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism. 361-380. 2012-05-01
Document
- On Cherry’s Why the Jews? How Jewish Values Transformed Twentieth Century American Pop Culture. Jewish Film & New Media. 2024-01-01
- The People of the Bookshelf: Forging Soviet Jewish Identity Through Reading Jarrod Tanny reviews Marat Grinberg’s “The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines.”. Jewish Journal. 2024-01-01
- Natan M. Meir, Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939. AJS Review. 2021-01-01
- Anna Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin,. Journal of Jewish Identities. 2019-01-01
- Kirtsen Fermaglich, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America. The American Jewish Archives. 2019-01-01
- Alexander Z. Gurwitz, A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas. Southern Jewish History. 2017-01-01
- Hana Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature. Review of Rabbinic Judaism. 2017-01-01
- David Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America. Journal of American Ethnic Histor. 2015-01-01
- Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. The American Historical Review. 2014-01-01
- Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia. H-Judaic. 2012-03-01
- Review of Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia. Journal of World History. 221-224. 2012-03-01
- City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa. Indiana University Press. 288. 2011-10-01
- Review of Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Lenin’s Jewish Question. H-Russia. 2011-08-01
- Review of Leonid Smilovitskii, Evrei v Turove: Istoriia mestechka Mozyrskogo Poles’ia. The Russian Review. 155-156. 2010-01-01
- Review of Anna Makolkin, The Nineteenth Century in Odessa: One Hundred Years of Italian Culture on the Shores of the Black Sea (1794-1894),. University of Toronto Quarterly. 2009-01-01

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