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  Presented
by The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation The discovery
of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized our picture of the early
history of Judaism and of the Jewish background of early Christianity.
With the completion of the publication of the entire Biography Lawrence H. Schiffman is Chairman of New York University's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and serves as Ethel and Irvin A. Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. He is also a member of the University's Center for Near Eastern Studies and Center for Ancient Studies. He serves as President of the Association for Jewish Studies. During the academic year 1989/90 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of a research group dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was featured in the PBS Nova series documentary, "Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls," as well as in four BBC documentaries on the scrolls, the McNeil-Lehrer program, and a Discovery special. He appears regularly in the popular educational series, "Mysteries of the Bible," which appears on Arts and Entertainment (A&E). In 1992/3 he was a fellow of the Annenberg ResearchInstitute in Philadelphia where he was part of a research team working on the unpublished scrolls. Together with a colleague, he served as editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls(2000). In 1991, he was appointed to the team publishing the scrolls in the Oxford series, Discoveries in the Judean Desert. He is one of the editors of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries published by Brill. Mostrecently Dr. Schiffman was appointed one of the directors of the Friedberg Genizah Project which is designed to create a unified catalog of all Cairo genizah fragments and publish a significant number of its unpublished texts. Professor Schiffman
received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. He is a specialist
in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism in Late Antiquity, the history of
Jewish law, and Talmudic literature. His publications include The
Halakhah at Qumran (E. J. Brill, 1975); Sectarian Law in the
Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony, and the Penal Code (Scholars
Press, 1983); Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian
Schism (Ktav, 1985); From Text to Tradition: A History of Second
Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Ktav, 1991); a Hebrew book entitled
Halakhah, Halikhah u-Meshihiyut be-Khat Midbar Yehudah (Law,
Custom, and Professor Schiffman
served as director of New York University's program at the archaeological
excavations at Dor, Israel, from 1980-82. He has served as visiting
professor at Yale University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev,
Duke University, Shier Visiting Distinguished Professor in Judaic
Studies at the University of Toronto, the Johns Hopkins University,
and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. In
Spring, 2001 he was the Luce Visiting Professor at the University
of Hartford and the Hartford Seminary. He was a member of the academic
committee for the Summer 1997 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary
of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls held in Jerusalem. Dr. Schiffman
is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and a corresponding
fellow of the Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
He has been chairman of the Columbia University Seminar for the Study
of the Hebrew Bible. He is a member of the board of the World Union
for Jewish Studies. He is active in the Society for Biblical Literature
where he served as chairman of the Qumran section.
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