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Biography
Professor Kelman's research focuses on the forms and practices of religious knowledge transmission. He holds a specific research interest in American Jewry.
He is the author of Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU 2018) and Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (California, 2009). He is also the co-editor (with Jon Levisohn) of Beyond Jewish Identity (2019: Academic Studies Press), the editor of Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader (NYU, 2010), co-author of Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary (Alban Institute, 2011). Together with research partners at Stanford and elsewhere, he maintains an active research agenda and publishes regularly in venues both scholarly and popular.
He is the author of Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU 2018) and Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (California, 2009). He is also the co-editor (with Jon Levisohn) of Beyond Jewish Identity (2019: Academic Studies Press), the editor of Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader (NYU, 2010), co-author of Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary (Alban Institute, 2011). Together with research partners at Stanford and elsewhere, he maintains an active research agenda and publishes regularly in venues both scholarly and popular.
Other titles
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education
Associate Professor (By courtesy), Religious Studies
Program affiliations
Learning Sciences and Technology Design (LSTD)
Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE)
SHIPS (PhD): Anthropology of Education
SHIPS (PhD): History of Education
SHIPS (PhD): Social Sciences in Education
SHIPS (PhD): Sociology of Education
(MS) LDT
Education and Jewish Studies
Research interests
Community-Engaged Research | Curriculum Studies & Design | History of Education | Jewish Studies | Learning Outside of Schools | Politics of Education | Qualitative Methods | Race, Culture, and Identity | Religion
Recent publications
Kelman, A. Y., & Kern, R. (2026). Toward a Sociology of Religious Knowledge. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION.
Horwitz, I. M., Kelman, A. Y., Hassenfeld, Z. R., & Lockwood, J. (2026). Bridging Sacred Tradition and Secular Aspiration: Cultural Capital in Bar/Bat Mitzvah Rituals. QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY.
Kelman, A. Y. (2025). American Judaism in the Twenty-First Century. STATE OF AMERICAN JEWRY, 6, 185–209.
