Nathan Katz is an American writer who is Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, in the School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University (FIU). He also served as the Bhagawan Mahavir Professor of Jain Studies, Founder-Director of the Program in the Study of Spirituality, Director of Jewish Studies, and Founding Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.
Born in Philadelphia in 1948 and raised in Camden, New Jersey, Katz attended Temple University. After earning his B.A. in 1970, he worked for two years with the U. S. Information Agency in Afghanistan and spent a year in India studying classical languages before returning to Temple for graduate studies in Religion. He was a Fulbright dissertation fellow in Sri Lanka and India between 1976 and 1978, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1979. He then joined the faculty in Buddhist Studies at Naropa University in Colorado, and after a year became Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College in Massachusetts. In 1984 he joined the faculty of the University of South Florida in Tampa, and a decade later was brought to FIU to start up a new Department of Religious Studies. He was also instrumental is starting up FIU's programs in Jewish Studies, in Asian Studies, in Jain Studies, and in the Study of Spirituality.
He is best known for his work about Indo-Judaic Studies. He has written books on Indian Jewish communities, and in 2002 convened an international seminar on this topic at Oxford University, bringing together scholars from North America, India, Europe and Israel. The conference resulted in Indo-Judaic Studies in the 21st Century, a book that was the focus of an academic panel at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
Katz was selected as a delegate to the 1990 Tibetan-Jewish dialogue hosted by the Dalai Lama and reported in the best-selling The Jew in the Lotus. He reciprocated the hospitality in 1999 when the Dalai Lama first visited FIU for an honorary doctorate, as well as his 2004 and 2010 visits.
Katz also serves as an adjunct professor of Hinduism at Hindu University of America in Orlando, as academic dean of Chaim Yakov Shlomo College of Jewish Studies, an Orthodox rabbinical school in Surfside, and at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram Bahamas.
After his retirement in 2015, he and his wife Ellen S. Goldberg established Indo-Judaic, Inc., and they lead Jewish-interest tours of India. Katz continues to edit the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies, as well as writing and consulting.
Awards and honors
Katz has been awarded four Fulbright grants for research and teaching in India and Sri Lanka, and was able to accept two.
His book, Who Are the Jews of India?, was a Finalist for the 2000 National Jewish Book Award and won the 2004 Vak Devi Saraswati Saman Award from India. His co-authored book, The Last Jews of Cochin (1993), was a Nota Bene selection of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
He won the President's Award for Achievement and Excellence, FIU's highest internal honor, in 2001, as well as FIU Faculty Senate Awards for Research (2005) and Service (2001). He was also named “Scholar of the Year” by the University of South Florida in 1990.
He won a statewide award for teaching excellence in 1994, and has been named a “Master Teacher” an unprecedented thirteen times by the Florida Center for Teachers of the Florida Humanities Council. He was appointed Kauffman Professor in Global Entrepreneurship at FIU for the 2009–10 academic year.
Selected books
' Jews: India – Selected Essays by Nathan Katz.' (New Delhi, Manohar, 2022).
Indian Jews – An Annotated Bibliography, 1665–2005 (New Delhi, Manohar, 2013).
Spiritual Journey Home – Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall (Jersey City, NJ, Ktav Publishing House, 2009).
Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First century: A View from the Margin, editor-in-chief/co-author (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, April 2007).
Kashrut, Caste and Kabbalah: The Religious Life of the Jews of Cochin, with Ellen S. Goldberg (New Delhi, Manohar, 2005).
Who Are the Jews of India? (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 2000).
Studies of Indian-Jewish Identity, editor and co-author (New Delhi, Manohar, 1995 [2nd ed., 1999]).
The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, with Ellen S. Goldberg. Foreword by Daniel J. Elazar (Columbia, SC, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1993).
Tampa Bay's Asian-Origin Religious Communities (Tampa, National Conference of Christians and Jews, "A Religious History of Tampa Bay" Research Reports no. 1, 1991).
Ethnic Conflict in Buddhist Societies: Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma, co-editor and co-author (London, Frances Pinter Publishers, 1988).
Buddhist and Western Psychology, editor and co-author. Introduction by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche (Boulder, CO, Prajña Press/ Shambhala, 1983).
Buddhist Images of Human Perfection: The Arahant of the Sutta Pitaka Compared with the Bodhisattva and the Mahasiddha (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1982; 2nd ed. 1989; 3rd ed. 2004).
Buddhist and Western Philosophy, editor and co-author. Foreword by the Dalai Lama (New Delhi, Sterling, 1981).
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman is an American Buddhist author and academic who has written, edited, and translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in June 2019. He was the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West. He also is the co-founder and president of the Tibet House US New York. He translated the Vimalakirti Sutra from the Tibetan Kanjur into English. He is the father of actress Uma Thurman.
Cochin Jews are the oldest group of Jews in India, with roots that are claimed to date back to the time of King Solomon. The Cochin Jews settled in the Kingdom of Cochin in South India, now part of the state of Kerala. As early as the 12th century, mention is made of the Jews in southern India by Benjamin of Tudela. They are known to have developed Judeo-Malayalam, a dialect of Malayalam language.
The history of the Jews in India dates back to antiquity. Judaism was one of the first foreign religions to arrive in the Indian subcontinent in recorded history. Desi Jews are a small religious minority who have lived in the region since ancient times. The 2,000-year history of Indian Jews was marked by a total absence of antisemitism from the Hindu majority and a visible assimilation in the local languages and cultures.
Lobsang Tenzin, better known by the titles Professor Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche and to Tibetans as the 5th Samdhong Rinpoche, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and politician who served as the Prime Minister of the cabinet of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamshala, India.
Ngawang Wangyal, aka Sogpo (Mongolian) Wangyal, popularly known as Geshe Wangyal and "America's first lama," was a Buddhist lama and scholar of Kalmyk origin. He was born in the Astrakhan province in southeast Russia sometime in 1901 and died in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1983. He came to the United States from Tibet in 1955 and was the spiritual leader of the Kalmuk Buddhist community in Freewood Acres, New Jersey at the Rashi Gempil-Ling Buddhist Temple. He is considered a "founding figure" of Buddhism in the West.
Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.
Rajiv Mehrotra is an Indian writer, television producer-director, documentary film maker, a personal student of the Dalai Lama for whom he manages as Trustee/Secretary The Foundation for Universal Responsibility (www.furhhdl.org) established with the Nobel Peace Prize. He is best known as the former acclaimed host of one of India's longest running talk shows on public television, "In Conversation", that has been through several incarnations over more than twenty years, aired on the India's National broadcaster, Doordarshan News Channel, Saturdays at 9.30 pm.
Lhundub Sopa was a Tibetan monk.
Indian Jews in Israel are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Indian Jewish communities, who now reside within the State of Israel. Indian Jews who live in Israel include thousands of Cochin Jews and Paradesi Jews of Kerala; thousands of Baghdadi Jews from Mumbai and Kolkata; tens of thousands from the Bene Israel of Maharashtra and other parts of British India and the Bene Menashe of Manipur and Mizoram.
The 14th Dalai Lama, known to the Tibetan people as Gyalwa Rinpoche, is, as the incumbent Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibet. He is considered a living Bodhisattva; specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, and Chenrezig in Tibetan. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959.
Meshuchrarim are a Jewish community of freed slaves, often of mixed-race African-European descent, who accompanied Sephardic Jews in their immigration to India following the 16th-century expulsion from Spain. The Sephardic Jews became known as the Paradesi Jews.
Jewish copper plates of Cochin, also known as Cochin plates of Bhaskara Ravi-varman, is a royal charter issued by the Chera Perumal king of Kerala, south India to Joseph Rabban, a Jewish merchant magnate of Kodungallur. The charter shows the status and importance of the Jewish colony in Kodungallur (Cranganore) near Cochin on the Malabar Coast.
Steven B. Bowman is an American scholar and academic particularly known for his research of Greek and Jewish relations throughout the past three millennia, with emphasis on Byzantine and Holocaust periods. He is a professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches a wide range of courses in ancient and medieval Judaic Studies and modern Israel.
Shalva Weil is a senior researcher at The Seymour Fox School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. In 2017, she was GIAN Distinguished Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. She has researched Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and the Ten Lost Tribes and specializes in femicide, qualitative methods, violence, ethnicity, education, religion, and migration.
Sengaku Mayeda is a Japanese writer, philosopher and teacher, known for his writings on Indian philosophy and Adi Shankara. He was honoured by the Government of India, in 2014, by bestowing on him the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, for his services to the fields of literature and education. He is the fourth Japanese to be honoured with Padma Shri, after Taro Nakayama, Shoji Shiba and Prof. Noboru Karashima. He is also a recipient of the Third Order of Merit with the Middle Cordon of the Rising Sun of the Government of Japan, which he received in 2002.
Per Kjeld Sørensen is a prominent Danish Tibetologist who specialises in Tibetan and Himalayan history, literature and culture. Since 1994 he has been Professor of Central Asian Studies at Leipzig University, Germany.
Ram Shankar Tripathi was an Indian scholar of Buddhism, editor and author of many texts focusing on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist Tantra. Partly inspired by Jagannath Upadhyaya, Ram Shankar Tripathi had been instrumental in reviving the study of Buddhist texts among Sanskritists in India and abroad, having taught a vast number of scholars from different parts of the world, and through a long-lasting association with traditional Buddhist scholars, from Tibet, Burma and elsewhere. Much of the important editorial work from the CUTS in Sarnath was encouraged and supported by Ram Shankar Tripathi's guidance; several prominent Tibetan Lamas, as well as a good number of contemporary Buddhologists, had studied with him.
Geshe Lhakdor Tibetan: དགེ་བཤེས་ལྷག་རྡོར, Wylie: dge bshes lhag rdor, also Geshe Lobsang Jordhen and Geshe Lhakdor Lobsang Jordan Tibetan: བློ་བཟང་འབྱོར་ལྡན, Wylie: blo bzang 'byor ldan, is a Tibetan Buddhist scholar who has co-authored and co-translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was also an English translator of the 14th Dalai Lama. He is a Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamshala, India. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Phunchok Stobdan is a former Indian civil servant and served as the Indian ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. He was also a senior fellow at Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, and was the founding president of the Ladakh International Centre.
Steven Phillip Weitzman is an American scholar of Jewish studies and religious studies, with interests that include the origins and early history of Judaism and the history of the Bible's reception. He has served as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania since 2014. He is also the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
