Growing up in New Jersey in a close-knit Jewish family, he left home at fourteen to attend Blair Academy, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved to California.

During his academic career he taught both American and Jewish history at several American universities and was a tenured professor of history at the University of San Francisco, where he was director of the Swig Judaic Studies Program, holding the Mae and Benjamin Swig Chair and creating several new programs including an Ulpan and a Judaic studies lecture series.

He co-authored two books that deal with race and ethnicity, and he has contributed to a wide variety of scholarly journals as well as to popular newspapers, periodicals and online publications.

In 2006, feeling creatively stifled by the confines of academic writing, he left his tenured full professorship at USF and moved to New York City to begin playwriting.

He has written one-act as well as full-length plays, many of them focusing on the historical and Jewish themes that had absorbed him in his former career; these include a comedy about Moses and his family, a drama about a New York Jewish family adjusting to life after World War II, and a drama about an Israeli Russian immigrant who, in desperation, has turned to prostitution.

His mother, he said, is a woman of "gentle disposition, sensitivity to human qualities that others overlook, vivacious imagination, love of art, and whimsical sense of humor," and his father he described as a man of "great loyalty, heartfelt devotion, and frequent praise [that] helped me set my sights high and pick myself up when fallen low.

"[3] At age fourteen Heinze won a scholarship to Blair Academy, a private boarding school in Warren County, New Jersey.

[4] He honed his writing skills working for Blair's school newspaper; he started as a reporter doing local news and human interest stories and ended up as the paper's editor-in-chief.

He researched and taught extensively on both African-Americans and Jews in the United States, and he maintained strong interests in relations between Christianity and Judaism, religion and homosexuality, racism and antisemitism.

[11] Heinze's first act as director was to invite Jan Karski, a man he had long admired, to speak at the program's upcoming 20th anniversary dinner.

Karski, renowned for his active role in the Polish resistance movement in World War II, delivered the keynote address before an audience that included former secretary of state, George Shultz.

Heinze hand-picked the topics as well as the participating lecturers, bringing public attention to a range of often controversial subjects that were of special interest to him.

[18] Heinze's first book, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity, was published in 1990.

"[20] The Journal of Consumer Affairs remarked upon the variety of topics that the book explored: the rise of ad campaigns for major American products in the foreign-language press; the rise of the summer vacation among working people; installment-buying as a way for working families to obtain expensive furnishings such as pianos; the role of Jewish women as agents of assimilation through their control over family purchases; and the way that American abundance altered religious rituals, especially holidays such as Chanukah and Passover.

[21] Adapting to Abundance established Heinze's reputation as part of a scholarly vanguard that produced the first histories of mass consumption in Europe and America.

[30] The Columbia Documentary History was praised as a "massive collection of primary-source documents dealing with 'the other' in America... [including]... an extensive introductory essay by a leading historian in the field.

[33] Heinze's opinion pieces rarely focus on politics, but in 2002 on the History News Network, he faulted George W. Bush for giving "a businessman's response" to questions about corporate greed.

In 1999, however, Buford Furrow and the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooting got his attention, and he wrote an opinion piece about it for the San Francisco Examiner.

There was another, more personal, reason for his interest, however; in 1997 he had met Jan Karski, the courageous Polish Catholic who was recognized in 1982 as Righteous Among the Nations for his efforts to help the Jews in World War II.

[12] In 1998 Heinze wrote an opinion piece for the Examiner, "The Vatican Repents Catholic Anti-Semitism;" it focused on the long-awaited and newly released document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, published by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.

"But," he added, "the rest of us must encourage the message of repentance and renewal the church is preaching to its followers because, in the end, that is what produces people such as Bernard Lichtenberg."

[16] In his Jewish Daily Forward essay, "Breaking the Mold of the Sitcom," Heinze analyzes his favorite TV comedy, Seinfeld, casting an affectionate eye on the show's creators, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, and marveling at their success in probing "the many gestures, innuendoes and gaps in the messages we send each other every day in every type of situation.

"[38] In another Jewish Daily Forward essay, "Life Among the Goyim," Heinze looks at the British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, and his TV comedy, Da Ali G Show, whose title character is a parody of a "white wannabe-gangsta rapper who not only adopts all the appropriate clothes, gestures and locutions but also convinces himself that he is black."

In his essay, Heinze points out that Baron Cohen is a Jew who speaks Hebrew and keeps kosher; and his undergraduate history thesis at Cambridge University was on black-Jewish relations.

For Heinze, the answer is yes, and he arrives at the "yes" in the following whimsical way: "If we take 'goyim' loosely to mean people who are strange, often affable, and potentially dangerous, then, yes, 'Da Ali G Show' is Jewish comedy and we, in our digital phantasmagoria of a world, are all goyim, all on camera, all the time.

[41] His first full-length play, Turtles All the Way Down, although unproduced, was praised by the Soho Theatre in London as "an accomplished first effort...sharp and highly enjoyable... very theatrical: fast moving with lots of humour.

Heinze expanded it into a full-length version that won a place in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in 2011.

[46] Heinze has written a number of one-act plays and believes the short-play format can teach a writer "the basics of dramatic structure.