Gerald Sorin (born October 23, 1940) is a Distinguished Professor of American and Jewish Studies and the Director of the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Sorin started teaching in 1965 at SUNY New Paltz, where he specialized in American social and political history and culture, and taught a wide variety of courses, including several on slavery and the coming of the Civil War.
His biography of the New York Intellectual, democratic Socialist, and Yiddishist, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (2002), won the National Jewish Book Award in History in 2003,[2] and was a New York Times “Notable Book” in the same year.
[3] Sorin's book on one of America's most prolific and politically controversial writers, Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane, was published by Indiana University Press in November 2012.
[4] He has also written collective biographies including, The New York Abolitionists; The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals (1985); and The Nurturing Neighborhood (1990), which focused on the communal values and socialist orientation that influenced Jewish boys growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s.