He attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in New York City, and graduated from the City College of New York before receiving his PhD in American history at Columbia University, where his dissertation on the lynching of Leo Frank was directed by William Leuchtenburg.
[2] The book based on his dissertation, The Leo Frank Case, has remained in print since its 1968 publication.
In 1961, he married Myra Anne Rosenberg, who was the founding director of the women's studies department at the University of Arizona.
[3] After completing his doctorate, Dinnerstein taught at New York Institute of Technology and Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey.
He also directed the university's Judaic Studies Department, and was the dissertation director for the historians Virginia Scharff and H. Gelfand.