HARTFORD — Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, will be the 2016 Greenberg  Distinguished Visiting fellow of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. The leading historian of Judaism in America, Sarna will deliver a public lecture on “Jews & American Politics: Historical Ideals and Contemporary Realities” on Wednesday, Feb. 17 at 4:30 p.m., in Mather Hall, on the Trinity College campus in Hartford.

Sarna attended Brandeis University, the Boston Hebrew College, Merkaz HaRav Kook in Jerusalem, and Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1979. He has taught at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Harvard, Yale, the University of Cincinnati, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He returned to Brandeis in 1990 to teach American Jewish history in its Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, which he has chaired three different times. He now chairs Brandeis’ Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program.

Sarna has written, edited, or co-edited more than 30 books, including American Judaism: A History, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Book of the Year Award in 2004. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also president of the Association for Jewish Studies and Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.