Sarah Bunin Benor is an American linguist and scholar of Jewish languages. She is a professor of contemporary Jewish studies and linguistics and vice provost of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion.[1]
Benor graduated from Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in North Bethesda, Maryland.[2] She received her B.A. from Columbia University in comparative literature in 1997 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in linguistics in 2004.[1][3] While working at the Columbia University Libraries as a college student, she stumbled across references to rare languages such as Judeo-Italian and Judaeo-Spanish, which led to her interest in studying linguistics, especially Jewish languages.[4] Her research has focused on Jewish languages, Yiddish, and American Jews.[1] She directs the Jewish Language Project at Hebrew Union College, which runs the Jewish Language Website and the Jewish English Lexicon.[5][6]
Benor is author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (2012), which won the 2013 Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature.[7] In 2021, she received a National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity for her book Hebrew Infusion (2020), a book on language infusion at Jewish summer camps co-authored with Jonathan Krasner and Sharon Avni.[8][9][10]
Benor is an Ashkenazi Jew.[11]
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