Bruce Nielsen

Bruce has an M.Div. degree from Union Theological Seminary; from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he has a Master's degree in Talmud and a Ph.D. in Ancient Judaism. At the JTSA, most recently he served as assistant dean of the graduate school and director of summer sessions. Bruce proposed, designed and implemented the Excellence in Teaching Program at the JTSA. Earlier in his career, he served as the coordinator of the Saul Lieberman Institute for Talmudic Research, one of the pioneering efforts to computerize collections of rabbinic literature, with an emphasis on transcriptions of all known manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud. Bruce has an extensive record of publications and his scholarship displays an intensive engagement with rare books and manuscripts, a deep knowledge of bibliography in general and the history of the Jewish book in particular. Bruce is a skilled papyrologist with classical training in Greek and Latin, as well as Hebrew and Aramaic, and is regarded as perhaps the leading expert on Daniel Bomberg, a sixteenth-century Christian Hebraist and printer, who was responsible for producing landmarks in early Hebrew printing, such as the Rabbinic Bible and the first complete printing of the Babylonian Talmud.