Professor M. Herbert Danzger was awarded his Ph.D. by Columbia University in 1968. His special areas of interest are religion, (particularly the study of Jews, conversion processes, and immigrants), social movements (charisma and power structure) and social psychology (symbolic interaction, social construction, and identity). He has taught at SUNY Stony Brook, served as Senior Lecturer at Bar Ilan University (Ramat Gan, Israel) and as Fulbright Professor at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
He has held grants from The National Science Foundation, The National Institute of Mental Health and others for studies of the civil rights movement, patterns of community conflict and power structure. He has also held grants from The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Littaur Foundation for studies of "return" (conversion) to traditional Judaism.
He has published on power structure, conflict, and mass media in The American Sociological Review, The American Behavioral Scientist and elsewhere. He is the author of Returning to Tradition (Yale University Press, 1989) and of more than sixty other articles, reviews and papers. His present research is a comparative cross-cultural study of Jewish emigres from the former Soviet Union in Israel, the CIS and the United States. The focus of this research is the process of religious affirmation and transformation of self, and particularly the cultural and organizational structures that facilitate this transformation. In the last three years three articles describing this work have been published, and two more are forthcoming. Three related essays and three biographies have appeared in an encyclopedia, and a piece on conflict has just been published. Twelve papers describing this work have been presented at scholarly meetings. A book describing this research tentatively titled "Jewish Return in Cross Cultural Perspective" is in preparation.