Samuel Heilman is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College and Emeritus Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies, Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem, a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the People’s Republic of China where he lectured at Nanjing, Henan, and Shanghai Universities as well as at the Universities of Wroclaw, Warsaw and Jagellonian University in Krakow Poland. He has also been Scheinbrun Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, visiting professor of social anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne in Australia.

He is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as twelve books: Synagogue Life, The People of the Book, The Gate Behind the Wall, A Walker in Jerusalem, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America(co-authored with Steven M. Cohen) , Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, Portrait of American Jewry: The Last Half of the 20th Century, When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son,   Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy and  (with Menachem Friedman) The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson . Most recently he has written Who Will Lead us: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America and is co-author of Hasidism: A New History. He is also editor of Death, Bereavement and Mourning What We Have Learned after 9/11,