Helene Sinnreich is head of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies.  A scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry, Dr. Sinnreich serves as the co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press). Dr. Sinnreich obtained her PhD and MA from Brandeis University and her BA from Smith College. She has served as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (2007), Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2009) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest (2023).

Her monograph The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2023) focuses on hunger and starvation in three ghettos in Poland during the Holocaust. She is also the editor of A Story of Survival: The Lodz Ghetto Diary of Heinek Fogel (Yad Vashem Press, 2015). Dr. Sinnreich employs a gender lens in much of her work. She has several current research projects including a study of public health in ghettos; a book on a series of selections at Auschwitz; and an examination of religious Jewish representations of Holocaust experience.