Julian Levinson is an associate professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, where he holds the Samuel Shetzer Chair in American Jewish Studies.

Levinson studies how Jewish culture has transformed as a result of its intense, sustained, partly harmonious, partly acrimonious dialogue with American culture. He asks, in other words, why American Jews express themselves in terms that differ so dramatically from Jews elsewhere, and he looks for answers by exploring the interaction between Jews and surrounding cultural and political discourses.

His research has focused specifically on topics such as the interaction between Jewish American writers and Transcendentalism; literary and cinematic responses to the Holocaust; Yiddish literary modernism; the uses of English in Yiddish literature; the prophetic turn in 19th-century American Jewish poetry; and the development of Jewish literary studies in the multiculturalist university.