Mervin F. Verbit has baccalaureate and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.  He is professor emeritus at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, where he also organized and directed CUNY’s Program for Study in Israel.  He has taught as a visiting professor at Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Yeshiva University.  Dr. Verbit teaches in all of Touro’s undergraduate divisions, offering courses in research methodology, the American Jewish Community, and Contemporary Israeli Society, as well as the introductory sociology course and other courses.  The main emphasis in Dr. Verbit’s research, reported in more than fifty professional papers and research articles, is patterns of contemporary Jewish identity and their consequences, primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion.

Dr. Verbit was the academic director of the North American Jewish Data Bank, the projects director for the United States of the International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, and the director of the Interuniversity Fellowship Program in Jewish Studies. He is a past president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.  He has served on a number of academic and policy advisory boards and has been a consultant to several national and international Jewish organizations.

Among his communal activities, Mervin Verbit has been chairman of the Zionist Academic Council, the New York Continuing Seminar in Zionist Thought, and American Professors for Peace in the Middle East.  He founded and directs the Israel Studies Institute, which, in cooperation with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, works to improve understanding of Israel in the American academic community. Dr. Verbit has also served on the boards and committees of several national Jewish organizations.

Mervin Verbit is listed in Who’s Who in American Jewry, Who’s Who in World Jewry, and Who’s Who in Israel and Jewish Personalities Abroad.