Alan F. Benjamin, Lecturer in Jewish Studies at The Pennsylvania State University teaches courses on the anthropology of Jews. He developed and has been offering an online course titled Jewish Civilization for the past two years. For the second of those years, off-site students in Penn State’s World and Commonwealth Campuses have been enrolled in the course. Jewish Civilization is a challenging course that students consistently rank between five and six out of a possible seven. Benjamin has developed a second online course, Society and Cultures in Modern Israel, that is being offered for the first time this fall. Benjamin received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997. He is interested in contemporary Jewish communities and the processes that keep them together and differentiate them from other (Jewish and non-Jewish) communities. His book, Jews of the Dutch Caribbean: Exploring Ethnic Identity on Curaçao, which draws on 17-months of participant-observation, came out through Routledge in 2002. Benjamin has lived on an Israeli kibbutz and earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Haifa. He also has worked in community mental health, conducted research on poverty in the U.S., and published on issues in research ethics.