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Meet the Faculty Members - 2019 | Jack, Joseph & Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities

Meet the Faculty Members - 2019

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Anna Shternshis 

University of Toronto

anna.shternshis@utoronto.ca

Anna Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil) in Modern Languages and Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (New York:Oxford University Press, 2017). Shternshis created and directed the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, together with an artist Psoy Korolenko, the initiative that brought back to life the forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. She lectures widely around the world and is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows worldwide (CBC, NPR, BBC, and more). Her work on Yiddish Glory, has been featured in printed media, TV and radio in over 40 countries.

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Daniel Langton

University of Manchester

daniel.r.langton@manchester.ac.uk

Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manchester, UK, with research interests in Jewish history, culture and thought, and particular expertise in Jewish-Christian relations. He has been co-director of the University’s Centre for Jewish Studies since 2010, and was President 2014-15 of the British Association for Jewish Studies (BAJS) and Secretary 2010-14 of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS). He was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow 2013-15 for a project on Jewish historical engagement with evolutionary theory entitled ‘Darwin’s Jews’, an AHRC Leadership Fellow 2016-17 for a project on the history of Jews and atheism entitled ‘The Doubting Jew’. Key publications include of Claude Montefiore: His Life and Thought (2002), The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination (2010), and Darwin and Reform Judaism: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion (2019), forthcoming.

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Elisheva Baumgarten

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

elisheva.baumgarten@mail.huji.ac.il

Elisheva Baumgarten holds the Prof. Yitzchak Becker Chair in Jewish Studies and teaches in the Departments of Jewish History and History at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on the social history of the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. She currently directs an ERC funded research project Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe and leads a team of approx 10 scholars, postdoctoral fellows, PhD candidates and MA students. Her publications include Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004); Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia, 2014) and many edited volumes and articles in academic journals. This is the fifth year she is directing the HUJI-Katz Center Summer School with Steven Weitzman.  

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Guy Miron

Open University of Israel

guymiron@openu.ac.il

Prof. Guy Miron Teaches Modern Jewish History at the Open University of Israel . He is also the director of a research center for the study and research of the Holocaust in Germany at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem. His research focuses on German and Central European Jewish history in the 20th century; Hungarian Jewish history; Jewish and Israeli historiography. His publications include the books German Jews in Israel – Memories and Past Images, (Hebrew, 2004); The Waning of the Emancipation, Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (English and Hebrew versions, 2011). His current research project deals with time and space in the German Jewish experience under the Nazi regime.

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Jonathan Ben Dov

University of Haifa

jonbendov@gmail.com

Jonathan Ben-Dov is associate professor of Biblical Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Biblical Studies, the University of Haifa. He runs a project of editing the Qumran scrolls in cryptic script, and co-directs a German-Israeli project developing digital tools for editions of Dead Sea Scrolls. Among his research interests include: apocalyptic literature, ancient calendars and astronomy, textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ancient Near Est in the first millennium BCE.

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Kathryn Lofton

Yale University

kathryn.lofton@yale.edu

Kathryn Lofton is Professor of American Studies, Religious Studies, History and Divinity at Yale University, where she has also served as the Deputy Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development as well as Chair of the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies. She is the author of two books, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017), and, with Laurie Maffly-Kipp, an edited collection, Women's Work. An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings (2010).

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Limor Shifman

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

limor.shifman@mail.huji.ac.il

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. I study digital media and popular culture, and am particularly interested in two realms: understanding the big meaning of small texts (such as jokes) and identifying patterns in seemingly chaotic universes of user generated content. My work has been published in venues such as Journal of Communication, American Sociological Review, New Media and Society and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. I am a former research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute , University of Oxford, and a former visiting scholar at the USC Annenberg school of Communication and Journalism.

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Miriam Goldstein

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

mi.goldstein@mail.huji.ac.il

Miriam Goldstein was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard College and the University of Cambridge before completing her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007. Her research focuses on medieval Judeo-Arabic literature and interreligious relations among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval Arabic-speaking world.  She is author of Karaite Exegesis in Medieval Jerusalem (Tübingen, 2011) and editor of Beyond religious borders: Interaction and intellectual exchange in the medieval Islamic world (Philadelphia, 2011), as well as numerous articles on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic literature. She is currently researching the Near Eastern versions of Toledot Yeshu and directs a Minerva Foundation funded project focusing on the Judeo-Arabic manuscript collections of the Russian National Library.

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Renana Keydar

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

renanakeidar@gmail.com

Dr. Renana Keydar is a post doctoral fellow in the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds a degree in law and political science from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Prior to her graduate studies, Renana served as an advocate in the Israeli State Attorney's Office - High Court of Justice Department. Starting next year, Renana will join the faculties of law and humanities in the Hebrew University.

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Steven Weitzman

University of Pennsylvania

wsteve@sas.upenn.edu

Steven Weitzman serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and as the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitics Languages and Literatures in the department of Religious Studies. Weitzman pursues research in three overlapping areas. As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, his work draws on literary theory and religious studies to rethink questions of meaning and contextualization, and to explore the history of the Bible’s reception. A second line of research focuses on Jewish culture in the centuries following the biblical age, a topic that encompasses the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish-Greek writers like Philo and Josephus, and Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical works like 1 Maccabees. And a third area of scholarly inquiry involves efforts to bridge between Jewish Studies and other fields, as in a special issue of the journal Human Biology coedited with biologist Noah Rosenberg and devoted to putting genetics research into a deeper conversation with Jewish Studies.

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Vered Noam

Tel Aviv University

veredn@tauex.tau.ac.il

Vered Noam is full professor at the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud and currently the chair of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. She studies rabbinic literature; Second Temple literature and early halakhah. Among her publications: Megillat Ta’anit: Versions, Interpretation, History. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2003. 451 pp. (in Hebrew). From Qumran to the Rabbinic Revolution: Conceptions of Impurity, Yad Ben Zvi Press, 2010. 408 pp. (in Hebrew); Josephus and the Rabbis (with Tal Ilan), Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2017. 952 pp. (in Hebrew); Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature, Oxford University Press, 2018.