Meet the Faculty Members 2022

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 of Jerusalem. 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 seventh year she is co-directing the Summer School.  

Avraham (Avi) Faust is Professor of Archaeology at the Department of General History at Bar-Ilan University. He specializes in the archaeology and history of the Bronze and Iron Age (“biblical archaeology”), especially from anthropological perspective. He is the director of the excavations at Tel ‘Eton and the survey in its surrounding, and of the National Knowledge Center for the History and Heritage of Jerusalem and its Environs. He is the author of 8 books and over 200 articles on these topics. 

Keren Friedman-Peleg is a senior lecturer and the Dean of the School of Behavioral Science and Psychology at the College of Management – Academic Studies, Israel. She obtained her PhD at Tel-Aviv University, in the department of Sociology and Anthropology and was a visiting scholar at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2016 and 2019), and a visiting assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley (2018 and 2021). Based on her ethnographic research on the politics of trauma in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she published articles in leading journals, such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and Transcultural Psychiatry (with Y. Bilu). Her book “A Nation on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel” was published by Magnes – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press (2014), and by the University of Toronto Press (2017). Her new manuscript, "Shifting Battlegrounds: The Politics of Resilience on the Border of Israel and Gaza" is currently under review.  

Anna Hájková is associate professor at the University of Warwick. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her article “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide“ was awarded the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship in 2013. She is working on two projects: a trade book on the Neuengamme guard Anneliese Kohlmann and queer Holocaust history. Her work on queer history of the Holocaust was published in Czech, German, British, US American, and Israeli newspapers. She guest edited a special issue of German History Holocaust, Sexuality, Stigma. Moreover, she is also working on a generational history of Communists in Central Europe, 1930-1970. 

Vivian Liska is Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is also Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. Her recent books include When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature and German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy. 

Tsafi Sebba-Elran is a senior lecturer of modern Hebrew Literature and Folklore, a member of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She is the author of: In Search of New Memories: The Aggadic Anthologies and their Role in the Configuration of the Modern Hebrew Canon (Yad Ben-Zvi Research Institute, 2017) and the editor of two other volumes on contemporary trends in the study of Jewish folklore. Her studies concern the formation of cultural memory in Israel, specifically the roles of national archives, anthologies and other collections as Zionist cultural agents, and the contribution of humorous and other popular genres to the construction of modern Jewish identities. 

Giddon Ticotsky is an Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Hebrew Literature Department. His research focuses on the canon of modern Hebrew literature, both on its own and in dialogue with European culture, and combines digital humanities methods with archival and bio-bibliographic expertise.  

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, and the award-winning books, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. Veidlinger is the chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, a member of the Executive Committee of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former vice-president of the Association for Jewish Studies. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from numerous agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. From 2015-2021 he served as Director of the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and from 1999-2013, he taught at Indiana University, where he was Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies, Professor of History, and Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

Steven Weitzman is the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and also serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. His recent publications include The Origin of the Jews: the Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, winner of a National Jewish Book Award; Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom, part of the award-winning Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press; and the coauthored The Jews: History, published in its third edition in 2019. He is currently writing a book that explores the role of the Ten Plagues story in how people in different ages understand and imagine disaster, provisionally entitled A History of Signs and Wonders.