Meet the Participants 2022

I am a PhD student in the Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. I study the Ashkenazic diaspora in Italy at the beginning of the early modern era.

I am a historian by training, with more than fifteen years of experience in teaching, research and providing community services in Ethiopian higher education. As a person with a very close association with Ethiopian Jews (I was born and raised in Dembia district of northwest Ethiopia that boasted a large Beta Israel community until the 1990s), I showed a keen interest to study and conduct research on this community from a very early age. I have presented research papers in connection with the Ethiopian Jews at national and international conferences. I have served in different administrative positions including as Head of the Department of History and Heritage Management at the University of Gondar. I am currently a PhD candidate in History at the Queen's University, Canada and part of my research lies in exploring the various ways Ethiopian Jews had interacted with both the state and other societies in Ethiopia over the longue durée.

I am a PhD student in the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My dissertation examines Jewish charity in the communities of Zaragoza and Girona in the Crown of Aragon in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a lens through which to understand Jewish-Christian relations. I am also interested in the differences between Jewish men's and women's charitable practices.

Oskar Czendze is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA), and currently a Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York. His research interests include modern Jewish history, the cultural and social history of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States, and Yiddish culture. He is particularly interested in questions of belonging and place in the modern era, memory, and transnationalism.

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Hebrew University in the History Department. I  received the President of State Scholarship for Excellence and Scientific Innovation in 2022 and am a research fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. My research focuses on the philosophical crisis that occurred in reaction to Nazism and the Shoah. Researching the philosophical writings, lectures and debates that were published and recorded during or immediately after WWII, thereby, exploring and explaining the intellectual “stimmung” of the postwar period. The objective of this research is to shed light on the specific event of Nazism and the Shoah, where philosophers were trying to engage historical events which imbedded in them a metaphysical, ethical and epistemological rupture. I am also expanding on the intellectual and conceptual history of crisis.

Orit Gugenheim is a first-year Ph.D. student at Yale, in the Spanish and Portuguese department. She was born and raised in Mexico City, and went on to obtain her B.A. from Columbia in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Hispanic Studies. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century Hispanic literature, and the study of (Jewish) exile as an opportunity for transnational encounters and for (re)creating the homeland through literature.

Elena Hoffenberg is a doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago. Her work examines the social and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on the history of gender, sexuality, and the family.

I'm second year PhD student of Jewish Studies at Charles University in Prague. My research focuses on history of Jewish community in Cheb (Eger) in Middle Ages. Based on this topic, my interests lay especially in Jewish moneylending and legal status.

I am a PhD student in the religious studies department at EPHE (Paris), and my research focuses on the intersection of philosophy, religion, comparative law, and economic analysis of law. My thesis subject is the judicial oath in Talmudic law, especially in tannaitic literature.

Débora G. Kantor is a PhD student at the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires. Her doctoral research is funded by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina. She is a member of the Nucleus for Jewish Studies at the Institute for Social and Economic Development in Argentina, and her doctoral research is focused on the representations of Jewishness in Argentine cinema.

I am a PhD student in the field of Art Studies at the University of Warsaw (Poland). My work focuses specifically on the visual turn in the modern Jewish culture in relation to Zionist narrations, the processes of creation of the visual culture in Israel, and the formation of particular iconographic codes. My PhD thesis, tentatively entitled “Iconography of the Coast in the Visual Culture in Israel: Historical, Political, and Social Aspects” is planned to be a cross-section of the motif recognition in regard to issues such as emigration, modernity, and postcolonialism. 

I am a doctoral student in modern Jewish thought at NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. My research centers around the thought and legacy of Nachman Krochmal, including his overlapping receptions in Jewish thought, scholarship, literature, politics, and religious life.

I am a PhD student in the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My research focuses on translation in modern Hebrew through the oeuvre of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. I am interested in the tensions in the reappraisal of translation history, the import of foreign poetic forms, and the quest for stability in the practice of translation.

Liza Michaeli is a writer, born in Jerusalem.  She is earning a PhD in Rhetoric, with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Jewish Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. She works in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, movement, poetics, and Jewish philosophy.

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a third year PhD student in the Department of History at Yale University, where he focuses on American Jewish history and American political economy. His dissertation will explore questions of American Jewish citizenship and emancipation between the American Civil War and the 1930s, with a particular focus on race and racism. His most recent article appeared in the journal American Jewish History, in which studies Black perceptions of Jews in the American South. 

Ben Notis is a PhD student in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at UPenn. His dissertation focuses on Hebrew poetry written in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He is currently doing dissertation research at Hebrew U, and is exploring lyrical complaints about physical and mental breakdowns, betrayal and abuse, separation from friends and lovers, and the vicissitudes of Time. His other interests include medieval Arabic poetry, the histories of madness and emotions, and the cultural history of the human body.

Ekaterina Oleshkevich holds B.A. (2013) and M.A. (2015) degrees in Jewish Studies from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. From 2018, she has been a Ph.D. student at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, working on her dissertation “History, Culture and the Experience of Jewish Childhood in Late Imperial Russia.” Her research interests include history of childhood and family, women’s studies, modern Jewish history in eastern Europe, and social history.

Philip Schwartz graduated from the University of Wrocław with an MA thesis on neo-Hasidic literature in interwar Poland. Currently, he is working on a PhD dissertation about the entangled history of the Yiddish intelligentsia in Poland and the Soviet Union, 1939–1961, at the Polish Academy of the Sciences in Warsaw.

I am a graduate student working on my PhD in American Jewish History at Fordham University, studying Jewish doctors in America between 1850 and 1950. I am interested in the intersection of religion, medicine and how they shape American Jewish identity. My research focuses on Jewish doctors whose work engaged questions of traditional Jewish values and modern medicine.

I am a PhD candidate in Jewish history at the University of Bergen in Norway. My doctoral project explores different Jewish health care organizations and the relationship between ethnicity and philanthropy in interwar Argentina. I graduated from Jagiellonian University and Cracow University of Economics, and most recently from Brandeis University. I have previous work experience from the JCC Krakow, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in NYC, the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv, and the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA.

I am a first-year English Doctoral student at UC-Irvine, focusing on American Jewish Literature and comparing the American Jewish immigrant experience to the African American and Asian American experiences, specifically examining questions around generational trauma and relationships to temporality. My hope is to focus on female authors and the role of gender. I am also particularly interested in Cynthia Ozick's work and researching and writing on her later novels and essay collections. In the past I have taught American Jewish literature to high school students and created a curriculum around Jewish literature and identity building, along with leading adult Jewish book clubs and hosting an author series called, "Let's Talk," where I interviewed a variety of Jewish authors and thinkers.

Roni Tzoreff recently submitted her PhD thesis, written in the Department of the Arts, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the supervision of Dr Ronit Milano and Prof. Sara Offenberg. In the dissertation she explored the ambivalent relationship between Zionist/ Israeli art and modern Jewish traditional objects. She is interested in conceptualizing the broad cultural meaning of traditional objects, and the way its political, theological, aesthetic and gendered functions changed through the twentieth century.

Susanne Weigand is a PhD student at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Munich (LMU) and a Fellow of the Leo Baeck Institute. She is currently conducting her research as an independent research fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In her research, she takes a close look at the relationships between Christians and Jews in Regensburg in the 65 years leading up to the expulsion of the Jewish community based on the evaluation of official records from the city court. 

I am a PhD student studying history at the University of Pennsylvania. My research explores the circumstances preceding and following the emigration of over 751,000 Soviet Jews from the USSR prior to its fall. Using a socio-cultural lens, I focus on Soviet Jews' expectations for life outside the Soviet Union and how these hopes aligned (or misaligned) with the realities present in their diaspora.