North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar

FALL 2025– SPRING 2026 Seminar Dates and Speakers

FALL SEMESTER

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Yale University

• September 7, 2025 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, currently serves as Director of Graduate Study in both Religious Studies and Jewish Studies. Her areas of research and teaching include ancient Judaism and rabbinic literature, the study of time, the history of Jerusalem, interreligious polemics, and gender and sexuality. Her first book, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020), received a National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship and a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently writing two books, A Queen in Jerusalem: Helena of Adiabene and the Malleability of Memory and Jerusalem: A Feminist History, both under contract at Princeton University Press. She is also working on discourses of nighttime in rabbinic literature and in the ancient world. She is the co-editor of Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction (2023); Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context (2016); and Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity (2013). She has published numerous articles and pedagogical essays. Sarit received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Religion. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she spent a decade at Fordham University, where she served as Associate Professor of Classical Judaism in the Theology Department and Co-Director of Fordham's Center for Jewish Studies.

Marc Brettler (Duke University) and Edward Breuer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) 

• November 2, 2025 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Marc Brettler, a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Council of the Society of Biblical Literature, is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. The Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies Emeritus and former chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, he has also taught at Yale University, Brown University, Wellesley College and Middlebury College.

Dr. Edward Breuer is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry.His research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth century Jewish intellectual History in Central and Western Europe. This includes work on the German-Jewish Enlightenment, and most especially on the writings of Moses Mendelssohn; on the rise of Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Reform movement; and on the study of the Bible in the modern era. He completed an annotated translation of Mendelssohn's Hebrew writings (edited with David Sorkin) that was published as part of the Yale Judaica Series in 2018. He is currently working with Marc Brettler (Bible, Duke University) on a study of the Jewish reception of biblical criticism from the 18th century to the present.

Adam Cohn, UNC-Chapel Hill

• December 7, 2025; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Adam Cohn is Assistant Professor of Spanish and faculty in Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research on modern Spanish cultural production falls into three main areas: Hispanic Jewish Studies, Spanish Civil War literature, and the work of Federico García Lorca. Adam's current book project examines how Spanish philosephardi literary culture (1900-1950) increasingly problematized the nation-state and provided a platform for Jewish intellectuals to emerge into the public sphere. Theoretically, this project engages questions of memory, coloniality, and diaspora. He also has research interests in Sephardi Studies and literary translation.

SPRING SEMESTER 

Tamar Hess, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• January 25, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Tamar Hess is a senior lecturer and chair of the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary Hebrew poetry and prose, feminist literary criticism, and the cultural politics of autobiography. She is the author of Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography (Brandeis University Press), a groundbreaking study of how personal narratives shape and reflect national identity. She also co-edited Papers on Dahlia Ravikovitch, a critical volume on one of Israel’s most influential poets.

Dr. Hess’s research engages literature within historical, social, and ethnic contexts, with particular attention to gender-conscious readings. She has served on the editorial board of Prooftexts and chaired the Agnon Prize in Hebrew Fiction committee. Her work continues to shape the field of Hebrew literary studies through both academic inquiry and public scholarship.

Daniel Schwartz, George Washington University

• February 22, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Daniel B. Schwartz specializes in modern European and American Jewish intellectual, cultural, and urban history. He is the author of Ghetto: The History of a Word, which traces the various and contested meanings of the word "ghetto" from sixteenth-century Venice to the present. His other books include Spinoza's Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy and The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image, which was co-winner of the 2012 American Academy for Jewish Research's Salo W. Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish studies and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in history. He is currently working on a history of the modern Jewish intellectual in Europe and the United States as a social and cultural type, from the Dreyfus Affair in France at the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. His research interests include Jews and the city, Jewish historical consciousness, early modern and modern Jewish identities, Jewish secularism, Jewish socialism, and Jewish intellectuals.

Andrea Gondos, University of Michigan

• March 8, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

Andrea Gondos is the Stuart B. and Barbara Padnos Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought at University of Michigan.  

Gondos' scholarship explores early modern and medieval kabbalah in conversation with Jewish cultural and intellectual history. She is particularly interested in how esoteric knowledge was preserved, transmitted, and reimagined in the premodern period. Her recently published co-edited book, Life of the Soul: Jewish Perspectives on Reincarnation from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period (SUNY, 2024), explores wide-ranging theories Jewish mystics and philosophers have offered on the concept of reincarnation. Earlier research analyzed the literary characteristics of the medieval mystical classic, the Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Enlightenment), and its popularization among Jews and Christians in the age of print. Gondos' first monograph, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (SUNY, 2020), examined how the technology of print influenced the popularization of kabbalah in the early modern period paying special attention to the literary strategies and pedagogic objectives authors pursued. Her current book project centers on the gendered aspects of healthcare and wellbeing in early modern Jewish recipe books of magic and practical Kabbalah. In this monograph, she is particularly interested in uncovering the material aspects of Jewish magic by examining the types of healing strategies Jewish male miracle workers (Ba'alei Shem) deployed for the management and treatment of the female body and its reproductive functions.

Shatzmiller Fellows

• April 5, 2026; 3:00 pm Eastern time (Hybrid)

NCJSS welcomes presentations from the 2025-26 Shatzmiller Fellowship cohort.  The Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows honor Emeritus Smart Professor Joseph Shatzmiller, who taught at Duke University from 1994 to 2010. Among his many publications, he is best known for Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society.