Karen Auerbach (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Professor Auerbach’s research focuses on the social history of Polish Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her first book, The House at Ujazdowskie 16: Jewish Families in Warsaw after the Holocaust, published in 2013, is a microhistory of Jewish families who were neighbors in an apartment building in Warsaw after the Holocaust, exploring the reconstruction of communities and identifications in postwar Poland. Her second book, The Nighttime Butterfly: A Young Woman in Warsaw at the Turn of the Century, is under contract with Yale University Press. Professor Auerbach’s other projects include information networks and the history of Yiddish in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. Her teaching focuses on modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and East European history.
Jagoda Budzik (University of Wrocław)
Assistant professor at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław. Budzik holds a degree in Hebrew and Theater studies from the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, and defended her doctoral thesis in 2019 on the images of Poland in the texts of Israeli authors of the third generation after the Holocaust.
Winner of the “Diamond Grant” of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education Award for Outstanding Scholars, as well as other Polish and foreign awards and scholarships. Recipient of several Polish and international research grants. Author of the monograph Eretz Sham. Poland in Narratives of the Israeli Third Post-Holocaust Generation (IBL PAN, Warsaw 2023), editor and translator of Jaakov Ha-Levy Levin’s Memoir from the Days of the Polish Rebellion, 1830-1831 (PWN, Warsaw 2022). Translator of literary and scholarly texts.
Her academic interests include topics related to the Holocaust and Holocaust memory, Hebrew literature and Israeli culture, society, and politics.
Dr Budzik is currently working on her next book, The Modern Goy. The Non-Jewish Other in Modern Hebrew Literature.
Yuval Evri (Brandeis University)
Evri is assistant professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. He is a cultural historian specializing in Sephardi/Arab-Jewish modern history and culture, with a particular interest in Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. His current book project traces the invention of the Mizrahim/Sephardim as go-betweens and mediators on the borderline that emerged between the Jew and the Arab and between Hebrew and Arabic and explores how the fluidity inherent in this position became a source of resistance to the dominant national and monolingual forces. His last book, The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes Press in 2020.
Kata Gellen (Duke University)
Kata Gellen is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. Her main areas of research and teaching include German literary modernism, German-Jewish studies, postwar Austrian literature and cinema, film studies, and sound studies. She is the author of Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) and numerous essays on writers including Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrud Kolmar, Günther Anders, and Thomas Bernhard, as well as essays on Weimar Cinema. Her book, Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, will be published with the University of Toronto Press in 2026. She is currently writing a book on contemporary transgressive Austrian cinema called Ulrich Seidl, Brutal Humanist.
Shai Ginsburg (Duke University)
Shai Ginsburg is chair of the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. Ginsburg's work focuses on Israel and its culture in its relation to Jewish nationalism and its variants. He is especially interested in the way works of culture shape the political imagination and vice versa, the engagement with politics shapes our perception of culture, society and history. In this context, he has written on Israeli and Jewish-international cinema, Hebrew literature, Israeli historiography and Jewish politics of the 19th and 20th century.
Malachi Hacohen (Duke University)
MALACHI HAIM HACOHEN (Ph.D., Columbia), Bass Fellow and Professor of History and Religion, is Director of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and member of the faculties of Jewish Studies and Slavic and Eurasian Studies. He teaches intellectual history and Jewish European history. He previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Reed College. His research interests focus on Central Europe and include social theory, political philosophy, and rabbinic culture – Midrash to Kabbalah to halakhic responsa. Hacohen writes on the Central European Jewish intelligentsia, on nation state vs. empire in Jewish European history, and on Jewish–Christian relations. He has paid special attention to science and culture in Vienna, to the international networks of European Jewish émigrés, and to trans-Atlantic Cold War liberalism. His Jewish European history is both traditionally Jewish and cosmopolitan European.
Sarah Hammerschlag (The University of Chicago Divinity School)]
Sarah Hammerschlag is a scholar in the area of Religion and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on the position of Judaism in the post-World War II French intellectual scene, a field that puts her at the crossroads of numerous disciplines and scholarly approaches including philosophy, literary studies, and intellectual history. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the editor of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Brandeis University Press, 2018). The Figural Jew received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, given by the Association of Jewish Scholars, and was a finalist for the AAR’s Best First Book in the History of Religions in 2011. She has written essays on Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Jewish Quarterly Review and Shofar, among other places. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Postwar Paris. Her most recent book is Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature and Political Imagination (2021), co-written with Constance Furey and Amy Hollywood.
Daniel Herskowitz (Duke University)
Dr. Daniel M. Herskowitz is the Smart Chair Family Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Duke University, working on the research project ‘Jewish Existentialism and the Legacy of Martin Luther’. He was previously a Career Research Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wolfson College and a postdoctoral fellow at the Religion Department at Columbia University, NY. Dr. Herskowitz is the author of over twenty studies on modern philosophy, modern Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian relations, political theology, secularization, and nationalism. His first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was awarded the 2021 Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Young Scholars Award for Scholarly Excellence. His essay “Between Exclusion and Intersection: Heidegger’s Philosophy and Jewish Volkism” was the winner of the Leo Baeck Year Book Essay Prize for 2020.
David Lambert (UNC-Chapel Hill)
https://religion.unc.edu/_people/full-time-faculty/lambert/
My work is in the Hebrew Bible and its history of interpretation. My goal is to further elucidate the Bible by making readers aware of the interpretive tendencies that they bring to bear on the biblical text. In that vein, I look to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.
This theme comes to the fore in my book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2016 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. It considers how the primacy accorded repentance within Hellenistic Judaism leads to the development of a series of interpretive practices whereby Jewish and Christian communities read repentance back into Scripture. It asks what it might mean to read the Bible without this penitential lens and, through a close reading of a series of biblical and extrabiblical passages, offers alternative descriptions of a variety of ancient Israelite practices and phenomena: fasting, appeal, confession, the phrase, “return to YHWH,” and prophecy, as well as redemptive expectations among sectarians in the Second Temple period.
I am now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices. In 2017-2018, I was on leave pursuing these questions as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group working on “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Culture.” Articles on the topic include: “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134:3 (2015); “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016); and “‘Desire’ Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation” in Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity (2019).
In my teaching, I also aim to integrate historical critical approaches with attention to the history of interpretation in such courses as “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature” (Reli 103) and “The Bible and its Translation” (Reli 603). My main pedagogical goal is to train students to become critical readers of texts by gaining awareness of their own interpretive presuppositions.
Finally, Reli 602, “What is Scripture? Formations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon?” represents for me another research interest, namely, in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture. What is Scripture, and how did we arrive at the concept? Is Scripture a uniform idea and was there, therefore, a singular canonical process, or is the very idea of Scripture itself contested and multiform? This project will be appearing as a monograph, “Is Bible Scripture? Assembling the Biblical in Ancient Judaism and Beyond” with Yale University Press. An initial article on the topic has been published: “How the ‘Torah of Moses’ Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47:1 (2016).
Joseph Lam is a scholar of the languages, texts, and literatures of the ancient Near East, focusing on the diverse written traditions of the Levant (Syria-Palestine) in the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, including the Hebrew Bible and the texts from ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra). He is particularly interested in the elucidation of ancient religious thought and practice through the analysis of (sometimes difficult-to-decipher) written sources. At the same time, he maintains an active engagement with general questions in the linguistic study of Hebrew and in comparative Semitic linguistics.
His first book, titled Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (Oxford University Press, 2016), examines the religious notion of sin through the most prominent metaphors used to express the idea in the Hebrew Bible, set against the background of the ancient Near East. Informed by a deep engagement with theoretical perspectives on metaphor coming out of linguistics and the philosophy of language, he demonstrates the pervasiveness of four root metaphors for sin in Biblical Hebrew—sin as “burden,” “account,” “path/direction,” and “stain/impurity”—revealing patterns in the understanding of sin that are developed in different ways in later Jewish and Christian literature. His current book project reconsiders the relationship between the notions of sin and sacrifice in ancient Israel in light of other sacrificial traditions from ancient Syria-Palestine and Anatolia. He has developed a course for Wondrium (The Great Courses) on “Creation Stories of the Ancient World,” and is a current member of the SBL Council.
At Carolina, he regularly teaches courses on Classical Hebrew language as well as on the history, culture, and literature of the ancient Near East. He also offers periodic, targeted instruction in ancient languages beyond Hebrew at the graduate level (e.g., Akkadian, Aramaic/Syriac, Ugaritic).
Julie Mell (NC State University)
Julie Mell is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She teaches courses in medieval history and Jewish history. Her research focuses on the Jewish communities in medieval Europe. Her book The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender (Palgrave, 2017) challenges commonplace narratives about Jews and their moneylending function in the commercialization of Europe. She has published articles in Jewish History, Jewish Historical Studies, and the Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte Kultur und Museumswesen, and received fellowships from the Yad HaNadiv, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the American Association of University Women.
Eva Mroczek (Dalhousie University)
My research stands at the intersection of early Jewish literary cultures (including the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic literature) and Book History. My first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP 2016), illustrates how early Jewish writers imagined their own sacred writing before the Bible existed as a concept. The book was the finalist for the 2018 AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize, the winner of the 2017 De Long Book History Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the winner of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Prize for Theological Promise. I am currently completing my second book, Out of the Cave: The Possibility of a New Scriptural Past, an intellectual history of manuscript discovery stories and what they tell us about history, the Bible, and ourselves. My next project is a guide to imaginary books in ancient and medieval Jewish lore.
Michele Rivkin Fish (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Since 1993, I have undertaken ethnographic and text-based research on health and gender in Russia to understand the broader social and political changes in that country since the end of state socialism. My work has examined Russia’s health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, sex education, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure well-being among privatization and nationalism. My first book, Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indiana UP 2005) made two overarching arguments. First, by showing how Western observers and Russian professionals both highlighted the importance of individuals’ moral change, rather than policies ensuring collective well-being, the book critiqued assumptions that the end of state socialism ushered in a collectively empowering democratization. Second, it detailed how the institutional contexts of Soviet health care and state policy – and ongoing changes occurring to them-- affected the micro-negotiations of biomedical power between doctors and women patients. Processes of medicalization, I contend, are shaped by political-economic conditions and specific health care systems; critiques of medicalization are not universal but arise in response to such local conditions.
My second book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (forthcoming, June 2024, Vanderbilt University Press) traces the work of health professionals, writers, and activists who drove a revolution in Russian reproductive practices by enabling the routine use of abortion to be replaced with contraceptive habits. The book spans six-and-a-half decades of Soviet and post-Soviet history, beginning from the re-legalization of abortion in 1955 and extending through the second decade of the 21st century. Detailing the rise of family planning institutions for both clinical and educational goals, the book reveals how Russian contraceptive advocates built a culturally-salient form of liberalism by emphasizing that contraceptive habits would strengthen families and increase fertility. Still, opponents of family planning succeeded in discrediting and defunding these new institutions on the basis of claims that they would reduce fertility and thereby pose a threat to Russia’s national security. The book reveals Russian nationalists’ overriding focus on reproductive and demographic sovereignty at the expense of science and women’s health.
I am currently working on a study of the work of the Russian demographer, Anatoly Vishnevsky, for insights into the ways liberal critiques developed during the late Soviet and post-Soviet era in the public outreach of Russian social sciences.
Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv University)
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Full Professor, teaches rabbinic literature in the department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel-Aviv University. In 2013 he was elected to the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. He has written on Midrash and Mishnah, as well as on issues of self-formation and collective identity in Second-Temple Judaism and rabbinic literature. Among his publications are: Demonic Desires: YETZER HARA and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia 2011); Body and Soul in Ancient Judaism (Modan: Tel Aviv 2012); The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple Gender and Midrash (Brill: Leiden 2012); Goy: Israel’s Others and the Birth of the Gentile (with Adi Ophir) (OUP: Oxford 2018; won the Goshen-Goldstein prize for the best book in Jewish Philosophy for the years 2016-2018); Between Mishnah and Midrash: The Birth of Rabbinic Literature (Open University 2019).
Ruth von Bernuth (UNC-Chapel Hill)
My research interests are in German and Yiddish literature and culture of the late medieval-early modern period, or the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, with a special interest in the sixteenth century. I have worked on ideas of natural folly, the 19th-century constructs of mental illness and mental disability, in early modern German literature. Combining my research on folly and my interest in Yiddish literature, I am also interested in Jewish carnivalesque culture including the tales of the “wise men” of Chelm. My most recent research focus is the Bible and Biblical literature in Yiddish.
In 2012-13, I held a Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies from the Rothschild Foundation in Israel as well as a Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. In 2013, I spent a semester as a Alfried Krupp Junior Fellowship at the Wisssenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Greifswald, Germany. Since 2017, I serve as the Mercator fellow of the Research Training Group “Religious Knowledge in Pre-modern Europe” at the University of Tübingen.