JEWISH STUDIES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Department of German
- People
Anna Parkinson (Ph.D. Cornell University, 2007), Associate Professor in the Department of German, affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, advisory board member of the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern and the Critical Theory Cluster, specializes in twentieth-century German literature, film, and critical thought. Her book, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), is a literary-historical study that contests the long-standing reading of postwar West German culture as emotionally stagnant. Instead, her book explores the plethora of highly volatile affects at work in the newly democratized public sphere of the Federal Republic of Germany. She is currently working on two projects: the first is a series of essays addressing the Jewish-German author and psychoanalyst Hans Keilson's writings and biography. Her second project is linked to a comparative German-South African focused study on modalities of evidence in forensics and art, drawing on her involvement as co-convener (with Professor Sarah Nuttall, Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research /WISER, University of Wits, Johannesburg, SA) of the project "Trauma, Politics, and the Uses of Memory," in the Andrew W. Mellon Project "Critical Theory in the Global South" (2017-2020) in the Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern (partner university in the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs). See: http://www.criticaltheory.northwestern.edu/mellon-project/critical-theory-in-the-global-south/
Her research and writing have been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., the German Literary Archive (DLA) at Marbach, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Association for Women-in German, and the "Languages of Emotion" Excellence Cluster at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2019/2020 she will take up a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship. Parkinson received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2018).
Anna Parkinson
Associate Professor in the Department of German
Phone number: 847-467-5173
Office location: Kresge Hall, 3-321
a-parkinson@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Pritzker School of Law
- People
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer specializes in the Talmud and other Rabbinic Literature. His 2005 Columbia University doctoral dissertation entitled "Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud" was awarded the Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies in 2007.
Wimpfheimer's work focuses on the Babylonian Talmud as a work of law and literature. His book Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories implicates a new methodology of reading talmudic law thickly by incorporating oft-ignored cultural concerns within its understanding of the law. The result of such an expansion is a textured description of Jewish law and an illuminating window onto rabbinic Judaism in Babylonia.
Wimpfheimer's The Talmud: A Biography was published by Princeton University Press in 2018 and received the National Jewish Book Award (Jew ish Edu ca tion and Iden ti ty Award in Mem o ry of Dorothy Krip ke) from the Jewish Book Council. The Talmud: A Biography embraces the conceit of the biography to tell the story of the Talmud's life from its pre-origins to the full extent of its reception down to the present. The book will be out in paperback in 2020.
Wimpfheimer produced a massive open online course (MOOC) on Northwestern's Coursera channel that is available here. You can also access the in-class materials from his Winter 2020 Introduction to Judaism here.
Barry Wimpfheimer
Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Pritzker School of Law
Phone number: 847-491-2618
Office location: Crowe Hall, 4-140
barry@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Department of History
- Associate Professor of History
- People
Benjamin Frommer, Associate Professor of History, is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was also published in Czech translation (Prague: Academia, 2010), and co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2020). His current book project, The Ghetto without Walls: The Identification, Isolation, and Elimination of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, 1938-1945, examines the wartime destruction of one of the world's most integrated and intermarried Jewish communities. His research and writing have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and held the Wayne V. Jones Research Professorship in History (2010-2012) and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2013-2016). At Northwestern Frommer has served as the History Department Director of Graduate Studies (2005-2008), the Director of the European Studies Major (2006-2009), and the inaugural Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation (2013-2016).
Benjamin Frommer
Associate Professor in the Department of History
Phone number: 847-491-2877
Office location: Harris Hall, 206
b-frommer@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of Education and Social Policy
- Learning Scientist
- People
Danny M. Cohen is a learning scientist in the School of Education and Social Policy. Concerned with collective memories of atrocity, he focuses his teaching and research on the design of community programming for social justice, memorialization and museum design, and appropriate and inappropriate pedagogies for educating about violence. Danny is the founder of Unsilence Project, a series of educational experiences for teenagers and the public that bring to light marginalized narratives of the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights. Danny has won a number of teaching awards at Northwestern University. He is an appointed member of the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission, he sits on the editorial advisory board of the journal The Holocaust in History and Memory, and he was a Faculty Fellow of the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Danny is a writer of human rights fiction for young adults, including his novel Train set in 1943 Berlin, and the choose-you-own-pathway story The 19th Window.
Danny M. Cohen
Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of Education and Social Policy
Office location: Annenberg Hall, 114
dannymcohen@u.northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Head of the Department of Economics
- Israel Studies Visiting Scholar
Prof. Peled is Head of the Department of Economics and Senior Consultant to the Vice President and Dean of Research at the University of Haifa in Israel. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Technion University's Neaman Institute. Prof. Peled's research focuses on Economic Growth, Economics of R&D and Innovations, Monetary Theory, as well as the Economics of Uncertainty.
Prof. Peled is involved in academic research and in public policymaking on the economics of research and development, the economics of national security, innovation and technology, and monetary economics. Prof. Peled will be offering public lectures as well as a graduate seminar through Northwestern's Department of Economics.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director
- Member of the Administrators and Staff
- Director ( on Sabbatical 2022 - 2023 Academic Year )
- Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies Associate Professor in the Department of History
- People
David Shyovitz (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2011), is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, and Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. His research focuses on medieval European intellectual and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations. He is the author of A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Penn Press, 2017), and has been a visiting fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His current book project, "O Beastly Jew!" Jews, Animals, and Jewish Animals in the Middle Ages, explores the overlapping ways in which Jewish and Christian authors and artists distinguished humans from animals, and Jews from Christians, over the course of the Middle Ages.
David Shyovitz
Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies; Associate Professor in the Department of History
Phone number: (847) 467-1967
Office location: Harris Hall, 314
davidshy@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director
- Member of the Administrators and Staff
- Assistant Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies Assistant Professor of Instruction in Jewish & Israel Studies
- Assistant Professor of Instruction
Dr. Maayan Hilel is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Jewish & Israel Studies, and Assistant Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. She is a historian of the modern Middle East specializing in the cultural and social history of Palestine / the Land of Israel. Her book manuscript explores the emergence of modern leisure culture in Palestine's urban centers during the formative years of British rule (1918-1948). Relying on relational history, it examines intercommunal relations and cultural transformations within Jewish-Zionist and Palestinian-Arab societies. Through archival research in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, her research focuses on the ways in which members of marginalized social groups such as women, children, workers, and villagers participated, experienced, and interpreted major historical changes that unfolded at that time. In her current research project, she focuses on the history of children and childhood in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. Before joining the Crown Family Center, she taught in the Department of History at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Alongside her academic pursuits, she also specializes in guiding bi-national groups on issues of conflict resolution, human rights, and gender equality.
Maayan Hilel
Assistant Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies; Assistant Professor of Instruction in Jewish & Israel Studies
Phone number: 847-491-5923
Office location: Crowe Hall, 5-167
maayan.hilel@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Senior Lecturer Emerita in Hebrew Language
- Emeritus Faculty
- People
A native speaker of Hebrew, Professor Grad coordinated the Hebrew language program at Northwestern from 1979-2016. She taught courses in Hebrew language and literature as well as applied linguistics. Grad has published beginning and intermediate-level Hebrew textbooks.
Job Titles:
- Crown Visiting Professor in Israel Studies Visiting Professor in the Department of History
- People
Elie Rekhess
Crown Visiting Professor in Israel Studies; Visiting Professor in the Department of History
Phone number: 847-491-3984
Office location: Crowe Hall, 5-149
e-rekhess@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization
Guy Ehrlich (Ph.D., Tel Aviv University, 2021) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. In the past year (2021-2022) he was an Einstein Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His Ph.D. dissertation is a monographic study of Israeli author Yehudit Hendel (1921-2014); and his current project focuses on Lea Goldberg's shelved novel Avedot (Losses), which was written during the mid-late 1930s, but first published only in 2010. He is interested in modern Hebrew literature, Israeli culture, gender studies, and feminist and queer theory. His articles were published in Mikan: Journal for Literary Studies (2019), Jewish Social Studies (2020), Ot: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory (2021), and Shofar (forthcoming, 2024). His book manuscript - titled The Empty Places of Yehudit Hendel - has recently won the Yaacov Bahat Prize for Best Original Scholarly Book Manuscript in Hebrew (2022).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Instruction ( Hebrew ), Jewish Studies and MENA Languages
- People
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Department of History
- People
İpek K. Yosmaoğlu (PhD Princeton, 2005) is an associate professor of History at Northwestern University, and the author of Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood, 1878-1908 (Cornell University Press, 2015). Her research and teaching interests include nationalism, political violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing at the intersection of empire and nation states. She is currently working on a project about the historical evolution of the Turkish state's minority policies with a focus on Ottoman (and subsequently Turkish) Jewish communities from the late nineteenth century until the beginning of the multi-party regime in Turkey in the 1950s. She is also preparing a volume co-edited with Kerem Öktem of the University of Graz, Austria, on Turkish-Jewish diasporas.
Jonathan Brack (PhD, University of Michigan, 2016) is Assistant Professor of the Histor y of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Middle East at the Department of History. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2020-2023) and a Martin Buber Society of Fellows postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017-2020).
His research, which combines cultural and intellectual history, political thought, and theory of religion, focuses on the intersection of inter-religious encounters (mainly between Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Inner Asian traditions) and sacral kingship across Mongol-ruled Eurasia and in the eastern Islamic world.
His first book, An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023), explores the debates and polemical writings of the powerful Persian vizier and Jewish convert to Islam Rashid al-Din (d. 1318). The book demonstrates how he drew both on his experiences with the Buddhist newcomers and on his in-depth knowledge of the Mongol tradition, to creatively experiment with new types of Islamic sacred sovereignty. On its broadest level, An Afterlife for the Khan is concerned with how religious agents persuaded rulers to relinquish their divinized claims for a more constrained, monotheist model of royal authority, and how sacral immanentist kings found ways to hamper their efforts. He coedited the volume Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020), and his articles have been published in Past & Present, Modern Asian Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.
He is currently engaged in two book projects. The first, Persian Israelites, examines the place of Judaism and histories of the Israelites within Islamic Persianate empires, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, from Iran to Central Asia and India. Research for this book project is carried out in Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Persian. The second book project is a study of the relationship between science and religion in Mongol Eurasia. It asks how the Mongols' religious logic impacted the cross-cultural exchange of scientific knowledge within and beyond the Mongol Empire.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Administrators and Staff
- Program Assistant
Professor Seeskin specializes in Jewish Philosophy, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and Philosophy of Religion. His work uses classic texts in the history of philosophy to shed light on problems of perennial interest. His most recent books include The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion and Culture (2010), Maimonides on the Origin of the World (2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides (2005). Previous books include Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy (2001), Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides (2000), Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (1990) and Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed (1991). He has won several teaching awards at Northwestern and was recently appointed co-editor of the Cambridge Comprehensive Survey of Jewish History, Religion, and Culture.
Kenneth Seeskin Philip M. and Ethel Klutnick Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization; Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies k-seeskin@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Instruction, School of Education and Social Policy
- People
Lilah Shapiro is a sociologist in the School of Education and Social Policy. Lilah's areas of teaching and research include; sociology of knowledge, religion, race/ethnicity, social class/social location and identity in the American context. In both her work and her teaching, Lilah has a particular focus on how these categories are interrelated and co-constructed. She is currently completing her first book, which explores the "back story" of Gen X Ba'alei Teshuvah. Lilah is a two-time recipient of the SESP Outstanding Instructor Award, is on the ASG Faculty Honor Roll, and she is a Faculty Fellow in the Culture and Community Studies residential college.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Lucille Kerr‘s areas of specialization include twentieth-century Latin American literature, with emphasis on narrative fiction, the Boom and post-Boom eras, literary culture since the mid-twentieth century, literary theory, and, more recently, Latin American Jewish literature and culture, especially in the Southern Cone. She is affiliated with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Jewish Studies Program, and is among the Associated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. Her publications include Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig (U of Illinois P), Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Duke UP), and (co-edited) Teaching the Latin American Boom (MLA). She is also founder and director of the web-based Latin American Literature and Film Archive. Her current research draws from participation in an NEH seminar on "Jewish Buenos Aires" and deals with Argentine Jewish narrative and film in relation to prevailing Boom and post-Boom currents. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 1999-2002 and 2003-2006.
With the support of the Sava Ranisavljevic Endowment in WCAS, she has promoted teaching and research on Latin American Jewish topics at Northwestern through the addition of new courses in the field, development of library holdings, and visits by distinguished Latin American Jewish figures. In 2008-09, Marjorie Agosín (Chilean writer & human rights activist), Edna Aizenberg (scholar), Ana María Shua (Argentine writer), and Saúl Sosnowski (scholar) came to Northwestern; in 2009-10, visitors included Ruth Behar (scholar, filmmaker, poet) and Erin Graff Zivin (scholar).
Lucille Kerr
Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Phone number: 847-467-6698
Office location: Crowe Hall, 3-131
lckerr@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Hebrew and Yiddish Literature
- People
Before joining Northwestern's faculty in 2005, Dr. Moseley taught a wide variety of courses on Hebrew and Yiddish literature at graduate and undergraduate levels at New York, Harvard, Oxford, and Johns Hopkins universities. Shortly after his arrival, he published Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (2005), which won a Koret Foundation Jewish Studies Publication Program prize. The book investigates the development of autobiography among the Jews in Eastern Europe from the 19th century to the period just around World War I, focusing on works written in Hebrew, but also considering Yiddish and German works, as well as the interaction among these languages of Jewish expression in this period. He is now working on his next book, From People of the Book to Literary Nation: On the Emergence of Literature in Jewish Eastern Europe. In exploring the cultural, social and ideological ramifications of the painful transition experienced by the secular, or secularizing, sector of East European Jewry, Moseley is seeking to shed light on how Jewish writers and (even more importantly) readers began to construct modern Jewish identity. He has close links with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where he worked as an Assistant Archivist from 1987-91, and then initiated a project to prepare an English language anthology of the interwar youth autobiography collections housed in the YIVO Archives, for which he received a major grant from the National Endowment of Humanities. He chaired the editorial committee and wrote the introduction for the resulting volume, Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002).
Job Titles:
- Member of the Administrators and Staff
- Program Administrator
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Ben - Gurion University
Noam Tirosh, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, hosted by The Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. His research focuses on the relationship between memory, media, and justice. His work has been published in the journals The Communication Review, Telecommunication Policy, Critical Studies in Media and Communications, The Information Society, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and others. Tirosh has participated in various international conferences and his 2015c article "Revisiting the Right to be Forgotten" was awarded "best student paper" by the Research Conference on Communication, Information, and Internet Policy (TPRC). A public intellectual, Tirosh publishes opinions in different Israeli newspapers and online, and he contributes to current public discourse in Israel. With his permanent home in southern Israel, Noam is living in Chicago this academic year, together with his wife and family.
Job Titles:
- Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, Department of German and Program in Comparative Literary Studies
- People
Peter Fenves is the author of A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (1991), "Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard (1993), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (2001), Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (2003), The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (2011), and Walter Benjamin entre los filósofos (2017). He is the editor of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (1993), the co-editor of "The Spirit of Poesy": Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Philosophy in Honor of Géza von Molnár (2000) and Points of Departure: Samuel Weber between Reading and Spectrality (2016). He re-issued and added an extensive introduction to Max Brod's important novel from the early twentieth century, Tycho Brahe's Way to God (2006), in which Kafka and Einstein are fused in the figure of Johannes Kepler. Two volumes he is co-editing are scheduled to appear in the coming years: Werner Hamacher, Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin and Walter Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence. The latter volume will include a new translation of Benjamin's famous essay along with fragments he wrote during the late 1910s and early 1920s as well as translations of the writers and philosophers to whom Benjamin refers, including Erich Unger and Hermann Cohen. His forthcoming book, which is an expanded version of the aforementioned Spanish-language monograph, is entitled Walter Benjamin among Philosophers: On the Way to Messianic Nature.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus Theodore Z. Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies Professor in the Department of History
Professor Hayes specializes in the history of Germany in the 20th century, particularly the Nazi period. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including the prize winners Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era and Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, and most recently The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (ed. with John K. Roth), Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (with Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, and Moshen Zimmermann), How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader. In Fall 2016, W. W. Norton & Co. will publish his twelfth book, Why? Explaining the Holocaust. He is currently working on a study of German big business and the persecution of the Jews and a manuscript on German elites and National Socialism. His publications have appeared not only in English and German, but also in French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. A recipient of the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award and the Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, he also held a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the University's highest honor for teaching, in 2007-10. He has received research fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he is also currently the chair of the Academic Committee.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of Instruction Emerita in the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cook Family Writing Program
Phyllis Lassner is Professor Emerita in The Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Gender Studies, and Writing Program at Northwestern University. She has published on interwar and World War II women writers, including two books on Elizabeth Bowen, British Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust, as well as essays on Holocaust representation in literature and film. Her most recent book is Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2017). She was the recipient of the International Diamond Jubilee Fellowship at Southampton University, UK. Her current research and publications concern Holocaust refugee writing, representations of intermarriage in Nazi Germany, post-Holocaust film comedy, and video adaptations of Holocaust memoirs. She co-edited, with Victoria Aarons, The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. She serves on the Exhibition and Education Committees of the Illinois Holocaust Museum.
Phyllis Lassner
Professor of Instruction Emerita in the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cook Family Writing Program at Northwestern University
Office location: 555 Clark St., 2nd Floor
phyllisl@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Professor of Human Rights Law at Hebrew University
Since moving to the United States from her native Israel in 2015, Ronit Avitan Alexander has held numerous teaching positions, faculty appointments, and fellowships at esteemed institutions around the world. She is currently a lecturer in the Hebrew faculty at Northwestern University (Illinois) and a teaching fellow for the School of Hebrew at Middlebury College (Vermont) as well as an instructor of Hebrew language at the Academy of Jewish Thought & Learning in South Africa. Her work with primary education includes serving as a Hebrew teacher at Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School (New York), Solomon Schechter Day School (Illinois), Bader Hillel High School (Wisconsin), and Derech Emunah High School (Washington).
Ronit's graduate thesis on language anxiety and ways to increase participation in the language classroom has led her to continue researching how best to provide meaningful feedback to language learners. Now, while back to being a student, in the Doctor of Modern Languages program at Middlebury College she engages a variety of language research methodologies to develop new insights and approaches to Hebrew language instruction.
Ronit regularly receives invitations to present her research at events, such as the National Hebrew Teachers' Conference, and is often consulted on how to improve Hebrew language curricula for schools. She also conducts workshops and webinars for Hebrew teachers on topics such as language anxiety, error correction and meaningful feedback, and technology tools in the language classroom.
Ronit holds an MA in Teaching Hebrew as a Second Language from Middlebury College and a BA in Psychology and Ancient Near East & Biblical Studies from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She is passionate about all languages and has had the opportunity to study and learn six foreign languages. With experience teaching Hebrew at all levels and ages and strives to create engaging lessons focusing on communication and modern, authentic materials.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation Lecturer in the Department of History
- People
Sarah Cushman, Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, came to HEF with broad administrative experience and a background in Holocaust history and education. Cushman served as Head of Educational Programming at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University for three years immediately preceding her arrival at HEF. From 2007-2013, she was Director of Youth Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (New York). While there, she completed her doctoral dissertation, The Women of Birkenau (Clark University, 2010), a social history of the women's camp in Auschwitz. She is currently revising the dissertation into a book. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, and Steven Spielberg.
Sarah Cushman
Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation; Lecturer in the Department of History
Phone number: 847-467-4408
Office location: Kresge Hall, 3-210
sarah.cushman@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- People
- Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow
Shai Zamir is the Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the early modern Iberian world and specializes in the history of the family and immigration, Jewish and Sephardi histories, and religious polemics. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and MA from Tel Aviv University where he studied in the Adi Lautman Program for Outstanding Students. He also spent a year at Hadar Yeshivah in Manhattan studying Talmud. He currently works on two projects: a book manuscript on the social and cultural history of friendship in the early modern Iberian world, and essay-long studies of Jews and New Christians in less studied parts of the Spanish empire. His work was supported by the American Historical Association; Center for Jewish History; John Carter Brown Library; Yad ha-Nadiv Foundation; Casa de Velázquez and other institutions.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
- People
Shira E. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, specializing in late antique rabbinic and contemporary Orthodox and ex-Orthodox Judaism, comparative forms of religious exit and queer/trans religious lives. A comparatist by training, Schwartz's interdisciplinary research combines textual, phenomenological and bioethnographic methods to explore how gender/sex and sexuality are constructed in minoritized ethnoreligious worlds and their educational institutions. Crossing the humanities with the social and biomedical sciences, Schwartz works across these methods to follow different kinds of religious and gendered crossers, highlighting the role of space in shaping the body and linking educational and biomedical environments as sites of religious and biomaterial reproduction.
Schwartz's research has been awarded support by the Association for Jewish Studies, Network for Research in Jewish Education, Jewish Orthodoxies Research Fellowship, and Humanities Without Walls, among others. Schwartz has previously served as a visiting scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in the Concentration for Education and Jewish Studies, and as a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. Schwartz has also completed Salivary Bioscience Training at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research at the University of California, Irvine and is developing a new method for conducting hormonal ethnography. Schwartz has organized numerous workshops, conference panels, collaborative projects and special publications, including "Unorthodox Media," an @theTable series on Netflix's My Unorthodox Life in Feminist Studies in Religion, 2022.
Schwartz's undergraduate teaching focuses on course offerings across the above topics, as well as in American Judaism, and religion and media, with particular relevance to the interdisciplinary concentrations of Religion, Sexuality and Gender, and Religion Health and Medicine. Through these courses, students are encouraged to explore ideas and follow their interests across a wide range of sources, modalities and time periods, and to become more conscious learners both in and out of the classroom. Schwartz holds a BA from Yeshiva University, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in Comparative Literature and graduate certificate in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Northwestern, Schwartz served as the inaugural Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies at Syracuse University.
Schwartz's current research projects include Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Reproduction, Evanjudaism, and Religion as Hormone.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Political Science
- Department of Political
- People
Shmuel Nili is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. He received his PhD in political science from Yale University (2016).
Nili's current work focuses on three related themes. First, he is interested in how we should think about the collective agency of "the sovereign people," both as a matter of abstract philosophy and as a matter of concrete public policy (see The people's duty, Cambridge University Press, July 2019). Second, he explores what political philosophy can contribute when facing obvious moral failures in public policy (the subject of an ongoing project). Finally, his current work also examines the moral value of integrity, whether applied to ordinary people, to authoritarian demagogues, or to collective institutions (see Integrity, personal and political, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2020). The same themes inform most of his journal articles, including essays in the American Political Science Review (2016), the Journal of Politics (2015 and 2018), the American Journal of Political Science (2018), and Ethics (2019 and 2020).
Nili's inquiries into these three themes started with a focus on corruption issues. In particular, he was interested in global corruption related to the "resource curse" and in philosophical questions that this "curse" raises about public property and democracy, as well as about the practical tasks of political philosophy. More recently, he has sought to connect his global theory arguments to domestic politics, paying special attention to morally fraught dynamics in various developing countries, in the United States, and in his native Israel.
Job Titles:
- Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History
- People
- Professor
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History. He teaches a variety of undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the History Department and the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies that include early modern and modern Jewish History, East European Jewish History, Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah; Origins of Zionism; History and Culture of Ukraine; and Slavic-Jewish Literature.
He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University (2001) and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Moscow University (1988). He has received several grants and awards, including Rothschild (Yad Hanadiv) Fellowship, Fulbright, Ephraim Urbach Doctoral Award of the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, DAAD Fellowship, Kosziuszko Foundation Award, and a Northwestern University Distinguished Teaching Award.
He has been a Sensibar Visiting Professor at Spertus College in Chicago; a Visiting Scholar at École des Hautes Études Sociales in Paris; and a Visiting Professor at the University Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine; a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been appointed a Fulbright Specialist on Eastern Europe; a Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Lady Davis Visiting Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Visiting Professor at the Free Ukrainian University in Munich, an honorary doctor of the University Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, a Recurrent visiting professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and the Kosciuszko Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw.
He has published several books, including Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (2008), The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009, winner of the American Association of Ukrainian Studies book award), Lenin's Jewish Question (2010), and The Golden Age Shtetl (2014, paperback 2015 winner of the National Jewish Book Award).
"With Paul Robert Magocsi he co-authored a monograph Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence University of Toronto Press, 2016, 2nd edition, 2018), which appeared in English and Ukrainian. Presently he is working on a book-size project National Democracy Behind Bars: Ukrainian and Jewish Dissidents in the Gulag and Beyond (1960-1990)." His books, book chapters, and articles appeared also in Greek, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Ukrainian.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of History
Phone number: 847-467-3399
Office location: Harris Hall, 317
yps@northwestern.edu