Dr. Jay Berkovitz, University of Massachusetts

Protocols of Justice: Marriage, Family and Community in Early Modern France

Dr. Berkovitz's project will investigate the civil proceedings of the Metz Rabbinic Court (1771-1789).

Rebecca Kahn Bloch, Oberlin College

Radical Judaism in a Radical Campus: The Emergence of a New Jewish Community at Oberlin College

This project will explore the varying facets of Jewish student life and engagement at a small, liberal arts campus whose student body is almost 30% Jewish but where active involvement in traditional Jewish campus life is minimal. By exploring both the present and the often radical past of Jewish life on the Oberlin campus, from the 1960s to the present, this project will endeavor to understand this fracture, to trace its historical roots using collections housed at the Center, and to contextualize this place and time not only within the history of Oberlin College, but also within that of American collegiate Jewish communities.

Jan Lanicek, formerly of the Czech Republic

Dr. Lanicek’s work focuses on bystanders’ studies and the responses of the Czechoslovak exiles to the Jewish plight between 1938 and 1948 as well as a comparative analysis of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Nazi-occupied East Central Europe.

Jolanta Mickute, Lithuania

Dr. Mikute is researching a manuscript on Jewish women nationalists in interwar Poland and Lithuania.

Mina Muraoka, Brandeis University

Jews and the Russo-Japanese War: The Triangular Relationship between Jewish POWs, Japan, and Jacob H. Schiff

Adam Sacks, Brown University

European Jews and the Question of Wagnerism

David Sclar, CUNY Graduate Center

He Will Flourish like a Cedar in Lebanon: the Life and 'After-Life' of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto

David Weinfeld, New York University

What Difference Does the Difference Make? Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Birth of Cultural Pluralism

Marianna Yarovskaya, University of Southern California (graduate)

Survival in Easter Siberia: The Other Jewish Side

This project will reveal one of the most intriguing chapters in 20th century Jewish and Russian histories - the creation in 1934, by Stalin, of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birodbijan in Siberia. At its peak, Birodbijan was home to 45,000 Jews, serving as a "homeland" for Soviet Jews. Over the decades, however, ravaged by disease and Stalin's "Great Terror", this Jewish community all but ceased to exist, and by the late 1990s, there were barely a few thousand Jews left in the region. Now, however, with the renaissance of Yiddish culture and language, just as it seemed that the Stalinist attempt to create a socialist Jewish homeland in the wilderness would fade into history, local Jews have effected a remarkable revival, even as the Russian parliament moves to remove the J.A.R. from the map of Russia.

Jennifer Young, New York University

American Jewish Communists, Anti-Fascism, and the Shaping of Ethnic Culture in the International Workers Order, 1930-1956

Polly Zavadivker, University of California at Santa Cruz

Soviet History, Jewish Fate: The War Writings of S. An-sky, Isaac Babel, and Vasily Grossman, 1914-1948

Miriam Intrator, Graduate Center, CUNY

Wartime Planning, Postwar Response: UNESCO and the Renewal of Jewish Libraries, Books and Reading in Post-Holocaust, Early Cold War Europe, 1944-56

Agnieszka Legutko, Columbia University

Possessed by the Other: Spirit Possession as Modern Jewish Identity: Dybbuk Possession Trope in 20th and 21st Century Jewish Literature and Beyond

Stanley Mirvis, Graduate Center, CUNY

The Jewel of a Sephardic Empire: A Social and Cultural History of Colonial Jamaican Jewry, 1670-1820

Joshua Z. Teplitsky, New York University

Between Court Jew and Jewish Court: David Oppenheim, the Prague Rabbinate, and 18th-Century Jewish Politics

Magdalena M. Wrobel, University College London

The Jewish Emigrants from Poland to Palestine, 1924-1928 (As an Example for a Transnational Migration of Polish Jews)

Helaine Blumenthal, University of CA, Berkeley

The Slansky Affair: Czechoslovak Political Purge Trials of 1952

In 2003, Helaine graduated from Swarthmore College with Highest Honors in the fields of History and English Literature. In 2005, she began her graduate career as a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. Her fields of specialization include Modern Jewish and East/Central European History. At UC Berkeley, she has been the recipient of several fellowships and honors including the Chancellor's Fellowship for Graduate Study, the Albert Newman Fellowship for Visually Impaired Students, and the Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Instructors. In addition to her time at Berkeley, she has spent a great deal of time in the Czech Republic where she engaged in intensive language training as well as historical research. She is currently conducting dissertation research at the Center for Jewish History where she holds the title of 2009-2010 Cahnman Foundation Fellow. Her dissertation entitled Communism on Trial: The Slansky Affair and the Making of Post-WWII Jewish Identities embraces her primary academic interests-i.e. Czech, Soviet, and Jewish history. She plans to finish the doctoral degree by May 2011.

Rebecca Cutler, University of PA

American Jews and the Politics of Medicine in the Post-World War II Era

Rebecca Cutler is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include American Jewish history, the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, and the history of medicine. Cutler is currently working on her dissertation entitled: The Politics of American Jewish Medical Activities in the Post World War II Era. She is currently the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fellow at the Center for Jewish History and the Annenberg History Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rachel Gordan, Harvard University

Post-WWII American Judaism: How Judaism Became an American Religion

Rachel Gordan is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at Harvard. She did her undergraduate work in American Studies at Yale, and received her masters in American religious history from Yale Divinity School. Rachel is working on a cultural and intellectual history of post-WWII American Judaism, “How Judaism Became an American Religion.” She grew up outside of Boston and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CJH Collections Used: Milton Steinberg collection at AJHS
YIVO's American Jewish Committee collection on anti-Semitism

Zachary Paul Levine, New York University

Chevrolets to Budapest: Transnational Cooperation and a Jewish Aid Regimen for the Cold

Zachary Levine is a PhD candidate in the Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History departments at New York University, and a 2009-2010 Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Fellow in Jewish Culture at the Center for Jewish History. His dissertation, Chevrolets to Budapest: Transnational Cooperation and a Jewish Aid Regimen for the cold War, 1948-1957, looks at the semi-clandestine efforts of a network of international Jewish philanthropies and the Israeli government to send material and financial aid to Jews in communist eastern Europe. Before attending NYU, Zachary received a Master’s Degree in History at Central European University where he completed a thesis on clandestine Jewish social organizations in Communist Hungary. His research interests include the history of East and Central European Jews, the politics of nationalist ideology and movements, the history and theories of material culture, and the study of science and technology. When not wiling away the hours on his dissertation, Zachary runs around photographing graffiti art and can sometimes before struggling to play his baritone ukulele.

Lara Rabinovitch, New York University

Feeding Identity: Romanian Jewish Immigrants in New York City and Montreal, 1890-1939

Lara Rabinovitch is writing her PhD dissertation at New York University on early 20th century Romanian Jewish immigrants and their foodways in New York City and Montreal. She is also co-editor of Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming), a book highlighting a young generation of scholars approaching Yiddish Studies through diverse interdisciplinary research.

Samuel Spinner, Columbia University

The Museum of the Jews: Ethnography and Literature about Jews in the 20th Century

Amos Bitzan, University of California Berkeley

Eastern European Jewry under Occupation, 1915-1918: Practice and Experience

Jessica Hammerman, Graduate Center, CUNY

The Heart of the Diaspora: French Jewry in Conflict During the Algerian War, 1954-1967

Jessica R. Hammerman is completing a dissertation which explores the French Jews of the 1950s in both Algeria and France. Her research has illustrated the diversity of political, cultural, and intellectual engagement with the Algerian War for Decolonization. Specifically, she is interested in how the war caused individuals to reflect their own religious or ethnic identities. Ms. Hammerman's research has earned her awards in both Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies. She is currently serving as Instructional Technology Fellow at CUNY Macaulay Honors College, where she helps both professors and students to effectively integrate the newest technologies into their curricula.

Kelly Scott Johnson, Harvard University

Sholem Schwarzbard: Life and Times of a Yiddish Assassin

David Koffman, New York University

The Jews' Indian: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination and Experience, 1824-1945

David S. Koffman is a doctoral candidate in NYU's departments of History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies, finishing a dissertation about encounters between Jews and Native Americans. He holds masters degrees in Anthropology (University of Toronto), Hebrew and Judaic Studies (NYU) and Public Administration (Wagner School of Pubic Service, NYU) and a BA in Anthropology (McGill University). He is a junior faculty member at the Network for the Teaching of Jewish History, a board member of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, and a member of the Jews/Media/Religion Working Group at the Center for Religion and Media. He has held numerous awards and fellowships, including those from the Wexner Foundation, the American Jewish Archives, the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Center for Jewish History.

CJH Collections Used: Ehrenreich Papers

Joshua Nathaniel Aaron Lambert, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Unclean Lips: Obscenity and the Jews in North American Literature and Culture

Josh Lambert is a Dorot Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He received his PhD in English literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2009, and his AB in English from Harvard in 2001. His publications include American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009), articles in Cinema Journal and The Jewish Graphic Novel (Rutgers, 2009), and many books reviews, interviews, and essays for Tablet Magazine, the Forward, and other national newspapers and magazines.

CJH Collections Used: The Henry Roth Papers

Jolanta Mickute, Indiana University, Bloomington

Modern, Jewish, and Female: Politics of Culture, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Poland and Lithuania, 1918-1939

Born in Lithuania, Jolanta is a doctoral student majoring in Jewish history, with minors in Eastern European / Russian history and Jewish Studies. From September 2003 onward, she has been enrolled in the Department of History and the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington. In September 2007, she left the United States for Eastern Europe to conduct dissertation research in Polish and Lithuanian archives. In late November of 2008, she returned to the States from her research to begin writing her dissertation and conduct supplementary research at the Center for Jewish History in NYC. Under the generous guidance of Prof. Jeffrey Veidlinger and Prof. Marci Shore, she is presently working on her dissertation at IU and applying to conferences both within and outside of the country, while getting ready to teach for a summer history survey on Modern East Europe at Indiana University. Currently, she is writing about Zionist politics surrounding the Jewish woman's body and sexuality in the rebirth process of the Jewish nation as well as in the formation of a modern Jewish identity in interwar Poland. The chapter thus explores Jewish patriarchal structures and the discursive power and reach of Zionist ideology. It is part of her dissertation entitled “Modern, Jewish, Female: The Politics of Culture, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Poland and Lithuania, 1918‑1939.” Her plan is to graduate at the end of this year.

CJH Collections Used: Vilna Collection
the Collection of Jewish Youth Autobiographies

David H. Horowitz, Columbia University

Fractures and Fissures in Jewish Communal Autonomy in Hamburg and Altona, 1750-1811

David Horowitz earned a doctorate from the Department of History at Columbia University, where he also received an M.Phil. and M.A. He is fascinated with the intersection between legal and social history and currently researches the legal jurisdiction of the Jewish community in 18th century Hamburg. David holds a B.A. cum laude from Brown University.

Emily Levine, Stanford University

Culture, Commerce, and the City: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg, 1919-1933

Ellie R. Schainker, University of PA

Imerial Hybrids: Russian Jewish Converts in the 19th Century

Elizabeth Strauss, University of Notre Dame

The Elderly in the Ghettos: A Study of Lodz, Vilna, and Riga, 1939-1944

Hilit Surowitz, University of Florida

La Nacion: Reconstructing Jewish Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Daniella Doron, New York University

Envisioning the Jewish Family: Children, Gender and Identity in Postwar France, 1944-1954

Jeremy Eichler, Columbia University

The Musical Migration from Germany to America, 1930s-1940s: The History of German-Jewish Composers in America

Dana Herman, McGill University, Canada

History of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization

Laura Jockusch, New York University

Collect and Record! Help Write the History of the Latest Destruction! Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe 1943-1953

Elissa Bemporad, Stanford University

The Red Star on the Jewish Street: The reshaping of Jewish Life in Soviet Minsk

Elissa Bemporad, Assistant Professor of History, received her undergraduate degree in Slavic studies from Bologna University, her MA in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and her PhD in history from Stanford University. She has taught at Stanford University, Hunter College, and The New School, and has recently been appointed Jerry and William Ungar Assistant Professor at Queens College, CUNY. Dr. Bemporad's research focuses on the social, cultural and institutional history of Eastern European Jews. Her book Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in a Jewish Metropolis, Minsk 1917-1939 , is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.

Maya Benton, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Shuttered Memories of a Vanishing World: The Deliberate Photography of Roman Vishniac and its effect on Modern Jewish Subconsciousness

Maya Benton is director of the Roman Vishniac archive and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Her work focuses on documentary photographs of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, the intersection of photography and Jewish visual culture, and contemporary photography and art in Israel. Maya has ten years of experience working in museums and holds a B.A. in Archaeology and Ancient Art from Brown University, an Ed.M. in museum and arts education from Harvard, and Master's degrees in German Art and Cultural Politics 1890-1945 and in the History of Photography from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; where she has not yet managed to finish her dissertation.

Joshua Karlip, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Modern Jewish Culture at the Crossroads: A Case Study of Jewish Socialism, Diaspora, Nationalism, and Yiddishism, 1905-1940

Amy Blau, University of Illinois

Afterlives: Translation of German Weltliteratur into Yiddish

Mia S. Bruch, Stanford University

The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men: American Jews and American Religious Pluralism, 1941-1960

Sarah Bailey Felsen, University of CA, Berkeley

German or "Jargon"?: Jewish Language Writing and Assimilation

Tamar Kaplan, University of PA

Rabbinic Authority in late Imperial Russia, 1905-1917

Julie G. Lieber, University of PA

Jewish Women during turn-of-the-century Vienna: A Study in Gender Construction

Edward A. Portnoy, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

The Creation of a Jewish Cartoon Space in the Yiddish Presses of New York and Warsaw, 1894-1939

Daniel B. Schwartz, Columbia University

Reclaiming Spinoza: The Heretic from Amsterdam in Modern Jewish Culture, 1832-1918

Marcy Brink-Danan, Stanford University

Mother Tongue: Turkish-Jewish Ideologies of Language and Kinship

Maria Ecker, Universitaet Salzburg, Austria

The integration of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the US, and the popular perception of the Holocaust in the US

Noah L. Gelfand, New York University

A People within and without: Sephardic Jewish Communities and Commerce in the 17th and 18th Century Dutch Atlantic World

Noam F. Pianko, Yale University

Reconstructing America: Diaspora Jewish Nationalism in American Jewish Thought, 1900-1950

David Ira Snyder, Princeton University

The Enduring Ghetto: Urban Renewal and the Jews in Modern Prague and Warsaw (Bridging Jewish and architectural history)

Alisa Braun, University of Michigan

Becoming Authorities: Jews, Writing, and the Dynamics of Affiliation, 1890-1940

Jessica Cooperman, New York Universiy

The Jewish Diaspora and the First World War: Germany and the US

James Loeffler, Columbia University

The Role of Music as Means of Jewish Social and Cultural Modernization in late Imperial Russia

James Loeffler is Assistant Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia and Research Associate at the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on East European Jewish history, Jewish music, and modern Jewish politics in Europe, Israel, and the U.S. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His book The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in Late Imperial Russia (forthcoming from Yale University Press), won the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2009 Musher Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies.

Avinoam J. Patt, New York University

Jewish DP Youth and Zionism in Post-War Germany

Avinoam J. Patt, Ph.D. is the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Sherman Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (published by Wayne State University Press, May 2009), which examines the situation of young survivors in Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust and their role in the creation of the state of Israel, and is the editor of a collected volume on Jewish DPs, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons (Wayne State University Press, February 2010). He is currently writing a new source volume (to published by the USHMM and Rowman and Littlefield) entitled Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, 1939-1940 for use by university professors and scholars.

Joshua Perelman, New York University

Choreographing Identity: Modern Dance and American Jewish Identity 1923-1964

Michaela Raggam-Blesch, Karl Franz Universitaet Graz, Austria

Jewish Women during turn-of-the-century Vienna

Michaela Raggam-Blesch, PhD at the University of Graz (Austria), is an associate at the Institute of "Culture Studies and the History of Theater" (IKT) at the "Austrian Academy of Science" (ÖAW) with a research project on the "Topography of the Shoah" in Vienna.

Her publications include:
Monography “Zwischen Ost und West. Identitätskonstruktionen Jüdischer Frauen in Wien” (2008) as well as papers Jewish feminist movements (Geschlecht, Religion und Engagement, 2005) and on women of Jewish descent (“Mischlinge”) surviving the NS-Regime in Vienna (Frauen1938, 2008). Co-editor of a brochure on the topography of the Shoah in Vienna (2008).

CJH Collections Used: Memoir Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute
Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) Interviews at the Leo Baeck Institute
Photo Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute