Our Team

Laura Arnold Leibman is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center.  Her latest book Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.

She is available to speak both in-person and via zoom.

Website: https://www.lauraleibman.com/

CV: https://reed.academia.edu/LauraLeibman/CurriculumVitae

Laura Arnold Leibman is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center.  Her latest book Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.

She is available to speak both in-person and via zoom.

Website: https://www.lauraleibman.com/

CV: https://reed.academia.edu/LauraLeibman/CurriculumVitae

Blaise Albis-Burdige (Class of 2022) is an Economics major at Reed College. His passions lie at the intersect of markets, programming, and story telling. He is the President of the Reed Finance and Investment Club and facilitates database systems and web-design at Period.org, a global non-profit out of Portland fighting for menstrual justice.

Jeanne Abrams is Professor at the University of Denver Center for Judaic Studies and
University Libraries. She has published numerous books in American history, including
Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail: A History in the American West and A View
from Abroad: “the Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe.

CV:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17waYNRDy6Ebx17Dh6Ca_pKw5Uh_pv5Qs/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116023191767626483186&rtpof=true&sd=true

Dianne Ashton was Professor Emerita, Director of American Studies, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Rowan University. She published extensively in the fields of US Jewish and women’s history and served as editor of the journal American Jewish History.

Alan Astro is professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Trinity University in San Antonio. He researches Yiddish literature from Latin America and France.

Recent publications:

• Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Writing (2003, repub. 2021)
• Splendor, Decline, and Recovery of Yiddish in Latin America (co-edited with Malena Chinski, 2018)
• Autour du yiddish de Paris à Biuenos Aires (2021)

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Spoken languages: English, Spanish, French, Yiddish.

Ruth Behar is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her scholarly books include The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy. Other works include poetry, a documentary, and novels.

Website: https://www.ruthbehar.com/

Celia J. Bergoffen is Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History at the Fashion Institute of Technology, author of The Bronze Age Cypriot Pottery from Sir Leonard Woolley’s Excavations at Alalakh (Tell Atchana), articles on Mediterranean and New York City archaeology, and archaeological reports for the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and New York State Office of Historic Preservation.

Merrie Blocker is a former U.S. diplomat. She discovered the Jewish farming colonies set up by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Argentina and Brazil when she served as Director of the U.S. Cultural Center in Buenos Aires and as Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Merrie is the translator of the first literary work to reflect the life of immigrants to the Brazilian colonies, On a Clear April Morning. She is now working with Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Regina Igel, on a complete translation of Filipson, the first work by a woman to describe these colonies from which the chapter Adelia’s Wedding in Jews Across the Americas is taken. Merrie is also the creator of thebaronhirschcommunity.org relating the work of Baron de Hirsch assisting Jewish immigrants in the U.S. and Canada as well as Argentina and Brazil. Merrie is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon and holds a M.F.A. in Museology from Syracuse University. She lives outside Washington, D.C. where she works through the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS) to assist those groups that seek refuge today, by providing them with Spanish language translation and interpretation services.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

CV: https://thebaronhirschcommunity.org/merrie-d-blocker/

Adriana Mariel Brodsky is Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her work focuses on the history of Sephardim in Argentina. She has co-edited (with Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University) The New Jewish Argentina: Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone (Brill, 2013), which won the Best Book Award from LAJSA in 2013, and is the author of Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2016. A native Argentinian with a degree in Education and a Ph.D from Duke University, Adriana has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Tel Aviv University. She is currently finishing a manuscript on the role played by Jewish youth (1940-1976) both in Argentina, helping modernize and energize the local communities, and in Israel, as members of kibbutzim, keeping their Argentine and Latin American identities alive. 

Dr Edith Bruder is Research Associate at the French National Center for Scientific Research and at UNISA- University of South Africa and Senior Research Fellow at ISGAP, New York. She is the founding President of the International Society for the Study of African Jewry (www.issaj. com). Her main subjects of research are African Judaism and religious Diasporas, the representation of the Jews in African culture, globalization of religions, shifting religious identities and the discrimination of religious minorities. She is the author of The Black Jews of Africa, History, Identity, Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008 and 2012) and of Black Jews, Les Juifs noirs d’Afrique et le mythe des Tribus perdues (Albin Michel 2014) and of Juifs d’ailleurs. Diasporas oubliées, identités singulières (Albin Michel 2020 ), whose translation Jews from Elsewhere will be published by OUP ( forthcoming 2024).

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee, in person only. Languages: French.

Judah M. Cohen is Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Cultural Arts, Professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies, and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Indiana University–Bloomington. He is coeditor of the journal American Jewish History and recently published Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America.

Dr. Ariel Berger is a cultural historian focused on American Jewry. She earned her BA in History and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, MA in Art History at Columbia University, MA in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and MA and PhD at the University of Virginia. She lives in Los Angeles, where she currently holds the Sally Priesand Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (2023-2024). Dr. Berger tells the founding stories of American Jewish museums with women as protagonists. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women were excluded from the highest levels of Jewish communal institution-building because of their gender. Several Jewish women of the early 20th century envisioned art exhibitions that could offer a contextually new kind of belonging and identity to American Jews – one their male peers offered in more conventional realms. The then-contrarian work of these women reverberates into the most established American Jewish museums today, which still work to visually articulate American Jewish identity in a fragmented world, put Jews on the American cultural map, and centralize Jewish visual culture in places of Jewish worship, learning, and practice.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gK8qN100OByhKQashbOnlKXPL8Wo3gxy/view

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee, both in person and online. Languages: English.

Jessica Cooperman is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Religion Studies at Muhlenberg College and the author of Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism. She is also coeditor of the journal American Jewish History.

Paloma Cung Sulkin is a Mexican author, Yiddish teacher, and translator. Her works include the books Judíos por herencia, Mexicanos por florecer and Tierra para echar raíces: Cementerios judíos en México and the documentary Viaje alrededor de la casa.

Max Modiano Daniel is a teacher of Jewish History at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, CA. He earned a PhD at UCLA and has published several articles and chapters on Sephardi Jews in the United States.

Jacob S. Dorman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his B.A. with highest honors from Stanford University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. He is the author of many articles in venues such as American Jewish History and The Journal of African American History. He also wrote the prize-winning histories Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford 2013), and The Princess and the Prophet: Magic, Race, and Black Muslims in America (Beacon 2020). Dorman’s work has been supported by funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Inge Dornan is a historian who focuses on histories of race and gender in Britain and the Americas. She is Deputy Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences, and Division Lead of Politics and History at Brunel University London.

Zev Eleff is president of Gratz College. He is the author or editor of 12 books and more than 70 articles and essays in the field of American Jewish history. His most recent book is Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America (Univ. Illinois Press, 2023).

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Mark Fertig was Chair and Professor of Art and Design at Susquehanna University. He published, among others, Hang ’Em High: 110 Years of Western Movie Posters, 1911-2020, Take That Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War, all with Fantagraphic Books.

Tamara Gleason Freidberg is a PhD candidate in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at University College London (UCL). Tamara has published chapters on Jewish antifascism and Yiddish literature in Mexico. 

Michel Gherman is a Researcher at Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism and is adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is also academic director of the Instituto Brasil-Israel.

Maxwell Greenberg is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis  

Brian Hamm is Assistant Professor of History at Samford University.

Lori Harrison-Kahan is Full Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College. She is the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary; editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson; and co-editor of Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History. She also co-edited a reissue of Emma Wolf’s 1900 novel, Heirs of Yesterday, and the Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s writings titled The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled West of the Ghetto: Pioneering Women Writers and Jewish American Literary Culture.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Website: https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/english/people/faculty-directory/lori-harrison–kahan.html

Youtube:

Recent publications:

• https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/superwoman-and-other-writings-miriam-michelson
• https://www.heyalma.com/we-shouldnt-ignore-this-groundbreaking-jewish-novelists-disability/
• https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-jewish-roots-of-wonder-womans-pop-feminism
• https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/02/opinions/me-too-movement-history-jordan-michelson-harrison-kahan/index.html

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and she has used feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theoretical models in interpreting Jewish-Christian relations. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. Her forthcoming book, written with Sarah Imhoff, is Jewish Studies and the Woman Question. Also forthcoming is New Paths: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot Wolfson, co-edited with Glenn Dynner and Shaul Magid. With Umar Ryad she edited The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism. She has also edited Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel, her father. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is also the recipient of five honorary doctorates from institutions in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, and she has held research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: German, English.

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mv6A447lOPWcI1_E4b0WRdr06muJZxdk/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Dr. Michael Hober­man teach­es Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture at Fitch­burg State Uni­ver­si­ty. He is a grad­u­ate of Reed Col­lege and earned his Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Amherst. His pre­vi­ous books include A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History and New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America. Hoberman’s essays on Jewish American culture appear in Tablet Magazine. Currently, he is working on a book entitled Imagining Early American Jews, which explores the popular legacy of Jewish life in America up to the time of the Civil War.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Writings: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/michael-hoberman

Regina Igel is Professor Emerita (2021) at the University of Maryland, Portuguese Program’s former director. Her literary career includes Brazilian Contemporary and Jewish Latin American Literatures, having published Osman Lins, uma biografia literária and Imigrantes judeus, escritores brasileiros. Former Contributing Editor for Handbook of Latin American Studies, Library of Congress.

Steven Leonard Jacobs is Professor of Religious Studies & Emeritus Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies. Focus of research Hebrew Bible, Holocaust, Genocide, and Jewish-Christian Relations. Degrees from Penn State and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent publications:

• Antisemitism: Exploring the Issues; Religion and Genocide
• A Short History of Judaism and the Jewish People

CV:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D-j7yxYkGNGeAR7IZU6KRM0lietEP6UG/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991), Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998), and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore, 2011) as well as a finalist for Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua (2008). Other publications include: The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany; Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945 (ed.). Her newest book, published in 2020 is Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal.

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Publications: Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua (2008)

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher pursuing a PhD in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her poetic and historical work explore diasporic memory and the ways in which literary and historical works transmit the past, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and is grounded in the language and myth of the Talmud. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, and Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English and Spanish.

Website: rachel-kaufman.com

Recent Publications:

• Poetry Collection: Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021): https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/many-to-remember-by-rachel-kaufman/#:~:text=In%20her%20debut%20poetry%20collection,the%20poet’s%20own%20family%20histories.
• Translating History” in Rethinking History: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1793529
• “Sound and Sense: Poetic Form and Translating Sor Juana’s Amor es más laberinto” in Comedia Performance: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/comedia-performance/article-abstract/20/1/118/351309/Sound-and-Sense-Poetic-Form-and-Translating-Sor?redirectedFrom=fulltext
• “Historical Traces in Archival Poetry,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog: https://jhiblog.org/2021/05/12/archival-poetry/
• “The Myth of la Llave in crypto-Jewish Poetry,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog: https://jhiblog.org/2019/11/27/the-myth-of-la-llave-in-crypto-jewish-poetry-and-spanish-memory/

Misha Klein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the U of Oklahoma. She is Chair of the Clyde Snow Social Justice Award. Her book, Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo, addresses the relationship between ethnic and national identity, with the multicultural and transnational Jewish population as her entry point into an exploration of the meanings of race, class, and belonging. Other publications include: “Anthropology” in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, on anthropological contributions to Jewish Studies, both historical and through the “new Jewish ethnography;” and “Privileges of the First World: Reflections on Another Life in Brazil” in Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South. Her current research is a transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration with Brazilian historian Michel Gherman, in a wide-ranging project that considers the changing concept of race in Brazil; the circulation of transnational discourses on race, Israel, Zionism, and anti-Semitism; the shifting political landscape in Brazil, including the rise of the evangelical right-wing; the reverberations among leftist activists; and the impact of all of this on Jewish identity and political participation. Their publications include “From Beacon to Siren: The Transformation of Brazil from Racial Utopia to Racist/Antisemitic Dystopia.”

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English and Portuguese.

Recent Publications:

• Klein, Misha. 2012. Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in São Paulo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
• Klein, Misha. 2015. “Anthropology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, Laurence Roth and Nadia Valman, eds. Pp. 17-34. London: Routledge.
• Klein, Misha and Michel Gherman, 2021. “From Beacon to Siren: The Transformation of Brazil from Racial Utopia to Racist/Antisemitic Dystopia.” Revista Videre (Brazil) 13(28): 65-88, https://ojs.ufgd.edu.br/index.php/videre/article/view/15413/8410.
• Gherman, Michel and Misha Klein. 2021. “Aquela Noite: o lugar da Israel imaginária na nova direita brasileira.” Revista Anthropológicas, ano 25, 32(2): 111-140. https://doi.org/10.51359/2525-5223.2021.251633.
• Gherman, Michel and Misha Klein. 2019. “Entre ‘conversos’ e ‘desconversos’: O caso da influência da Nova Direita Brasileira sobre a comunidade judaica do Rio de Janeiro.” Estudios Sociales del Estado (Argentina) 5(9): 101-123. https://doi.org/10.35305/ese.v5i9.173.

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BYDdwL1u0atlrMS8bmJsB3JU19wFvQDs/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Academic website: https://ou.academia.edu/MishaKlein

David S. Koffman is the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry in the Department of History at York University. He is the author of The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (Rutgers University Press, 2019), winner of a 2021 Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and the editor of and a contributor to No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging (University of Toronto Press, 2021). He serves as the acting director of York’s Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, and as the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent publications:

• https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-jews-indian/9781978800861
• https://utorontopress.com/9781487523572/no-better-home/
• https://utorontopress.com/9781487528775/the-ever-dying-people/
• https://utorontopress.com/9781487554392/none-is-too-many/
• https://shop.mcmichael.com/products/william-kurelek-jewish-life-in-canada

Laura Arnold Leibman is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her work focuses religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center.  Her latest book Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.

She is available to speak both in-person and via zoom.

Website: https://www.lauraleibman.com/

CV: https://reed.academia.edu/LauraLeibman/CurriculumVitae

Sophia L. Levin is the Pediatrics Chaplain at Mount Sinai Hospital (NYC), and an independent scholar and researcher. She holds an MA from the Bard Graduate Center in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in American Studies from Yale University. Her work on Classical Reform Jewish approaches to death and dying, and the art and architecture of Salem Fields Cemetery, was published in the journal American Jewish History in 2017. (Lufkin, Sophia C. “A Home between Death and Life: Mausoleums as Liminal Spaces of Memory for Classical Reform Jews of Temple Emanu-El, 1890–1945.” American Jewish History, vol. 101:2 (April 2017), 121-161.)

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Dr. Frances Levine has served as the Interim Executive Director of the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum since September 2022. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology with a specialty in historical archaeology and ethnohistory from Southern Methodist University. She was chief executive of the New Mexico History Museum Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe from 2002 until 2014 and was the President and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society and Missouri History Museum from spring 2014 until summer 2022. Dr. Levine is the author, co-editor or contributor to several award-winning books with a focus on ethnohistory and archaeology of the Southwest, and the topic of conversos.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Publications:

• 2016 Doña Teresa Aguilera Y Roche Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth Century New Mexican Drama. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
• 2016 “Two Women Before the Inquisition,” IN Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition and New World Identities, Roger Martinez, Ron Duncan Hart and Josef Diaz, editors. New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe.
• 2012 “So Dreadful a Crime.” El Palacio 117(4):52–59.

Justin Jaron Lewis: I am a storyteller and scholar who loves the Yiddish language. My contribution to this volume is a translation of an editorial from Der Veker, a Yiddish-language journal that I have also written for. I am the author of Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), and the translator of Many Pious Women, a Yiddish work from Renaissance Italy in praise of women. At the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada) I teach in the Department of Religion and the Judaic Studies Program, where one of my predecessors was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi; my interviews with people who knew him then are available on line as the Winnipeg Jewish Renewal Oral History Collection. My course topics include Hasidism, Talmud, and Kabbalah, as well as “Storytelling and Religion” and “Religion and Sexuality.” My Ph.D. is from the University of Toronto, where Harry Fox was my Doktorvater; my love of storytelling was nourished by years of participation in the weekly Toronto gathering “1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling.” I am also a rabbi, ordained at the pluralistic Academy for Jewish Religion (New York), and a Maggid (Jewish teacher-storyteller) ordained by Yitzhak Buxbaum (his memory for a blessing).

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Yiddish.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IYRb8NM7toFuoTQzPkGrxCj1edhu7Sys/view?usp=sharing

Academic Website: https://www.JustinJaronLewis.ca

Recent Work: https://www.colorado.edu/post-holocaustamericanjudaismcollections/winnipeg-jewish-renewal-oral-history-collection

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@justinjaronlewis

“Hasidic Creativity in Yiddish Today” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbdt6RoRBXc

Julia R. Lieberman is a Professor of Spanish and Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. She is co-author and editor of Los Estudios sefardíes para estudiantes de español,  Sephardi family life in the Early Modern Diaspora, and Charity in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions.

Blanca Isabel De Lima Urdaneta is a Historian and Social Anthropologist and worked at the Francisco de Miranda University (Coro, Venezuela) until her retirement. She is a member of the Venezuelan National Academy of History and has published more than 50 books, chapters, journal articles and museum catalogs. 

Antropóloga Social por la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (México, DF). Maestría en Arquitectura Investigación y Docencia (UNAM, México). Doctora en historia por la UCV (2001). Docente titular jubilada de la Universidad Francisco de Miranda (UNEFM. Coro, estado Falcón, Venezuela). Miembro de número del Capítulo Falcón-Academia Nacional de la Historia (Caracas, Venezuela). Jefa del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas Pedro Manuel Arcaya-UNEFM (2005-2008). Veintidós años de docencia y veinticinco años de investigación universitaria. Cursos en el área de historia del arte, paleografía, patrimonio y conservación. Experiencia en investigación social e histórica, con énfasis en los sefarditas del Caribe. Experiencia docente en temas sociales, históricos, museológicos y metodología de la investigación. Experiencia en gerencia de la investigación. Asistencia como ponente a eventos científicos en Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, España, Estados Unidos, México y Venezuela. Publicaciones arbitradas en Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, España, México, Perú y Venezuela. Más de 50 publicaciones entre libros, capítulos de libros, artículos para revistas arbitradas y catálogos para museos. Premios regionales y nacionales en Venezuela por producción docente e investigación.

Available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: Spanish, Dutch.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fq8-03X_shF2uXOMtUNeJNSvGBKbS6KP/view?usp=sharing

Academic Website: https://independent.academia.edu/BlancaDeLima

Recent Publications:

• https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/revApuntesArq/article/view/9064
• http://bosks.openedition.org/cidehus/2965. https://journals.openedition.org/hamsa/371
• http://journals.openedition.org/lerhistoria/5105
• http://www.scielo.org.ve/pdf/te/v24n61/art14.pdf
• https://revistasenlinea.saber.ucab.edu.ve/index.php/revistamontalban/article/view/3597

Darrell B. Lockhart is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Spanish at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is Editor-in-Chief of Latin American Jewish Studies, the journal of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association. His research focuses on Jewish literature and popular culture in Latin America.

Gina Malagold ​​is Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish language, literature, and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University.

Devi Mays is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her book Forging Ties, Forging Passports won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. Her work focuses on transnational Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and global contexts, with a focus on Sephardic Jews.

Stanley Mirvis is Associate Professor of History and the Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition (Yale, 2020).

Dr. Navarro-Rosenblatt holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a professor of History and Secretary of Studies in Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. Dr. Navarro-Rosenblatt collaborates with the Chilean Jewish Archive. Her research focuses on the political experience of the Jewish Left in Chile and Argentina during the 20th Century. Her dissertation follows the life of a Communist Family during the 20th Century, as they became “Jewish-Chilean,” and integrated through harshness, pain, and struggle into Chilean. Dr. Navarro-Rosenblatt has published several articles regarding Chilean history, Jews, Politics, and Memory. Her current research observes Chilean Jewish women’s political and cultural activities during the 20th Century.

Available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English and Spanish.

Academic Website: https://wisc.academia.edu/ValeriaNavarroRosenblatt

Recent Publications:

• https://www.academia.edu/62516830/Construcci%C3%B3n_de_una_memoria_hist%C3%B3rica_La_celebraci%C3%B3n_del_cincuentenario_de_la_Colectividad_Israelita_en_Chile
• https://www.academia.edu/54814322/Del_Silencio_a_la_Memoria_Dividida_los_memoriales_para_los_detenidos_jud%C3%ADos_en_Chile_1973_2013_ 

Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS5cclOuRcA&pp=ygUadmFsZXJpYSBuYXZhcnJvIHJvc2VuYmxhdHQ%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sz4PdpFHNk&pp=ygUZaWRlcyAgYm9yaWMgeSBsb3MganVkaW9zIA%3D%3D

Patricia G. Nuriel is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wofford College; co-editor (with Luca Barattoni) of Jewish Identities in Latin American Cinema and (with Nora Glickman) of Interviews with Latin American Women Filmmakers—both in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities.

Josh Parshall is the Director of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life. He works on American Jewish culture and politics, Yiddish language and culture, and southern studies.

Ronnie Perelis is the Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena (Rachel) Alcalay Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University. His research explores the connections between Iberian and Jewish culture and history. His first book was Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith. 

Rebecca Sandler Perten is the Assistant Dean of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Toni Pitock is associate teaching professor in the Department of History and faculty in the Jewish Studies program at Drexel University.

Independent scholar Rabbi Deborah Prinz, authored On the Chocolate Trail: A Delicious Adventure Connecting Jews, Religions, History, Travel, Rituals and Recipes to the Magic of Cacao (2nd edition, Turner Publishing). She was awarded a Starkoff Fellowship and a Director’s Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives as well as a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship from the Rockefeller Library to research the book. In 2017, she co-curated “Semite Sweet: On Jews and Chocolate,” a museum exhibit based on the book mounted at the Herbert and Eileen Bernard Museum of Temple Emanu-El, New York City. Rabbi Prinz lectures in-person and virtually about historical connections between Jews and chocolate, as well as about Jewish celebratory breads nationally and internationally. Her forthcoming book explores Jewishcelebratory breads. More information may be found at her website: https://onthechocolatetrail.org.

Available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Extended Bio: https://onthechocolatetrail.org/bio-for-rabbi-prinz/

Dana Rabin is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the history of eighteenth-century Britain with a focus on law, gender, and race. Her first book, Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2004), examined the language of mental states in the English courtroom. Her recent book Britain and its Internal Outsiders 1750-1800: Under Rule of Law (Manchester University Press, 2017, paperback, 2022) analyzed the intersection of metropole and colony through a study of legal scandals involving Jews, Romani, enslaved people, Catholics, and Irish who claimed the rights of English men. Rabin’s current project examines Jewish civil rights throughout the British Empire between passage of the Naturalization Act (or Plantation Act) in 1740 and “Jewish Emancipation” 1858. This multi-sited project takes note of the Empire’s metropole and its colonial spaces, plantation societies and settler colonies, to study how definitions of race and religion shaped the lives of Jews and definitions of Jewishness and whiteness.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sbj_uUTHb9aKxd9Wnh1hKQJEb-Oc4Ov4/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Shari Rabin is a scholar of modern Judaism and American religions interested in exploring how religion has been shaped by the complexities of space and place. She is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017), was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She is currently writing a history of Jews, religion, and race in the U.S. South, from the seventeenth-century to the present day, a project that has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Publications:

• “Mobile Jews and Porous Borders: A Transnational History in the Nineteenth Century,” PaRDeS: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany 27, Special Issue on Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies (2021), 25-38.
• “Jews and Sexuality in the Americas, 1519-1880,” with Laura A. Leibman, Religion Compass (June 2021).
• Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (New York University Press, 2017).

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zAE0rmG8iYYRbD_9-CO-dNm7GSk3CqnV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Website: sharirabin.com

Videos:

Jackie Ranston is a Jamaican researcher-writer. Her latest published work, Masonic Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, in two volumes, includes character-driven narratives of Jewish Freemasons in Jamaica under the English Constitution from 1739 to 2021. Her detailed study of the Jewish artist, Isaac Mendes Belisario and his family, won the Book Industry Association of Jamaica’s Awards for Best Academic Book, and Best Adult Non-Fiction in 2008. Her published conference papers on Belisario and Jamaican Freemasonry can be found respectively in The Jews in the Caribbean (Jane S. Gerber, ed. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) and Freemasons in the Transatlantic World, (Dr John Wade, ed., Lewis Masonic.) Together with her husband, a graphic designer and book illustrator, Jackie runs a small publishing company focusing on Early Childhood Education and heritage studies. For ‘dedicated service to the research and recording of Jamaica’s national history’ she was awarded the Order of Distinction (OD) by the Government of Jamaica in 2016.

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

Jonathan Ray, the Samuel Eig Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, has published several books on Sephardic History, including The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry, and Jewish Life in Medieval Spain: A New History. 

Raanan Rein is the Elias Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History. Former Vice President of Tel Aviv University and Co-President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, Rein is the author of numerous books, including Jewish Self Defense in South America, Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina, Futbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina.

Rein is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Spanish, Hebrew.

Academic Website: https://www.raananrein.sites.tau.ac.il/

Recent works:

• https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23534
• https://www.mqup.ca/populism-and-ethnicity-products-9780228001669.php
• https://www.routledge.com/Jewish-Self-Defense-in-South-America-Facing-Anti-Semitism-with-a-Club-in/Rein/p/book/9780367724887#

Judith Riquelme Ríos, Professor in the Information Management Department of the Metropolitan Technological University, Chile. Co-author of “…And the archives kept their voices: Poles, Catholics and Jews under Chilean protection (Italy, 1941-1943).

Yosef Dov Robinson is an independent scholar living in Montreal, Quebec. He received his B.A. in Geography (minoring in Urban Studies) from Rutgers University in New Jersey, a Master in City and Regional Planning from the Ohio State University, a Master in Environment from Concordia University in Montreal, and most recently an M.A. in Judaic Studies also from Concordia University. His most recent complete scholarly project is translating Chaim Kruger’s Der Rambam: Zayn leben un shafn from Yiddish to English. He is interested in the history of early 20th-century Jewish life in Montreal, as well as in contemporary Jewish communities around the world.

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lSaD6mEdMXsgqNouZJ9bPVoyb8gc6Js-/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPzetETjc_gfPGgn0dxirlQ

Cara Rock-Singer is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies, Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research and teaching center on the relationship among gender, Judaism, and science and technology in the United States. Her book project, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion, shows how reproductive bodies serve as often-unacknowledged infrastructure of religious communities and how feminist movements have mobilized new media, technoscience, and biomedicine to craft embodied political theologies.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English

Website: www.cararocksinger.com

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_xa_MvgsFpCJnCIGh4cjhn3QVD_o_I9g/view?usp=sharing

Recent Work: “Immersions in a Contagious Summer,” Contagion Symposium, Political Theology Network. https://politicaltheology.com/immersions-in-a-contagious-summer/

Roitman is an historian of early modern and modern Jewish History. Her research focuses on Jews and Jewish communities in the (Dutch) Caribbean. She is interested in issues of race, ethnicity, minoritization, slavery, and colonialism and the intersection of Jewish and Caribbean histories. She wrote The Same but Different? Inter-cultural Trade and the Sephardim, and co-edited (with Gert Oostindie) Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680-1800. More recently, she published Highlights of the Mongui Maduro Museum and Mongui Maduro Library. 

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English, Dutch.

Recent Publications:

• https://islandstudiesjournal.org/files/ISJ.401.pdf
• https://www.academia.edu/35485254/Repositioning_the_Dutch_in_the_Atlantic_1680_1800
• https://www.academia.edu/34084931/_A_mass_of_mestiezen_castiezen_and_mulatten_Contending_with_color_in_the_Netherlands_Antilles_1750_1850
• https://www.academia.edu/27882050/Economics_Empire_Eschatology_The_Global_Context_of_Jewish_Settlement_in_the_Americas_1650_1670
• https://www.academia.edu/6995344/Portuguese_Jews_Amerindians_and_the_Frontiers_of_Encounter_in_Colonial_Suriname

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV-FTuLWL8h9O9YTKpXo8wg

Selected Videos:

Michael Rom is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Eli Rosenblatt is the Wallerstein Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University. 

Founding curator of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Library, Dale Rosengarten earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. While assembling a distinguished archives on southern Jewish history and culture, she has continued to pursue her other chief field of interest—the African American tradition of coiled basketry. Her publications include A Portion of the People: 300 Years of Southern Jewish Life (2002); Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art (2008); and Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry (1986; 4th edition 2022).

She is available to give talks or class visits in person for a fee. Languages: English.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nXFjsz8f5vI9JiWz_AFWbqBtmibZOLEA/view?usp=sharing

Websites and Recommended Links:

• http://jhc.cofc.edu/
• https://mappingjewishcharleston.cofc.edu/
• https://synagoguesofthesouth.cofc.edu/
• https://lifeofthesynagogue.cofc.edu/
• http://jhssc.org/publications/magazines/
• https://apop.library.cofc.edu/

Laurence Roth is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English at Susquehanna University and author of Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore (forthcoming), Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories, and co-editor, with Nadia Valman, of The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures.

Rachel Rubinstein is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Springfield College. Her interests include American literature, Jewish-American literature, and Yiddish literature. 

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11XudZOzar4vP5XKUigkO56aubyrOH35v/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Simone Salmon is a PhD candidate in the Ethnomusicology Department at UCLA where she specializes in Sephardic Jewish music from the late-Ottoman Empire to today. She received her master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford in 2014 and her bachelor’s degree in Music from UCLA in 2011. Simone has several online and forthcoming publications in Jews Across the Americas, Smithsonian Pathways, Musica Judaica, Oxford Annotated Bibliographies, The Journal for Synagogue Music, and others. Simone has presented internationally in Istanbul, Essaouira, Paris, and at conferences across America. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from Foreign Language and Area Studies, American Research Institute in Turkey, Bluma Appel, Maurice Amado, Rotter, Y&S Nazarian, Stephen Wise, Lowell Milken Fund, and others. Simone’s current focus is recordings of her family from Sephardic Turkey and Jewish music in Istanbul today. She plays the oud for several Middle Eastern and Balkan bands and hosts a radio show called Los Bilbilikos about music in Judeo-Spanish.

CV:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y4kBwdBevdfY18iD043OdHjVH5VZ6jyR/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Edward Sanders is an independent scholar focusing on life in the antebellum South. He works as a manager at the United Negro College Fund in Washington, D.C.

Jonathan D. Sarna is University Professor and the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. He also is the past president of the Association for Jewish Studies and Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Author or editor of more than thirty books on American Jewish history and life, his American Judaism: A History – recently published in a second edition — won six awards including the 2004 “Everett Jewish Book of the Year Award” from the Jewish Book Council. Sarna is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Jewish Research. His most recent books are When General Grant Expelled the Jews, Lincoln & the Jews: A History (with Benjamin Shapell), an edition of Cosella Wayne, by Cora Wilburn, the first (and hitherto unknown) American Jewish novel, and Coming to Terms with America, a volume of essays.

He is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

​​Ana Schaposchnik is Associate Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University (Chicago, IL) and the author of The Lima Inquisition: The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth Century Peru.

Zohar Segev is professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Prof. Segev has published books and many articles on American Jewish History including, The World Jewish Congress During the Holocaust: Between Activism and Restraint (De Gruyter, 2014).

Recent Work:

• Immigration, Ideology, and Public Activity from an American Jewish Perspective – A Journey across Three Continents [Brill 2022, 280p].
• “Rethinking the Dilemma of bombing Auschwitz: Support, Opposition and Reservation.” Jewish Quarterly Review, 2 (2021): 155-184.

Prof. Segev was the NYPL – Fordham Research fellow (2020/2021)

Prof. Zohar Segev

zsegev@research.haifa.ac.il

Dept. of Jewish History

University of Haifa

Israel 34905

New book: 

Paulette Schuster is the Registration and Absorption Coordinator at Reichman University. She has published books on food and identity, and transnationalism, including The Syrian Jewish Community in Mexico City in a Comparative Context: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Modelando el Transnacionalismo, and Trayectorias y jornadas: Transnacionalismo en acción.  

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QKjURzF8HMD6dUdlJK_ownBEiuYalDAF/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Dr. Noam Sienna is an educator, artist, and scholar of Jewish history, focusing on Jewish life and culture in the premodern Mediterranean world. He completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2020, specializing in Jewish History and Museum Studies, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, working with the Mellon-funded interdisciplinary project “Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book.” He is also a Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His first book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), received the 2020 Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries and the 2020 Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation. His monograph on North African Jewish book culture is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

Noam Sienna is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Hebrew.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NT9D6xwM3LxwwnU1XI6EJ0wRIdTJiB_L/view?usp=sharing

Website: https://noamsienna.com/

Stephen Silverstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University and author of The Merchant of Havana: The Jew in the Cuban Abolitionist Archive.

Perla Sneh, psychoanalyst, writer, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at the National University of Tres de Febrero (Argentina), has published many essays and books, among them Palabras para decirlo – Lenguaje y exterminio, which won the National Award from Ministry of Culture of the National Government of Argentina.

Holly Snyder, now retired, was a research librarian at Brown University for two decades.  Her ongoing scholarship focuses on Jews in the early modern British Atlantic,  and has been published in a wide array of academic journals and critical anthologies, most recently in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History.  

Aron Sterk is Associate Lecturer in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln. 

Cecilia Sterk is an independent researcher.

Hernan Tesler-Mabé is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies program at Huron University College (London, Ontario) and Past President of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies. His research centers on modern Jewish culture across the Diaspora, with a focus on the intersection of culture and identity. His first monograph – Mahler’s Forgotten Conductor: Heinz Unger and his Search for Jewish Meaning, 1895-1965 – was an exploration of a musician’s negotiation of his German Jewish identity and was awarded the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Best Biography.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Spanish.

Links: https://huronatwestern.ca/programs/arts-social-science/jewish-studies/

Barry L. Stiefel, Ph.D. is a Professor of Historic Preservation & Community Planning at the College of Charleston. He has completed numerous publications, including ones that address sustainability, cultural-ethnic architectural history, historic transportation mobility, human-centered preservation, community-building through historic places, and preservation education. He is the author of several books and articles, including the forthcoming book, Monuments of Diverse Heritage: Early American Placemaking and Preservation by Black, Indigenous, and Jewish Peoples.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Website: https://cofc.academia.edu/BarryStiefel

In the news: https://today.cofc.edu/2022/01/27/professors-research-results-in-historic-plaque/

Publications:

• https://uscpress.com/Jewish-Sanctuary-in-the-Atlantic-World

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/149F6VkY1GUpgqQRYdm8pMioNcoH1QIRU/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Hilit Surowitz-Israel is Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Rutgers University. She co-edited Jews in the Americas, 1776-1826.

Kelly Amanda Train is a Contract Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto and the Unit 1 VP for the contract faculty union (Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3904). She teaches a number of courses that focus on race, ethnicity, gender and families. Her research focuses on 1) Jews of colour in Canada and 2) Jewish women of colour and Jewish feminist thought.

Her recent publications include “Patriarchy and the Other in the Western Imagination: Honour Killings and Violence Against Women,” International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (2021), “Negotiating New Territory: Indian Jewish Women in the Family in Toronto,” Canadian Jewish Studies (2018), “Well, How Can You Be Jewish and European? Indian Jewish Experiences in the Toronto Jewish Community and the Creation of Congregation BINA,” American Jewish History (2016), and “East Meets West: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in Canada and the United States,” in Barry Stiefel & Hernan Tesler-Mabé’s (eds.), Neither in Dark Speeches nor in Similtudes: Reflections and Refractions Between Canadian and American Jews (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from York University in Toronto.

She is available to give talks or class visits online for a fee. Languages: English.

Britt Tevis is a historian with special interests in law and Jewish studies. Her research examines the ways in which local, state, and federal authorities condoned and/or incited anti-Jewish discrimination. She recently published “The People’s Judge” in the American Journal of Legal History, among other pieces.

Michael Waas is a genealogist and historian, specializing in Sephardic Jewry with a particular interest in the Portuguese Jewish Nation. He received his MA from the University of Haifa in Jewish History and the subject of his thesis was the development of Jewish Heritage projects and identity in Turkey and Greece in three former Ottoman Jewish Communities: Salonika, Izmir, and Tire. During his MA research, he received the Gaon Prize for Outstanding M.A. Thesis research for the academic year 2017-2018 from the Moshe David Gaon Center for Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Culture as well as the Prize for Research into the Heritage of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry, awarded by the Ben Zvi Institute and the Israeli Ministry of Education, for the year 2017-2018. In addition, Waas volunteers as a co-administrator on the Genetic Census of the Jewish People study (aka the Avotaynu DNA Project). He has presented on a variety of topics at numerous international conferences and has had multiple articles published.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Hebrew, Spanish.

Website: hollander-waas.com

Avotaynu DNA Project: https://avotaynuonline.com/avotaynu-foundation-dna-project/

Recent publications:

• “The Surprising Origins of the Coryell Family of Colonial New Jersey.” American Ancestors 23(4):27-31. Co-written with Lea Coryell and Adam Brown https://avotaynuonline.com/2023/01/the-surprising-origins-of-the-coryell-family-of-colonial-new-jersey/

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cG9TPzSGQ8j8bdgBPwYrFzxf6KhcxjWh/view?usp=sharing

Matthew Warshawsky is Professor of Spanish at the University of Portland and the author of The Perils of Living the Good and True Law: Iberian Crypto-Jews in the Shadow of the Inquisition of Colonial Hispanic America (Juan de la Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs, 2016).

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English, Spanish.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BPMzNd_9ASLCVdJtvCz32hmG8ZK6Y5fs/view?usp=sharing

Mir Yarfitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of Jewish Studies at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), and articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Women in Judaism, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, and The New Jewish Argentina. He has also written collaboratively on collaborative pedagogy in Exploring Inclusive & Equitable Pedagogies: Creating Space for All Learners, edited by Melissa Mallon, et al (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023 and Engaging Undergraduates in Primary Source Research, edited by Lijuan Xu (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). His current research explores multiple interpretations of what might fruitfully be framed as trans and non-binary lives in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century.

He is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English.

Recent Publications:

• https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/impure-migration/9780813598154

Videos:

Natasha Zaretsky, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist who works on human rights, genocide, and the politics of memory in the Americas and the Jewish diaspora. Currently, she is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, where she leads the Truth in the Americas initiative. She has published extensively in the fields of human rights, anthropology, Jewish Studies, and Latin American Studies, especially focusing on Jews in Argentina. In addition to her work in Latin America, her new research also focuses on Holocaust memory and belonging in post-Soviet Jewish communities. She has taught courses in anthropology, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, human rights, comparative genocide, and writing at Princeton University, Rutgers University, and NYU. Currently, she is completing a documentary about the aftermath of the AMIA bombing for Jews in Argentina, 1000 Mondays. Her latest ethnography, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina (Rutgers University Press 2021) was awarded Honorable Mention for 2023 Best Book by the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English and Spanish

Website: natashazaretsky.com

Links: https://1000mondaysfilm.com