Fordham-NYPL Research Fellows in Jewish Studies

Current Fordham-NYPL Research Fellows in Jewish Studies, 2024-2025


Long-Term and Mid-Term Fellows: 

Our full-year fellowship will be held by Anna Sierka, whose research project “Touching the Secret – Sensory Perception in Jewish Mysticism,” applies the history of senses to the study of Kabbala, including esoteric commentaries on Shiʻur Qomah and premodern palmistry manuals produced by Jews and Christians. The long-term fellowship is supported by a grant from the Knapp Family Foundation.

In the Spring semester, we'll be joined by mid-term fellow Rachel Kadish, an award-winning writer, who will be working on her next novel, "The Vessel," which takes place against the backdrop of the sea trade of late-18th- and early-19th-century New York and offers a glance at how Jews and other groups who faced limited opportunities on land could gain unfamiliar freedom at sea.

Short-Term Fellows:

  • Adam Farkas, from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, will work on “The Dropouts: An Oral History of the Soviet Jewish Immigration in the US, 1973-1981,” comparing the Soviet Jewish immigrant experience to those in Israel and Western Europe and explore how Soviet experiences influenced identity in the US.
  • Leor Jacobi, from Bar Ilan University, will work on a project titled “From Catalonia to Yemen: Medieval Hebrew Manuscript Fragments and Jewish Bookbindings in the NYPL,” examining the material history of books and reconstructing the intellectual history of Jews, now buried in bookbindings across the world.
  • Miyuki Kita, of the Kitakyushu University in Japan, will work on “Labor Movement as Groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement,” focusing on the Jewish Labor Committee, Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, and their parent organizations to examine the link between the Holocaust, left-wing labor activism, and the civil rights movement.
  • Aleksandra Szczepan, a postdoctoral researcher at Universität Potsdam, will work on a project titled “Intimate Cartographies: Mapping Jewish Eastern Europe in Yizker-Bikher,” exploring the role that maps play in the act of bearing witness to the Holocaust by examining how Jewish memorial books, created by Holocaust survivors and pre-war Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe, have engaged and encouraged various forms of mappings.

 

    Former Fordham-NYPL Research Fellows in Jewish Studies


    2023-2024

    Long-Term Fellow:

    • Shachar Pinsker, Ph.D., Professor, Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies, University of Michigan, "When Yiddish Was Young in Israel: the Pervasiveness of Israel's Silent Language"

    Mid-Term Fellow:

    • Marilyn Miller, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Tulane University, "Righteous Revolutionary: Cuban Independence Leader José Martí and his Jewish Supporters" 

    Short-Term Fellows:

    • Rivka Elitzur Leiman, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar, Harvar University, “Magic in New York: Reassessing a 1900s Collection of Late Antique Jewish Amulets at the NYPL.”
    • Nick Underwood, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and Howard Berger-Ray Neilsen Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies, College of Idaho, "Jewish Migration, Yiddish Culture, and the Reconstruction of Post-Holocaust France, 1944-1965"

     

    2022-2023

    Mid-term Fellow:

    • Jana Schmidt, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, "Futures Not Yet: Jewish Exiles, Black Politics, 1940-1975"

    Short-term Fellows:

    • Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, University of Haifa, "The Jews and Global Geography"
    • Debora Kantor, University of Buenos Aires, "Jews and Jewishness in Modern and Contemporary Film and Culture: a Comparative Approach"
    • Markus Krah, University of Potsdam, "Schocken Books and the Cultural Transformation of American Jewry, 1945-1987"
    • Saba Nerina Visacovsky, National University of San Martin, Buenos Aires, "The Links between the Pro-Soviet Jewish Left-Wing in New York and Buenos Aires (1946-1956)"

    2021-2022

    Mid-term fellow:

    • Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Professor of Medieval Jewish History,  Department of Jewish History, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, "The 'Holy Community of Cologne': New Perspectives on the Medieval Jewish Community"

    Short-term fellows:

    • Zohar Segev, Professor of Jewish History, University of Haifa, "Philanthropy, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation: The Nathan Straus Papers in the NYPL"
    • Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Director of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Louisiana State University, "Elizabeth Polack: British Melodrama and Jewish Emancipation"
    • Tamara Gleason Freidberg, PhD Candidate, University College London, "'Our Golden Chain is Broken': Responses to the Holocaust in the Bundist Journal Foroys from Mexico (1941-1947)"

    2020-2021

    Short-term fellow:

    • Ariel Paige Cohen, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Virginia, "Displaying Art and Exhibiting Philanthropy: Jews, Genders, and Museums in the United States, 1888 – 1958"

    2019-2020

    Mid-term fellow:

    • Michael Casper, Ph.D. Candidate in History,  University of California, Los Angeles, "The memory of the Holocaust and World War II among Lithuanian Émigrés" 

    Short-term fellows:

    • Paula Ansaldo, Ph.D. Candidate in History and Theory of Arts,  University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, "Jewish Theater in Buenos Aires (1930-1960): Connections and Exchanges with the New York Yiddish Theater"
    • David Assaf, Professor of Jewish History,  University of Tel Aviv, "Not Just Words and Tunes: On the History and Transformation of Hebrew and Yiddish Songs"

    2018-2019

    Mid-term fellow:

    • Nina Valbousquet, Research Fellow, Center for Jewish History / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,  "Transnational Antisemitism, Diaspora Politics, and Jewish Diplomacy: the Impact of Antisemitism on Jewish-Catholic Relations in a Transatlantic Perspective (1914-1965)"

    Short-term fellows:

    • Miranda Crowdus, Research Associate, Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, "The Liturgical Music of the Romaniote Jews: From Antiquity to the Present Day" 
    • Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, University of Florida, "How Judaism Became an American Religion: Middlebrow Culture and the Making of America's Third Religion." 
    • Yael Levi, Ph.D Candidate, the Department of History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Early Jewish-American Entrepreneurs: The Emergence of the Yiddish and Hebrew Press in the United States, 1870-1900."
    • Michal Ben Ya’akov, Professor of History, Emuna-Efrata College, Jerusalem, "Getting Acquainted after the War: American Jewry meets North African Jewry, 1943-1954"

    2017-2018

    Short-Term Fellows:

    • Gabriella Abramac, former Visiting Fulbright Professor, New York University, "Sociolinguistic Superdiversity in Hasidic Communities of New York"
    • Menahem Blondheim, Professor of Communications, Department of History and Department of Communication, and the Director of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "The Yiddish Sermon in the United States, 1881-1939"
    • Boaz Huss, Professor of Kabbalah, Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, "Isaac Myer and the Kabbalah in America in the Late 19th Century"
    • Gil Ribak, Assistant Professor at the Center for Judaic Studies, University of Arizona, "'A Feeling of Self-Disgust Attacks Me': The Attitudes of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants toward African Americans in a Transnational Perspective"
    • David Stromberg, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "A Yiddish Writer in America: Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1935-1957"
    • Lidia Zessin-Jurek, Research Associate, German-Polish Research Institute, "Homeless memory? The memoirs of the Polish Jewish survivors in the Soviet Union outside the Holocaust and the Gulag memory cultures"

     

    The Fordham-NYPL Long-Term Research Fellowship is supported by a grant from the Knapp Family Foundation.