Jewish Studies

Overview
The Program in Judaic Studies is an interdisciplinary unit devoted to the study of Jews and Judaism in all historical and geographic contexts. The faculty includes scholars from both humanistic and social scientific disciplines such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology. We offer an undergraduate curriculum that covers a wide array of courses in Judaic Studies. Several of our faculty members are engaged in graduate instruction in other departments. There are ten faculty members with appointments in the Program, plus eight affiliated faculty members with research and teaching interests in Judaic Studies. Home departments of affiliated faculty include Anthropology, History, Modern Culture and Media, Political Science, and Sociology.

About Us
The Program in Judaic Studies is an interdisciplinary unit devoted to the academic study of Jews and Judaism in all historical and geographic contexts. The faculty includes scholars from both humanistic and social scientific disciplines, including anthropology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology. We offer an undergraduate curriculum that covers a wide array of courses in Judaic Studies. Several of our faculty members are engaged in graduate instruction in other departments. In addition to faculty members with appointments in the Program, eight Brown faculty members with research and teaching interests in Judaic Studies are affiliated with the Program. Their home departments include Anthropology, History, Modern Culture and Media, Political Science, and Sociology.

There are currently ten faculty members with full appointments in Judaic Studies or joint appointments in Judaic Studies and another academic unit (including Anthropology, History, and Religious Studies).

Hebrew Language:

Ruth Adler Ben Yehuda (M.A., Hebrew University) teaches all Hebrew language courses covering the first two and one half years of study. She has been an active member of the Hebrew Board of the National Middle East Language Resource Center, which was initiated by the U.S. Department of Education. She also regularly presents training workshops for instructors of Hebrew as a second language in the U.S. and in Israel.

Anthropology:

Marcy Brink-Danan (Ph.D., Stanford University) trained as a cultural anthropologist, Marcy Brink-Danan studies the role of language and symbolism in the formation and maintenance of social groups, communities and nations. She most recently conducted ethnographic research with the Jewish community of Turkey, where she focused on issues of multilingualism, intimacy and ideology. The methods she uses to examine cultural phenomena borrow from anthropological approaches to the present (participant observation and interviews) and a historical approach to things past (text and image analysis). She specializes in the languages, cultures and social histories of Balkan, Middle Eastern and North African Jews.

Archaeology:

Katharina Galor (Ph.D., Brown University) focuses her research on Roman and Byzantine Palestine, with topics related to sacral, civic and domestic architecture,town planning, water installations and mosaics. She recently organized the first international conference devoted entirely to the archaeology of Qumran. She is co-director of an excavation at Apollonia-Arsuf, Israel, a joint project with the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University. She also is co-director (together with P. Bienkowski and Z. Fiema) of the Wadi Arabah Project. Among her publications are “The Roman-Byzantine Dwelling in the Galilee and the Golan – ‘House’ or ‘Apartment?;’” “Qumran’s Plastered Pools: A New Perspective;” and “The Stepped Water Installations of the Sepphoris Acropolis.” She is currently writing a book on the Archaeology of Jerusalem.

Jewish Thought:

Michael Gottsegen (Ph.D., Harvard University) is an expert on modern Jewish thought and philosophy.

Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature:

David C. Jacobson (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) conducts research in the fields of modern Hebrew literature and contemporary Israeli literature and culture. He is the author of: Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers; Does David Still Play Before You? Israeli Poetry and the Bible; and Creator, Are You Listening? Israeli Poets on God and Prayer. He is co-editor (with Kamal Abdel-Malek) of Israeli and Palestinian Identities in History and Literature and co-editor (with William Cutter) of History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band. His courses include: Jewish Fiction, Israeli Literature in Hebrew, Contemporary Israeli Literature in Translation, Holocaust Literature, The Bible as Literature, God and Poetry, and Mysticism and Community in the Hasidic Tale.

Ancient Judaism:

Ross S. Kraemer (Ph.D., Princeton University) specializes in ancient Christianity and aspects of ancient Judaism, with particular attention to women and gender studies. Her latest project is a new book in progress tentatively titled Rethinking History, Gender and (Women’s) Religions in the Greco-Roman World. Once it is complete, she hopes to start work on a project about the fate of Mediterranean diaspora Jewish communities in the late Roman Empire. Among other areas, she teaches courses on the relationship between Jews and Christians in antiquity and Jews and Judaism in the Greco-Roman diaspora.

Modern Jewish History:

Maud S. Mandel (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1998; A.M., University of Michigan, 1993; B.A. Oberlin College, 1989) is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History. Her monograph, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth Century France, was published by Duke University Press in 2003. Her current book project, Beyond Antisemitism: Muslims and Jews in Contemporary France is under contract with Princeton University Press and has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her most recent article, “Assimilation and Cultural Exchange in Modern Jewish History,” will appear in 2008 in Rethinking European Jewish History (Littman). She teaches courses on many aspects of modern Jewish history, including history of the Holocaust, Zionism and the birth of the state of Israel, and history of American Jews.

Biblical Studies:

Saul M. Olyan (Ph.D., Harvard University) focuses his research and teaching on the history, literature, and religion of ancient Israel, and the history of biblical interpretation. In recent years, textual representations of ritual and ritual’s social dimensions have been abiding interests of his. He has written on aspects of death and the afterlife, social hierarchy, sexuality, purity and impurity, honor and shame, among other subjects. Currently, he is writing a book on constructions of disability in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation. He teaches an introductory course on the Hebrew Bible and the history of ancient Israel, various seminars on biblical books that require an advanced knowledge of Hebrew, seminars on Aramaic texts and language, as well as courses on topics such as death and afterlife in the biblical tradition, the history of biblical interpretation up to the Enlightenment, problems in Israelite history, problems in Israelite religion, biblical literature of the exile, and disability in antiquity.

Rabbinics and Early Judaism

Michael Satlow (Ph.D., Jewish Theological Seminary) has written extensively on issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage among Jews in antiquity (ca. 500 BCE - 500 CE). His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Creating Judaism, is broader in scope, developing a model for understanding “Judaism” as a religion. He currently has two active research projects: an Internet-based corpus of inscriptions from Palestine that date to antiquity and a study of popular piety among Jews in antiquity. His undergraduate courses include introduction to Judaism, surveys of Judaism and rabbinic literature in antiquity, the Dead Sea scrolls, Jewish mysticism, a comparative course co-taught with Prof. M. Zaman on Jewish and Islamic Law, and “Judaism and Christianity in Conflict,” a history of polemics. Graduate seminars have included a study of rabbinic texts, Philo, and a wider-ranging examination of “orthodoxy” in the ancient Mediterranean.

Latin American Jewish Literature:

Nelson H. Vieira (Ph.D., Harvard University) has research and teaching interests in Latin American Jews via their literary and cultural manifestations, with specific attention to the Jewish populations of Brazil and Argentina. While issues of Jewish ethnicity, diaspora, immigration, and gender constitute a major component of this topic, his research above all aims to understand more universal matters that surface such as identity, alterity, and belongingness in the context of how people negotiate their various manifestations of self in the different daily socio-political situations they encounter. All of these subjects are treated in his courses, Esthers of the Diaspora and Prophets in the Tropics, in which students are expected to explore theoretical and applied concepts in view of the world’s ever-changing, globalized, cultural reality.

Schusterman Visiting Israeli Scholar:

Sam Lehman-Wilzig (PhD in Government, Harvard U, 1976) specializes in the following fields: 1) Israeli extra-parliamentary behavior (over a dozen journal articles and two books in English; one translated to Hebrew); 2) Israeli media and election campaigns (several academic studies); 3- the Jewish political tradition (academic articles here too). He has served in the following capacities: Chairman of the Israel Political Science Association (1997-1999); Founder and Head of Bar-Ilan University's Public Communications Program within the Dept. of Political Studies 1994-2007; and Chairman of the Bar-Ilan U Political Studies Department (2004-2007).