Doctoral Seminar

Nazeer Bacchus is a Ph.D candidate at NYU specializing in the study of the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Jewish literature. Working at the intersection of literary studies, religious studies, and phenomenology, his work seeks to foreground the body as a framework for theorizing the production, poetics, and reception of ancient texts. His dissertation inquires into the ways early Jewish writers used the senses to shape understandings of the self in relation to the material and immaterial world. Focusing on the sense of sight, his project traces the ways biblical and early Jewish writers mobilized ideas of vision in order to construct, revise, and cultivate models of Jewish subjectivity and readerly formation in the Second Temple period. Nazeer holds an advanced certificate in Poetics and Theory through the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. From 2022-2023, he was a member of the Authoritative Texts and Their Reception research program at the University of Oslo. Nazeer has presented his work nationally and internationally at several conferences, including the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Jewish Studies, and the Enoch Colloquium. Prior to coming to NYU, he received his MA in Religion and Literature, concentrated in Hebrew Bible from Yale University; a BA in English Literature and Judaic Studies from the University of Central Florida; and an AA from Valencia Community College.

Lee Bartov is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, concurrently serving as a fellow in The 'Maskilot' Fellowship for Outstanding Women Scholars at the Shalom Hartman Institute. She is the author of the book 'The Desperate Man's Temple: Lev Shestov's Philosophy and Hebrew Culture,' published by the Bialik Institute. She has been honored with the Rotenstreich Scholarships for outstanding PhD students in the humanities Her ongoing doctoral research centers on the philosophical discourse surrounding the religious phenomenon, with a specific focus on the interplay between Lev Shestov and phenomenologists and its reception within the 'Eranos' circle. Her primary research areas encompass modern Jewish philosophy, phenomenology, religious phenomenon, secular theology, history of religious studies, and Sabbateanism.

Yakov Ellenbogen is currently a sixth-year PhD candidate in Columbia University's Department of History. Before coming to Columbia, he completed his BA in History at Yeshiva University. His fields of study include the social and cultural history of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry and disability studies. His dissertation focuses on disability in late medieval Ashkenazic society and its intersection with other contemporary categories of identity. In 2022-2023 he was a Leo Baeck Fellow. He has presented his research at the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) conference as well as the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) annual meeting.

Samuel Glauber is a scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East Europrean Jewry and its diaspora communities. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben- Gurion University of the Negev, where he is writing a dissertation exploring Jewish engagement with modern occult currents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Eastern Europe. His research develops an interdisciplinary approach to processes of religious and social change with a focus on the religious landscape of Eastern Europe; particular research interests include Jewish occultism, modern religious thought, and Yiddish press culture. His work has appeared in, among other journals, Nashim, Jewish Historical Studies, In geveb, Tradition, and Kabbalah, and he is co-editor of Hillel Zeitlin, In the Secret Place of the Soul: Three Essays (Jerusalem - Berlin: Blima Books, 2021). He has previously held fellowships at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is currently a Junior Library Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

Yitzhak Mor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University. Yitzhak is a fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and is the recipient of the Rotenstreich Scholarship. He writes about interfaith dialogue and the relationship between theology and politics in the thought of Jewish and Catholic intellectuals in the religious neo-conservative movement in the United States. Yitzhak completed a bachelor's degree in the PPE program (Philosophy, Economics, and Political Science) and a master's degree in the Department of Comparative Religion (with distinction). During his graduate studies, Yitzhak was a doctoral fellow at the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry and the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

Tom Parnass, born and raised in Jerusalem, is a scholar of Jewish intellectual history in the early modern period with a specific focus on Kabbalah, science and magic. He studied History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, and received his BA from the History Department and the department's honors program. His MA thesis, also written under the History department, was dedicated to the eighteenth-century Sabbatean thinker Nehemiah Hayon, a leading figure in this fascinating messianic movement. Tom is doing his doctoral studies at the department of Jewish Thought in the Hebrew University, and is currently writing his dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Garb. His dissertation focuses on the Kabbalistic activity in seventeenth-century Damascus, led by R. Hayyim Vital and his students. Tom is married to Naama, an illustrator and writer. In addition to his academic activities, he teaches in various non-academic settings, such as 'Idea' program for Humanities studies for outstanding high-school students. He also plays the Baglama, a traditional Turkish instrument.

Miriam Schwartz is a PhD candidate in the Department for Germanic Languages and Literatures and in the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Hebrew and Yiddish literature at the beginning of the 20th century in Israel, Eastern Europe, North America, and South America. She examines the representation of direct speech in Jewish literature and deals with questions of translation, orality, and ideology. Before coming to Toronto, she earned her BA in Literature and MA in Yiddish Literature, both at Tel Aviv University. Her MA thesis "From There to There: Types of Detachment in the Writings of Lamed Shapiro and Y. H. Brenner" examined the trope of the Talush, the detached uprooted men, and uncovered the unexplored connection between the authors Yosef Haim Brenner and Lamed Shapiro. Miriam is a research assistant on the Bais Yaakov Project and has written for the Bais Yaakov project blog. Her translations and creative writing have been featured in literary and academic journals.

Matthew Shih is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Toronto, where he is also completing a Collaborative Specialization in Jewish Studies. His dissertation develops a postcolonial perspective of musical interactions between Austrian and German Jewish refugees and Chinese natives in Shanghai during the WWII era. Matthew is a Vanier Scholar, and his work has also been generously supported by the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Fulbright Program, and the Jackman Humanities Institute.

Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania studying the history of the Soviet Union and transnational Jewish history. Her dissertation explores the emigration of almost 1.5 million Soviet Jews from the USSR in the post-Stalin era, emphasizing the paramount influence of migrant agency and networks. She investigates how these migrants found themselves both collaborating and at odds with the USSR, Israel, and American Jewish philanthropic organizations, all of whom sought to direct and even control the movement of Soviet Jewry. Zborovsky's work has been previously supported by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, Open Society Archives, and American Jewish Historical Society.

Gabriel Abensour was born and raised in Strasbourg, France. Gabriel is a PhD student in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a Fellow of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and is the recipient of the Rotenstreich Scholarship. His dissertation examines the "history from below" of Algerian Jews during the colonial period. Gabriel has published half a dozen articles on the modern history of Maghrebi Jews, his research lying at the intersection of post-colonialism studies, Jewish Law, and History. Gabriel is also a Fellow at the Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought, Shalom Hartman Institute, Israel. In this role, he co-leads a seminar on the intellectual heritage of Jews from Muslim countries.

Tova Benjamin completed her BA at the University of Toronto in Comparative Literature and Religion, with a minor in Jewish Studies. She is currently a joint PhD candidate in the History, Hebrew, and Judaic Studies departments at New York University. Tova's research interests include the history of Jewish economic life in Russia and the history of global trade and capitalism. Her dissertation focuses on the significant and changing role of Jews in Russia's valuable grain trade and export from the imperial to the early Soviet years. From 2020-2022 she was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow. In 2022-2023 she received the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Scholarship. She currently serves as an editorial board member in Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her writing most recently appeared in the 2022 Winter Issue of Jewish Currents, for which she served as guest editor, and her other writings (including creative works) have appeared in a variety of magazines and journals.

Daan de Leeuw is a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Daan studies Dutch Jewish slave laborers during the second half of World War II (1942-1945). He analyzes the movement of these Jewish slave laborers through the German concentration camp system and how these relocations affected the social structure among prisoners. He maps the routes of individual deportees and follows their journeys through the concentration camps. Daan holds a BA (cum laude) and MA (cum laude) in History from the University of Amsterdam. Before matriculating at Clark University, he worked at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam as research assistant and as Project Manager of EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure). Daan has been awarded several fellowships and research grants, including a Yad Vashem Summer Research Fellowship for PhD Students, a Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund Grant, a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, a 2021-2022 Ben and Zelda Cohen Fellowship at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship.

Yaakov Lipsker is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the Kekst Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Using archival materials from three continents and a vast corpus of published primary sources in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, his dissertation reexamines the formative history of the Zionist movement in the late Russian Empire. Yaakov has presented papers on his research at New York University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). In Fall 2021, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University. He also has strong interests in Yiddish culture and has been published in Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Hadas Raichelson is a PhD student at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, under the supervision of Professors Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Ruth Halperin-Kaddari. She is interested in criminal law, family law, and feminist legal theory. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the criminalization of get refusal. Hadas serves as the secretary-general of the Israel Criminal Law Association. She is also head of the Doctoral Students Forum at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. Hadas was awarded the Bar-Ilan University President's Scholarship for Exceptional PhD Candidates. She also received the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award, the Mozes S. Schupf Foundation Scholarship for outstanding doctoral students involved in leadership and social activism, a research grant from the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law, the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism Scholarship for Outstanding PhD Students, and The Argov Center for the Study of Israel and the Jewish People Scholarship. Hadas earned her LLB and LLM from Bar-Ilan University, magna cum laude. During her studies, Hadas worked as a research assistant and teaching assistant for various researchers. She was also a team leader and editorial board member of the legal journal Bar-Ilan Law Studies.

Osman Cihan Sert earned his Bachelor's degree in political science and public administration with high honors and a minor in history at Middle East Technical University in Turkey. He was awarded the Moshe Dayan Center Research Grant and the Israeli MFA Tuition and Monthly Stipend to pursue his MA in Middle East and North African History at Tel Aviv University. He earned a magna cum laude degree and dedicated his Master's thesis to the Communal Memory and Heritage Politics of the Turkish Jews. Osman is currently a research assistant in History at Koc University in Istanbul and conducting his dissertation project on Ottoman Sephardic diasporic networks across Danube based on diverse archival inquiry and historical languages of Judeo-Spanish and Ottoman-Turkish. He is also interested in the Ottoman Sephardic heritage of Turkey and other post-Ottoman countries in the southeastern Europe.

Tzipora Weinberg is a doctoral candidate in the Skirball Center for Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on Eastern European Jewish history in the 20th century and centers around the intellectual and religious experiences of Orthodox Jewish women within the communities of Poland, Galicia, and Lithuania. She has presented her findings at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Jewish Historical Institute, and the American Musicological Society, among other academic institutions, and her recent article, "Shifting Paradigms, Pandemic Realities: The Reception of Ishay Ribo's Music in the American Hasidic Community" was published in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. As the 2021-2022 Max Weinreich Fellow in Baltic Jewish Studies at YIVO and the 2022-2023 Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, she explores the educational and theological development of Orthodox women in Jewish Lithuania.

Sigal Yona is a PhD candidate at Ghent University's Department of Communication Sciences and a member of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies. In her dissertation, she examines cinema-going audiences, and exhibition in Tel Aviv-Jaffa between the 1950s and the 1970s, focusing on cinemas that screened films from the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. She holds a BFA and MA from Tel Aviv University and previously served as Visiting Instructor in Jewish Studies at Vassar College. Her work is published in the Lexicon of Global Melodrama and the forthcoming volume Multilingual Israel.