Ephraim Urbach Grants

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period. She is a chief historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and a Rothschild HaNadiv fellow at the Center for Research of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. She received her PhD in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her award-winning doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jewish women experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration. Her new postdoctoral project explores how the Jewish family as a unit faced the difficulties created by The Great War and the Great Economic Crisis, between 1914 and 1939.

Idan is a scholar of medieval Kabbalah. He completed his three degrees at Tel Aviv University: a bachelor's degree in General and Jewish Philosophy, a master's degree in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah, and his doctoral dissertation was dedicated to the writings of the 13th-century commentator and kabbalist, Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa. Additionally, he has published several studies on exegesis, theosophy, and kabbalistic praxis. This year, Idan is a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and concurrently, he is teaching a course titled 'Reading Kabbalistic Texts' at Tel Aviv University.

Shraga Bick is a scholar of rabbinic and early Christian literature. He is currently the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow in Ancient Judaism at Yale University. He completed his dissertation in 2022 (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), titled The Bodies of the Law: Commandment's Discourse in Late Antiquity. In 2023 Bick received the Shlomo Pines Prize for junior distinguished scholar, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr. Elnatan Chen specializes in Biblical Hebrew and the grammatical thought of the medieval Andalusian linguists. He wrote his PhD dissertation at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Professor Aharon Maman on Studies in the Linguistic Thought of R. Jonah ibn Janah. Dr. Chen edits and translates important grammatical works from medieval Muslim Spain, such as the works of Rabbi Yehuda Hayyuj and Rabbi Jonah ibn Janah. He currently serves as a postdoctoral researcher within the Ben-Yehuda Center of the Hebrew Language Department at the Hebrew University.

Anna Holzer-Kawalko is a postdoctoral research Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. She specializes in the history of Jewish material culture, in particular libraries and book collections in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Holzer-Kawalko earned her PhD in 2023 with a doctoral dissertation that addresses the fate of the Nazi-looted German-Jewish libraries in post-war Czechoslovakia. In addition to Jewish cultural property, her research interests also include nation-building in European borderlands as well as heritage and migration studies. These are reflected in Holzer-Kawalko's numerous publications, and especially in her latest book In Other People's Houses: Poles and Jews in Lower Silesia after 1945, which was published with Magnes Press in 2022.

Anastasiia Strakhova is a historian of modern East European Jewry, focusing on migration, borderlands, race, ethnicity, and interethnic relations. Before getting her PhD from Emory University in 2022, she studied history and Jewish Studies in her native Ukraine and Hungary. During Anastasiia's tenure as an Ephraim E. Urbach Fellow, she will work on transforming her dissertation into a book, Selective Emigration: Border Control and the Jewish Escape in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914, that examines how the racialization of Jews in the Russian Empire functioned through migration policies and everyday border-crossing practices. Her article Unexpected Allies: Imperial Russian Support of Jewish Emigration at the Time of Its Legal Ban, 1881-1917 has been recently published in the special issue of Quest - Issues on Contemporary Jewish History devoted to migration. Currently a Perilman postdoctoral Fellow at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, she will start a Starr fellowship at Harvard in July 2023.

Dr. Rachel Frish is visiting faculty at Yale Divinity School and the program of Judaic Studies at Yale University, and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Her main interests include prophetic literature and biblical and post-biblical wisdom literature. Frish explores the development of traditions from the Bible through Tannaitic literature and early Christianity. She seeks to define the core ideas that characterize the biblical traditions as well as their unique developments in the various literary works, tracing their theological range and later developments. Frish's dissertation, Wisdom Sayings in the Book of Jeremiah (Bar-Ilan University, 2021) discusses the nexus of wisdom and prophecy in the book of Jeremiah, shows how these traditions influenced each other, and points out the implications on the development of wisdom tradition and texts. Her current research focuses on the source of wisdom in biblical and post-biblical literature.

Ahuva Liberles is a historian of medieval Jewish history. In 2020, Liberles completed a doctoral thesis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), titled: "Believing or Belonging? Religious Conversion, Family Life, and the Jewish Community in Late Medieval German Lands". At Yale University, she is a Blaustein Postdoctoral Associate of Medieval Jewish History. Liberles was previously a Kreitman Post-doctoral Fellow at BGU's Jewish history department. During the academic year 2018-19, she was a visiting research scholar at LMU Munich. Her areas of interest include pre-modern German and Jewish history (1100-1500), social and intellectual history, family life, conversion, marginality, and inter-religious relationships.

Yonatan Shemesh is a Post-doctoral Associate in Jewish Thought in the Judaic Studies Program and the Philosophy Department at Yale University. He is a scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy and intellectual history, with a focus on texts and ideas that originated in the Islamic world and later transformed the Jewish communities of Christian Europe. Yonatan is a co-editor of Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His current project examines Moses Narboni's fourteenth-century commentary on Maimonides' Guide and demonstrates the many ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped the interpretation of the Guide in late medieval Judaism. Yonatan received his MA in Religion and PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois - Chicago, and Hamilton College.

Anna Sierka earned her PhD at the University of Munich with a doctoral dissertation focusing on the adaptation of imagery known from the medieval Ashkenazi esoteric sources in Lurianic Kabbalah, chiefly in Naphtali Bachrach’s major oeuvre Emeq ha-Melekh. She has been a Golda Meir Postdoctoral Fellow and subsequently, a Minerva Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research explorers significant shifts in esoteric and kabbalistic doctrines against the backdrop of the manuscript sources. Her recent paper “Kanfei Yona in Seventeenth-Century Ashkenaz” was published in Kabbalah: Journal of Jewish Mystical Texts (2021). She is currently completing a monograph on non-Lurianic traditions in early modern Ashkenazi Kabbalah.

 Dr. Ayelet Brinn is an American Jewish historian, with a focus on gender and popular culture. Her research explores the role of the Yiddish press in mediating between American and Jewish cultural spheres. She is currently working on a book project about the crucial role that questions of women and gender played in the development of the American Yiddish press. Ayelet received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. During the 2021-2022 academic year, in addition to serving as an Ephraim Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellow, she will be a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Ayelet has previously served as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Rabin-Shvidler Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University and Columbia University. 

Dr. Tom Fogel is a Folklorist and ethnographer. He completed his dissertation in the program for Folklore and Folk Culture Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His studies deal with Yemeni Jewish Folklore, Culture and Language, and address issues of Identity, Heritage and Tradition. Fogel is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Within the framework of this project, he studies inter-religious encounters involving Jewish Yemeni occult knowledge. Additionally, Fogel is a research fellow at The Department of Arabic Language and Literature, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a project that documents and analyzes Judeo Arabic dialects from Yemen.

Geraldine Gudefin is a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a visiting scholar at the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University’s Buchmann Faculty of Law. She is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in the United States and France. She holds a BA from Sorbonne-Paris IV, an MA from Yale University, and a PhD in History from Brandeis University. Her current book project, which expands her dissertation, focuses on how international mobility exposed East European Jewish migrants to distinct, and often conflicting, systems of family law in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. This study offers a new understanding of Jewish migrations and the tangled ties between religion and the state. Her work has been published in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues and Archives Juives. Her research has been supported by the Posen Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the Center for Jewish History. Gudefin was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Dissertation Award, which is given to the best dissertation in the field of Jewish History and Culture in the Americas.

Dr. Neri Y. Ariel obtained his Ph.D. in Talmud and Halacha at Hebrew University (July 2019). Ariel is a Post-Doctoral research fellow and lecturer in Israel and Germany. Ariel completed recently a joint research project as an interoffice collaboration (ZJS, FUB & Menczer, HUJI). Additionally, as cooperation partner at the Institute of Jewish History in Austria (INJOEST), at the University of Vienna and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), he researches Hebrew fragments retrieved from Book-Binding deepening the understanding of medieval Jewish traditions in Europe. Ariel’s Ph.D. research has focused on his discovery of a hitherto unknown genre within Judaeo-Arabic literature named Adab al-Qadi (“etiquette of judgeship” earlier known in its Hebrew name Hovot Haddayanim). Dr. Ariel will be taking up the Kreitman post-doctoral position at Ben-Gurion University. 

Jordan Katz is the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History in the Judaic Studies Program at Yale University. She is a historian of early modern Jewry, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her current book project builds upon her dissertation, which examined the role of Jewish midwives within communal, intellectual, and medical frameworks in the early modern Ashkenazic world. Through an exploration of Jewish midwives’ medical influences, their engagement with administrative knowledge systems, and their intellectual status in the eyes of prominent male leaders, Katz’s study offers a new understanding of the structures of knowledge and authority that undergirded early modern European society. More broadly, she is interested in the ways in which expertise and special skills created pathways for interaction between Christians and Jews, and between Jews of different socioeconomic classes, that have not yet been studied. 

Jordan has received an Doctoral as well as Ephraim Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellowship from MFJC; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Center for Jewish History; and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review and a forthcoming article will appear in Jewish Social Studies. In Fall 2021, she will begin a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.