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.
He studies the relation between religion and public/political life, mainly in the modern period, and how Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers conceive this relation in theological, philosophical and political terms. He also writes about the nature of collective and political responsibility, and about the role of religions in ongoing struggles for economic and social justice in an era of globalization. He is presently in the midst of a writing project which explores the ethical, religious and political thought of Emmanuel Levinas, which also reflects his broader research interest in contemporary religious and secular conceptualizations of transcendence and political theology. He teaches courses focusing on medieval, modern and contemporary Jewish thought; religious ethics; religion and public policy; secularization theory; and political theology.
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. He is currently writing a book to be titled Beyond Political Messianism: the Poetry of The Second Generation of Religious Zionist Settlers. His courses include: Jewish Fiction; Israeli Literature in Hebrew; Contemporary Israeli Literature in Translation; Holocaust Literature; The Bible as Literature; God and Poetry; Mysticism and Community in the Hasidic Tale; and Believers, Agnostics, and Atheists in Contemporary Fiction.
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, and theorizing religion. Her latest book, which revisits the relationships between religion and gender in the Greco-Roman world, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (2010). Her current research project investigates the fate of Mediterranean diaspora Jewish communities in the late Roman Empire. Various of her courses explore the relationships between Jews and Christians in antiquity, as well as Jews and Judaism in the Greco-Roman diaspora. Most recently, she taught a Judaic Studies freshman seminar on Jewish messiahs from Jesus of Nazareth to the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Spring 2009).
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) among other topics. His most recent book, Creating Judaism: History, History, Tradition, Practice, is broader in scope, developing a model for understanding “Judaism” as a religion. His active research projects include a study of popular Jewish piety in antiquity; a synthetic history of Jews during the Second Temple period (based on a podcast now in development); the continuation of an internet database of inscriptions from Israel/Palestine; and a study of Jewish calendars in early America. This year (2009/10) he will teach courses on Talmud (in English translation); Faith and Violence (a freshman seminar); The Gift in Antiquity (undergraduate/graduate seminar); and Judaism.
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.
Post Doctoral Fellow in Early Modern Jewish History:
Anne O. Albert (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2008) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Modern Jewish History in the Program in Judaic Studies, 2009-2010. Her dissertation, “Post-Sabbatian Politics: Reflections on Governance Among the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, 1665-1683,” examines the political self-image of that community during the period immediately following the failed messianic movement of Shabbetai Tzvi. She is currently in the process of expanding this research for publication. Beyond the particular focus of her dissertation, Professor Albert specializes in early modern European Jewish history, and her other areas of teaching and research include Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish political thought, and the history of conversos and the Sephardi diaspora. These themes reveal an abiding interest in the relationship between Jewish thought and that of the wider world. Her courses at Brown include Power and Powerlessness in Jewish Political Thought and Philosophers, Messiahs, and Mystics: Early Modern Judaism.