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 American Civilization, Anthropology, Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, History, and Religious Studies).
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.
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 Maud S. Mandel (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is the author of, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth Century France (Duke University Press, 2003). Currently, she is working on her monograph, Beyond Antisemitism: Muslims and Jews in Contemporary France. Her most recent article, “Transnationalism and its Discontents during the 1948 Arab/Israeli War,” appeared in the journal Diaspora. In 2008, her article "Assimilation and Cultural Exchange in Modern Jewish History" will appear in the volume, Rethinking European Jewish History. She teaches courses on many aspects of modern Jewish history, including the history of the Holocaust, Zionism and the birth of the state of Israel, and the history of American Jews.
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.
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.
Sociology:
Lynn Davidman (Ph.D., Brandeis University) is the author of Motherloss and Tradition in a Rootless World. She is co-editor of Feminist Perspective in Jewish Studies. Recent articles include: “Beyond the Synagogue Walls,” “Truth, Subjectivity and Ethnographic Research,” “Studying Close to Home: The Intersection of Life and Work,” and “The Personal, the Sociological and the Intersection of the Two.” Her current book project is Leaving Home: Exiting Orthodox Judaism in Israel and the U.S. Her courses include Women in Jewish Culture: Image and Status, Jews, Race, and Ethnicity, and Gendered Jewish Lives.
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.
Jewish Thought:
Michael Gottsegen (Ph.D., Harvard University) is an expert on modern Jewish thought and philosophy.
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.
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.