Fall Colloquium Speakers

Street and Sanctuary: Jews and Visibility in American Public Spaces 

Fall Colloquium Speakers

 

Allan Amanik, Brooklyn College

Allan Amanik is assistant professor of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Death and Burial in New York (NYU Press, 2019) and co-editor of Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

Amanik received his PhD from New York University in the departments of History and Judaic Studies.

 

Michael Casper, New York Public Library | Katz Center Fellow

Michael Casper is a historian of modern Eastern European Jewish politics and culture. His research examines the Jewish role in planning, theorizing, and inhabiting public housing in twentieth-century America.

Casper received his PhD in history at UCLA with a dissertation titled “Strangers and Sojourners: The Politics of Jewish Belonging in Lithuania, 1914–1940.” He has previously held fellowships at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Posen Foundation.

 

Alanna E. Cooper, Case Western Reserve University | Katz Center Fellow

Alanna E. Cooper serves as Abba Hillel Silver Chair in Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work addresses contemporary Jewish life. While her attention is global in scope, she has a particular focus on Jewish life in the United States. Her current research examines the ways that communities acquire, use, maintain, and deaccession their material possessions.

Cooper received her PhD in anthropology from Boston University. She has held teaching and research positions at the University of Michigan, Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Hasia R. Diner, New York University | Katz Center Fellow

Hasia R. Diner is the Paul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. She is also director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History. Her research interests include American Jewish history, American immigration, and women’s history. She is currently investigating Irish and Jewish interactions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Diner received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an elected member of both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Jewish Research, and was previously a Guggenheim fellow.

 

Dean Franco, Wake Forest University

Dean Franco is Palmer Professor of Literature and director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University, where he teaches courses in comparative race studies. His publications include Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature Since 1969 (Cornell UP, 2012) and The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles (Stanford UP, 2019). He recently published the essay “The Jews are ‘The New Jews’” for a special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature on Jewish studies in the Age of Trump.

Franco received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California.

 

Melissa R. Klapper, Rowan University | Katz Center Fellow

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and director of Women's & Gender Studies at Rowan University. Her current research explores Jewish identity and the travel experiences of American Jewish women between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of WWII.

Klapper received her PhD in history from Rutgers University. Her scholarship has been awarded grants and fellowships from the American Jewish Archives, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among others.

 

Lana Dee Povitz, Middlebury College | Katz Center Fellow

Lana Dee Povitz is a visiting assistant professor of History at Middlebury College. Her research and teaching focus on US social movements and grassroots politics, women and gender, oral history, food politics, and American Jewry. She is currently at work on a historical biography of three sisters: feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, psychotherapist Laya Firestone Seghi, and Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone.

Povitz received her PhD in US history from New York University. Her first book, Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice, was published by UNC Press in 2019. She is coeditor of a special forthcoming issue of Histoire sociale /Social History on activist lives.

 

Laurence Roth, Susquehanna University | Katz Center Fellow

Laurence Roth is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and co-chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University where he founded and directs the Jewish and Israel Studies Program and the English–Publishing and Editing major. His current research examines American Jewish literature as an activity, constituted not only by authors and texts, but also through commerce and within social space.

Roth received his PhD in English from UCLA. He serves as editor of Modern Language Studies, a publication of NeMLA, and has previously held fellowships at the Katz Center and at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

 

Britt Tevis, Katz Center Fellow

Britt Tevis is a historian with special interests in law and Jewish studies. Her current research challenges the myth of American Jewish exceptionalism by examining the ways in which local, state, and federal authorities condoned and/or incited anti-Jewish discrimination, resulting in the curtailment of Jews’ civil rights.

Tevis received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was previously a lecturer of law at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Jennifer A. Thompson, California State University, Northridge

Jennifer A. Thompson is the Director of the Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program and the Maurice Amado Professor of Applied Jewish Ethics and Civic Engagement at California State University, Northridge, in Los Angeles. Her research uses ethnography to investigate the cultural categories that contemporary American Jews use to organize their individual and collective lives. Thompson is the author of Jewish On Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism (Rutgers University Press), which examines the gap between discourses about intermarriage and the lived experiences of intermarried Jews. She is currently working on a book about the Jewish expressions and commitments of unaffiliated Jews, drawing on ethnography among Jewish genealogists, High Holiday services at a Hollywood comedy club, a secularist Jewish community, self-identifying “unconventional Jews,” and Twitter users who call themselves “bad Jews.” 

Thompson received her PhD from Emory University.

 

Amy Weiss, Saint Elizabeth University | Katz Center Fellow

Amy Weiss is the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at the College of Saint Elizabeth. Her research and publications focus on the intersections of American Jewish history, Israel studies, and Jewish-Christian relations. She is currently examining American Jewish interfaith relations in the age of Evangelicalism.

Weiss received her PhD from the departments of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History at New York University. She has previously taught at Rutgers University and the City College of New York.