Current Year

2025–2026 Fellowship Theme

New Frontiers in Contemporary Jewish Life: Cultural Expansions, Encounters, and Experiments

Illustration of treeContemporary Jewish life constitutes an ever-expanding cultural landscape, teeming with multiple possibilities for doing and being Jewish. Individuals, groups, and institutions are imagining and pushing forward new Jewish formations to create and inhabit previously uncharted territories. It is to these new frontiers of Jewish life that the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies devotes its fellowship program in 2025–26.

What does it mean to live, worship, and affiliate Jewishly in this diversified landscape? How is Jewishness expressed and contested across media and geographies of the contemporary moment? What can we learn about the present and future of Jewishness by looking at forms of community and creativity in marginal, interstitial, and unexpected spaces, including those in the frontier zones between the religious and the secular, the center and the periphery, the Jewish and the non-Jewish, or that exist in the virtual realms of the imagined and the digital?

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Tom
Baker

Full Year Fellow

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

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Nancy
E.
Berg

Spring Term Fellow

Washington University St. Louis

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Sara
Byala

Full Year Fellow

University of Pennsylvania

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Peter
Decherney

Full Year Fellow

University of Pennsylvania

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Ayala
Fader

Fall Term Fellow

Fordham University

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Marjorie
N.
Feld

Fall Term Fellow

Babson College

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Cynthia
Gabbay

Full Year Fellow

Humboldt University of Berlin

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Tamar
Hess

Full Year Fellow

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Michael
Hoberman

Spring Term Fellow

Fitchburg State University

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Mendel
Kranz

Full Year Fellow

University of Pennsylvania

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Michal
Kravel-Tovi

Affiliated Fellow

Tel Aviv University

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Sarah
Leiter

Full Year Fellow

University of New Mexico

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Gal
Levy

Full Year Fellow

Open University of Israel

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Hannah
Mayne

Fall Term Fellow

University of Toronto

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Lilach
Naishtat

Spring Term Fellow

Kibbutzim College of Education

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Vanessa
L.
Ochs

University of Virginia

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Lipika
Pelham

University of Westminster, London

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Yosefa
Raz

Full Year Fellow

University of Haifa

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Joshua
Shanes

College of Charleston

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Edward
Waysband

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Rachel
Werczberger

Full Year Fellow

Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College

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Efrat
Yerday

Full Year Fellow

American University

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Orian
Zakai

Fall Term Fellow

George Washington University