Announcing the 2022–23 Fellows

The Katz Center is thrilled to announce the cohort for the 2022–23 academic year, engaging the theme of Jews and Modern Legal Culture. The fellows will join us from Israel, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States, and represent a range of methodological, disciplinary, and historical specializations. Our goal as always is to promote generative intellectual exchange not only among the fellows but also with the Penn community and the public more broadly.

Continuing and building on the 2021–22 fellowship year devoted to Rethinking Premodern Jewish Legal Cultures, the Katz Center’s coming year turns its attention to the study of law between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, an era of transition from a world of empires to the modern age of the nation-state and international law. 

We are also pleased to include in this announcement the names of two University of Pennsylvania faculty members who will join the cohort as part of a new Penn faculty fellowship initiative. We are grateful to the deans of the School of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Education for their support. 

We look forward to hosting these distinguished scholars and seeing how they expand our understanding of Jewish culture’s engagement with law, democracy, the state, modernity, and justice.

2022–2023 Katz Center Fellows

Itamar Ben Ami, Humboldt University of Berlin
Ruth Meltzer Fellowship
Legal Theocracy: The Ultra-Orthodox Adaptation of Halakhah to the Statist Era

Sigal Ben-Porath, Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania Faculty Fellowship
Free Speech for and about Jews: A Legal and Normative Analysis

Leora Bilsky, Tel Aviv University
Primo Levi Fellowship
Cultural Genocide in the Eichmann Trial: A View from Below

Emmanuel Bloch, UC Berkeley School of Law
Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship
The Tsni’ut Laws: Halakhah and Metahalakhah in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Yonatan Y. Brafman, Tufts University
Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship
Jewish Law, Philosophy, Systematicity

Julie Cooper, Tel Aviv University
Ariel and Joshua Weiner Family Fellowship
Legal Foundations of the Diasporic Jewish Nation

Carolyn J. Dean, Yale University
Primo Levi Fellowship
Bystanders, Jews, and the Legal Imagination in Vichy France

Noëmie Duhaut, Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz
Ariel and Joshua Weiner Family Fellowship
French Jews, Legal Practice, and the Construction of Empire

Ayala Fader, Fordham University
Ivan and Nina Ross Family Fellowship
Haredi Jews, Health, and Legal Cultures

Marc Flandreau, Department of History
University of Pennsylvania Faculty Fellowship
Sovereign Default, International Law, and the Anglo-Jewish Financial Community in the Nineteenth Century

Elisabeth Gallas, Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow
Jody Ellant and Howard Reiter Family Fellowship
“We Accuse!”: History of Jewish Indictments in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Nan Goodman, University of Colorado
Ivan and Nina Ross Family Fellowship
The Memory of Sabbatianism and American Legal Culture

Tafat Hacohen-Bick, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Louis Apfelbaum and Hortense Braunstein Apfelbaum Fellowship
Yirah, Law, and the Birth of Modern Hebrew Literature

Dana Hollander, McMaster University
Louis Apfelbaum and Hortense Braunstein Apfelbaum Fellowship
German Legal Comparatism and the Modern Understanding of Jewish Law

Tamir Karkason, Martin Luther University of Halle – Wittenberg
Dalck and Rose Feith Family Fellowship
Translating Citizenship: Jews and Ottoman Law in the Nineteenth Century

Jessica Marglin, University of Southern California
Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship
The Extraterritorial Mediterranean: Jews, Sovereignty, and Law in the Nineteenth Century

Thomas Prendergast, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Maurice Amado Foundation Fellowship
Habsburg Jewish Legal Scholars, Sociology, and the Global Imperial Turn

Chaim Saiman, Villanova University
Albert J. Wood Fellowship
The New American Halakhah: Praxis of Contemporary American Beth Dins

Nomi Stolzenberg, University of Southern California
Ellie and Herbert D. Katz Distinguished Fellowship
The Place of the Jew in the Law of Religious Liberty

Elly Teman, Ruppin Academic Center, Israel
Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Fellowship
Surrogacy in Israel: Between Jewish and Secular Law

Avishalom Westreich, College of Law and Business, Israel
Israel Institute Visiting Faculty Fellowship; Roberta and Stanley Bogen Visiting Scholar
The Civil Revolution of Jewish Law in Israel

Sarah Zager, St. Olaf College
Ruth Meltzer Fellowship
Deontology and Virtue Ethics in Halakhah