2025–2026 Fellowship Theme
New Frontiers in Contemporary Jewish Life: Cultural Expansions, Encounters, and Experiments
Contemporary 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?
