Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): You are one of the few Katz Center fellows in my time as director who combines training in history and the law (although we will have several next year in a year focused on Jews and the law). Can you tell us a bit about what led you to the study of legal history, intellectually and/or personally?

Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): Ayelet, can you tell us a bit about the project you are working on at the Katz Center?

Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): Your research began far afield from this year's current focus on America's Jewish Questions. You did anthropological fieldwork in Uzbekistan and produced an excellent monograph on Bukharan Jews—you could have fit well into a recent Katz Center year focused on Jewish life in modern Islamic contexts. How then did you move from that focus and part of the world to your current project on American synagogues?

Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): Elazar, can you tell us a little about how you came to your intellectual interests, and what you are hoping to accomplish as a Katz Center fellow this year?

Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): It’s a distinctive pleasure to have this chance to ask you a few questions about your work because you and I have tackled some overlapping areas in our research and share some interpretive sensibilities, and yet you think in ways that go beyond the limits of my thinking. I appreciate having my mind challenged and opened in that way.

This blog post is part of a series focused on the research of current fellows. In this edition, Katz Center Director Steven Weitzman sits down with Ofer Ashkenazi, whose research seeks to shed light on otherwise unuttered, or under-examined, perceptions of Jewish domestic experiences under Nazism.

This blog post is part of a series focused on the research of current fellows. In this edition, Katz Center Director Steven Weitzman sits down with Melissa S. Cradic, who recently earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on funerary practices and ancestor lineages in the Bronze Age Levant.