Katz Center Fellow Ayelet Brinn on the American Yiddish Press and the Historical Roles and Contexts of the Media
Steven P. Weitzman (SPW): Ayelet, can you tell us a bit about the project you are working on at the Katz Center?
Katz Center Fellow Alanna E. Cooper on Unraveling Jewish Communities, Synagogue Dissolution, and the Afterlife of Material Culture
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?
Katz Center Fellow Dr. Elazar Ben-Lulu on Reform Lifecycle Rituals, LGBTQ Culture in Judaism, and Religious Observance During COVID-19
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?
Katz Center Fellow Jacqueline Vayntrub on the Revitalization of Philology, Biblical Poetics, and Generational Dynamics in Biblical Authorship
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.
Katz Center Fellow Ofer Ashkenazi on German-Jewish Film, Photography, and Culture
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.
Katz Center Fellow Keren Friedman-Peleg on Exploring the Socio-Political Dynamic of the Clinical Labels of Trauma and PTSD in Israel
Steven Weitzman sits down with current fellow Keren Friedman-Peleg, a medical and psychological anthropologist whose research combines clinical questions of security-related trauma diagnosis, treatment, and prevention with socio-political questions of national belonging and inequality.
Katz Center Fellow Joshua Teplitsky on Early Modern Jewish History, David Oppenheim, and Insatiable Bibliophilia
Steven Weitzman sits down with current fellow Joshua Teplitsky to learn about his research into the place of books not only in the movement and dynamism of Jewish knowledge in early modern Europe, but also their role in the circulation of social prestige, access, and capital.
Katz Center Fellow Melissa S. Cradic on Archaeology, Ancient Genetics, and Human Remains
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.
Katz Center Fellow Hadar Feldman Samet on Sabbateanism
Katz Center director Steven Weitzman sits down with Hadar Feldman Samet, who researches the lives and texts of the Sabbatean Ma’aminim, their syncretic religion, and the development of Sabbateanism.
Katz Center Fellow Alon Tam on Egyptian Jewish Culture
My father’s family is Jewish-Egyptian, and I grew up with that strong heritage: Egyptian music, films, and family stories about life in Cairo filled my childhood...