Program in Judaic Studies, Princeton University

Although the Program in Judaic Studies is designed for undergraduates, there are many graduate students at Princeton who are pursuing topics relevant to Judaic Studies within their home departments.  At the present time, these include Anthropology, Architecture, Comparative Literature, English, Germanic Languages and Literature, History, Music, Near Eastern Studies, Politics, and Religion.

Mika Ahuvia, in the Department of Religion,  was born in Kibbutz Beit Hashita in north Israel. She graduated with a BA in Classical Studies from Rollins College and a MA in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan. She's participated in archaeological excavations with Oxford University, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Michigan. In the Religions of Late Antiquity program at Princeton University, she's currently researching the feminine divine in heterodox Christian and Jewish sources as well as the archaeology of Late Antique churches, synagogues, and cemeteries.

April C. Armstrong entered the Religion Department's Ph.D. program in Religion in America in 2007. Prior to enrolling at Princeton, she earned her B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Oklahoma and her M.A.Th. in Theological Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Tentatively entitled, "'I Don't Know Why He Chose the Jews': Southern Baptist-Jewish Relations and the American Public Square," her dissertation will focus on Southern Baptist-Jewish relations in the 1980s.

Yael Berda is a lawyer  5th year graduate student in the department of Sociology. In her dissertation she examines how the legacies of British colonial administration of populations have impacted and shaped  practices and policies related to citizenship and political membership in Israel, India and Cyprus, following the regime change from colonial administration to struggling democracies. Formerly a practicing human rights lawyer specializing in administrative, military and international law, Yael is interested in the ways institutions and organizations, through their mundane routines, forms and files, shape the life of the state. She Holds a LLB from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an M.A is Sociology & Anthropology from Tel Aviv university with honors. Her book, a pioneering study on the bureaucracy of the military occupation in the West Bank is forthcoming in June 2012 (Jerusalem Van Leer institute and Hakibutz HaMeuhad Publishing - In Hebrew). Yael has been highly engaged in public life in Israel, particularly on issues related to social justice and political participation.

Shira Billet entered the Religion Department in 2010. She studies modern Jewish thought and intellectual history, with a focus on German Jewish thinkers spanning the period from unification through the second world war, with a particular interest in the political, legal, and ethical implications of religious thought. Topics of interest include the political overtones and undertones - in their local and particular historical contexts, in the broader context of a more sweeping intellectual history,  and with an eye toward contemporary conversations - of discussions of sin, the problem of evil, aesthetics, emotion, race and peoplehood. Shira received her BA in Religion from Princeton University, and is a Wexner graduate fellow in Judaic Studies, as well as a graduate fellow at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization.

James Casey is a pre-generals graduate student in the History Department. He completed his BA in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2008) and his MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2011). As a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholar in Syria he conducted research on the language of nationalism in the Syrian popular press under French Mandate. With the support of a Judaic Studies fellowship, he will be spending summer 2012 in Beirut, researching relationships between Islamic, Christian, and Jewish pious endowments in Lebanon in the context of French colonial rule (1920-1943).

Sarit Kattan Gribetz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion.  She is interested in the ways in which ancient communities within the Roman Empire regulated their time and invested time with meaning through daily rituals, prayer cycles, calendars, astronomical observations and calculations, and other time-keeping mechanisms.  Her dissertation examines conceptions of time and rhythms of daily life in ancient Jewish society, with a particular focus on the synchronization of Jewish time with Greco-Roman and Christian time and on gendered constructions of time in rabbinic sources.  Sarit received her BA in Religion from Princeton University, studied Talmud and archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a Fulbright Research Fellowship, and spent a year as a visiting instructor at the University of Toronto.

Rachel Gross entered the Religion Department's program in Religion in America 2008. Her dissertation is a material culture examination of nostalgia in American Jewish communities, including studies of Jewish genealogists, the use of historic synagogues as museums, children's books and dolls, and American Jewish foodways. She received a B.A. in Jewish Studies and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.

David Grossberg entered the program in 2010 after earning his MA in Judaic Studies from the University of Connecticut.  An article based on his master’s thesis research, “Orthopraxy in Tannaitic Literature,” appeared in the Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010).  He is interested in Second Temple and rabbinic literature, early Christianity, and Hellenistic philosophy.  His current work concentrates on rabbinic approaches to religious doctrine and practice, developments in the rhetorical strategies of rabbinic heresiology, and the gradual separation between Jewish and Christian religious self-identity in Late Antiquity.  His article “Between 3 Enoch and Bavli Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben Abuyah” is forthcoming in Hekhalot Literature in Context: From Byzantium to Babylonia.

Ronnie Halevy, Anthropology, is focusing on the primary education of Bedouin girls in the Negev through the prism of tribe and state. She is currently completing and submitting grants that offer support for fieldwork, such as Wenner-Gren and SSRC. She is entirely engaged in fieldwork among the Bedouin community in the Negev of southern Israel.

Yossi Harpaz, department of Sociology, received his M.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel-Aviv University, where he studied the proliferation of dual citizenship among Israelis whose families immigrated from Central and Eastern Europe. Yossi is interested in understanding ethnic and national identity, focusing in particular on the way it is shaped by experiences of migration and conflict. His current project deals with these topics through a comparative examination of several cases of dual citizenship among immigrants to and from Europe.

David Jorgensen, entered the Religions of Late Antiquity program in the Department of Religion in 2007, having completed a Master of Theological Studies degree at Harvard Divinity School with a focus on the New Testament and Early Christianity.  At Princeton his work centers around the Christianities of the second to fourth centuries, especially exegetical techniques, canon formation, and constructions of orthodoxy and heresy.

Alex Kocar is a student in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity subfield of the Religion Department and came to Princeton in 2009. He graduated with a BA in Classics, Philosophy, and Religions of Antiquity from the University of Minnesota and a MA in Comparative Religion from the University of Washington. Mr. Kocar works on early Christian social and intellectual history, focusing in particular on traditions of scriptural exegesis and ethical instruction. Since coming to Princeton, Alex has worked on Greek and Coptic papyri from the Oxyrhynchus collection of Oxford University as well as the Coptic Pachomian texts stored at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland.  Mr. Kocar will propose his dissertation in the fall of 2012 on the rhetorical use of ethical responsibility and intention in early Christian writers of the first three centuries of the common era.

John Lansdowne is a graduate student in the Dept. of Art and Archaeology. A native of Cleveland, OH, he received his B.A. in Classics and History from Boston College (2007) and M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from St Cross College, Oxford (2011). He travels to Israel this summer to conduct research for his potential dissertation project on the concept of the 'New Jersualem' and its manifestation in the art and architecture of the Medieval Latin West.

Jessica Marglin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  Her research focuses on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in early modern and modern North Africa, and her dissertation looks at Jews in the Moroccan legal system during the nineteenth century.  In January 2013 she will begin a position as assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  During her first term at the University of Michigan, Jessica will be a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.  Jessica graduated with a BA and an MA from Harvard in 2006.  She is also an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship.

Jessi O'Rourke-Suchoff is in the Department of Comparative Literature. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature with a minor in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, focusing on mixed media and photography in the contemporary American novel. She is currently interested in modern and contemporary British, American, and French novels in terms of object theory and the formation of national and collective memory and identity, as well as issues surrounding modes of writing in the Hebrew Bible.

Elias Sacks, Religion, areas of focus include Jewish thought, philosophy of religion, hermeneutics, and the history of philosophy. He has a particular interest in German- Jewish thought, and his current projects include work on Moses Mendelssohn's relationship with Immanuel Kant and on Franz Rosenzweig's approach to ethics and law.  After receiving his B.A. from Harvard, Eli studied at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned an M.A. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia.

Sara Verskin is in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  She is currently writing her dissertation "Barren Women: the Intersection of Religion, Medicine, and Magic in the Medieval Response to Infertility."  Her current academic interests include the history of social contacts between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the development of Islamic and Jewish laws pertaining to women in the public sphere, the history of privacy and gender segregation in theory and in practice, medieval medicine, and generally social and intellectual history in the medieval middle east.

Marc Volovici holds an MA degree in German Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently  he is a first year graduate student in Princeton's History Department, sudying Central European cultural and intellectual history.

Lev Weitz is in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  He is from Minneapolis, Minnesota and received his BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2006.  At Princeton, he plans to study the adoption of Arabic and the formation of communal identities among Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule in the medieval period.

Other graduate students working in areas relevant to Jewish Studies are the following:  Sand Avidar-Walzer (English), Abra Levenson (Comparative Literature), Daniel Marks (Politics), Leeore Schnairsohn (Comparative Literature), Geoffrey Smith (Religion), Bella Tendler (Near Eastern Studies), Ezra Tzfadya (Religion), Jennifer Wilson (Slavic), and Oded Zinger (Near Eastern Studies).