GRADUATE STUDENTS

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.

Aryeh Amihay, Religion, is a third-year student interested in ancient Jewish literature including the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple Literature and Rabbinic literature. Amihay’s undergraduate studies were in the Bible Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last year he was awarded a travel fund from the Judaic Studies Program to attend a graduate conference on interdisciplinary approaches on The Bible at Trinity College, Dublin, where he lectured on the Oracles of Balaam.  His current interests include legal texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, focusing on issues of authority and interpretation of scripture in these texts, as well as historical questions concerning the development of the sect represented in the scrolls.

Yael Berda, second year in Sociology, was raised in West Jerusalem, Israel.  She practiced as a human rights lawyer focusing on free speech, impediments on freedom of movement, and citizenship and immigration law in the Israeli Supreme, administrative, criminal law, and military courts.  Her master's thesis at Tel Aviv University was titled "The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the Palestinian Territories: An Introduction to the Permit Regime."  Yael is interested in the intersections of law, politics and sociology and will focus on comparative sociology of organizations (particularly on colonial bureaucracy), sociology of space and time, security and policing, sociology of music and urban sociology.  She has co-authored several articles on bureaucracy and human rights.  Her first book of poems will be published in fall 2008.

Yiftah Elazar, Politics, is a fourth-year student of political theory, interested in normative theories advocating or opposing social and political change. Before coming to Princeton, Yiftah studied at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he earned his MA in Political Science, and his BA in Philosophy and the Amirim Honors Program for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In his career as a journalist, Yiftah reported from the Israeli Supreme Court for Galei-Zahal national radio station, and worked as a news editor in Israel's most widely distributed daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot. He wrote for The Seventh Eye, the Israel Democracy Institute's bimonthly journal for media analysis and criticism.

Ronnie Halevy, Anthropology, is a fourth-year student, who 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. By late November she will be entirely engaged in fieldwork among the Bedouin community in the Negev of southern Israel.

Adam Jackson started at Princeton in the Late Antiquity subfield of the Department of Religion, the Program in the Ancient World and the Program in Judaic Studies in 2004. This past year he continued his research for his general exams and towards his dissertation, and presented a paper on the transmission of divine revelation through the agency of children and the mystical significance of the alphabet in Genesis Rabbah in the Fall workshop and then at the Spring "Revelation, Literature and Community in Antiquity" departmental colloquium. Among other projects, he is currently reworking this paper for publication.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Religion and Judaic Studies in the subfield of religions of late antiquity.  Last year, she studied archaeology and rabbinic literature at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem on a Fulbright Fellowship, and she spent the summer on an archaeological excavation in Sepphoris in the Galilee and studying Arabic at Middlebury College's graduate-level program.  She is interested in comparing the Roman theater, the synagogue, and the church as spaces of ritual and performance; she is also fascinated by the relationship between revelation and textual interpretation in rabbinic literature, the representation of Moses in Second Temple, rabbinic, and early Christian sources, and the development of rabbinic identity expressed through midrashic interpretation.

Ari Lieberman is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. He is currently studying the evolution of Modern Hebrew literary style.

Jessica M. Marglin is currently a second-year student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  She graduated with a BA and Masters in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 2006, and spent the following year on a Fulbright in Israel, studying at The Hebrew University and doing research in the archives in Jerusalem.  Her area of study is Jewish-Muslim relations in North Africa, 18th-19th centuries, and she recently gave a paper at a conference entitled "Poverty and Charity in Meknes; A Study in Jewish Communal Leadership, 1750-1912," which will be published in an edited volume in 2009.

William Plevan, is in the sixth year of the Religion department's program in Religion and Philosophy which he entered after earning his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary.  He is currently working on his dissertation, entitled: "I, Thou, We: Martin Buber's Philosophical Anthropology Reconsidered." The dissertation examines the role of philosophical anthropology in the development of Buber's later writings on philosophy, religion and Judaism.  He will be presenting papers on Buber's philosophical anthropology at the upcoming American Academy of Religion and the Association of Jewish Studies meetings.

Elias Sacks, Religion, is a second-year student whose 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.

Rafael Segal, in his sixth year at the School of Architecture, received his professional architectural degree from the Technion –Israel Institute of Technology in 1993, and an M.Sc in architecture (2001).  He has taught and practiced architecture in Israel and the US.  He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation which examines and analyzes the architectural work of Alfred Neumann built in Israel between 1959 and 1967.  Alfred Neumann (1900-1968), a Czech architect who studied and worked in Vienna and Paris during the 1920’s -30’s, immigrated to Israel in 1949, where he later became Professor and Dean of the Architecture and Town Planning Faculty at the Technion –Israel Institute of Technology. In 1959 Neumann established an architecture practice with his former students Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon which produced one of the most original bodies of work of the mid 1960’s. Neumann’s buildings and designs gained extensive international recognition through publications in leading periodicals of the time yet to date no research has been undertaken on his work.  His approach to architecture occurred as a critique of Israel's overarching acceptance of International Style Architecture and within the broader international scene, where it can be seen to reflect a paradigm shift from the notion of 'building as object' to 'building as pattern'.  Neumann’s buildings explored the possibility of addressing issues of human proportion, sensitivity to light, climate, and other human and environmental considerations, without compromising the search for new forms and expressions.

Danielle Shani, Politics, sixth-year, is a Fulbright scholar, a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars, and the recipient of the Knesset’s award for exceptional academic achievements.  Her research interests include public opinion, civic engagement, political socialization, political psychology, and democratic theory. She has an ongoing project about partisan biases in political perceptions of “objective” national conditions.  In her dissertation, she explores the ways in which citizens develop an interest in politics, by testing various theories about the origins of political interest, such as family socialization, high-school socialization, and the force of events experienced during one’s formative years.  The title is “Engendering Citizens: On the Origins of Political Interest.”

Krisztina Szilágyi, Near Eastern Studies, is a fourth-year student, from Hungary, whose dissertation will deal with Muhammad’s portraits among the Christians of the Islamic world from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Last year she published an article in Ginzei Qedem entitled “Christian books in Jewish libraries: Fragments of Christian Arabic writings from the Cairo Genizah,” and is working on the edition of a Judaeo-Arabic fragment from a hitherto unknown work of the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Daud. She received an M.A. in Arabic and Jewish studies from the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), and another one in religious studies from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Adriana X. Tatum is an eight-year student who works primarily on twentieth century Modern Hebrew poetry, with an emphasis on the relation between translation and poetry. Her dissertation explores the ways diasporic languages were made present in Modern Hebrew writing in the State of Israel. This project will articulate a “poetics of multilingualism” through a close look at how translation practices shaped the development of Modern Hebrew and Israeli poetry. Her article “Paris or Jerusalem? The Multilingualism of Esther Raab” was published this year in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

Erica Weiss, Anthropology, is a fourth-year student who is investigating the relationship between the citizen and the State of Israel with regard to changing notions of being governed.  She will be going to Israel for her fieldwork this spring and will continue through the following academic year.

Lev Weitz is a second-year PhD student 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:  Mika Ahuvia (Religion), April Armstrong (Religion), Sand Avidar-Walzer (English), Amir Goldberg (Sociology), Rachel Gross (Religion), Miriam Hess (German), Michael Kirkwood House (German), Eduard Iricinschi (Religion), Devra Jaffe-Berkowitz (Sociology), Lance Jenott (Religion), David Jorgensen (Religion), Abra Levenson (Comparative Literature), Daniel Mark (Politics), Edward Muston (Comparative Literature), Leeore Schnairsohn (Comparative Literature), Geoffrey Smith (Religion), Bella Tendler (Near Eastern Studies), Ezra Tzfadya (Religion), Keri Walsh (English), Jennifer Wilson (Slavic), and Oded Zinger (Near Eastern Studies).