Scholars-in-Residence

Past HBI Scholars-in-Residence

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Ornit Barkai, Summer 2009
Independent Filmaker
Ornit Barkai's film credits include the documentaries From Anne Frank's Window, A Day in Poland, Past Forward (work-in-progress) which all explore post-Holocaust narratives from multi-generational perspectives, A Moment of Silence and Manhattan Moments which highlight 9/11 themes, and Let Them Fly which documents Jewish youth leadership in New England and is part of the media curriculum of the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education. Ornit offers diverse media production and broadcasting experience with regional and national radio and TV stations and international programming. She holds an M.A. in Mass Communications/TV Production emphasis from Emerson College.
While at the HBI, Ornit Barkai carried out pre-production research for a documentary film on "The Polacas" (Polish women in Spanish), young women from the shtetls of Eastern Europe who were forced into prostitution in Argentina and Brazil by members of the Argentinean Jewish crime ring Zwi Migdal during the 19th and early 20th century. Working in a cinema verite style, Ornit aims to make a documentary that will offer a glimpse of the historic consequences of the ordeal of these tragic women.

Marleen Barr, 2003-04
Montclair State University (New Jersey, USA)
Marleen S. Barr is herself a pioneer in the feminist criticism of science fiction. A professor of American Literature at Montclair State University, Barr specializes in postmodern fiction, narrative theory and cultural studies. Her many works include Oy Pioneer!, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Barr spent her HBI residency working on a new novel, Oy Quebecois!

Norma Baumel Joseph, 1999-00
Associate Professor of Religion, Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec)
While in residence at HBI, Professor Joseph worked on her book manuscript about Rav Moshe Feinstein’s legal opinions and was the guest editor for “Food, Gender and Survival,” Volume 5 of Nashim.

Michal Ben Ya'akov, Summer 2009
Efrata College for Education, Lecturer, History Department
Michal Ben Ya'akov's academic research centers around 19th and early 20th century Eretz-Israel, with special emphasis on North African and Sephardi Jewry. Combining her academic interests with her work teaching at the Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem, she has done research on the history of the school, originally the Mizrachi College for Women. She received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002. While at HBI, Michal's research focused on the changing lives of Jewish immigrant widows from North Africa living in the various urban centers of 19th century Palestine.

Orly Castel-Bloom, 2007
One of Israel's most celebrated authors of our times. Author Orly Castel-Bloom writes about Israeli society from the perspective of the satirist with a strong sense of the absurd. Her novels and stories have been described as an “experiment in a new art form” for their daring use of language and the unusual treatment of their subjects. Recognized as one of the fifty most influential women in Israel, she has twice won the Prime Minister’s Prize as well as various others prestigious awards, and her novel Dolly City has been included in UNESCO’s Collection of Representative Works. Ms. Castel-Bloom came to the HBI in order to research the Israeli expatriate community for her next novel.

Julie Cwikel, 2007
Professor Cwikel is the Founder and Director of the Center for Women’s Health Studies and Promotion, Israel’s only academic center of women’s health studies with a multi-disciplinary approach. In addition to her responsibilities as an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Julie mentors non-traditional women students (minorities, mature students) in their own research through her position as the Academic Advisor to the Continuing Education Unit.  She has recently published a major new textbook Social Epidemiology: Strategies for Public Health Activism.  While at the HBI, Dr. Cwikel carried out the US portion of her current research project looking at how mothers transmit health information to their daughters. Her research investigated how women learn about critical health behaviors in their lives including menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and maintaining health and mental health.

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Sharon DiFino, Ph.D., 2007
Sharon is an expert in 18^th and 19^th century German literature, culture and intellectual history.  She is an Associate Professor at University of Florida where she teaches courses in both the Germanic Studies and the Center of Gender and Women Studies. She is also the Director of the UF Utrecht summer program.  In 2007 Sharon received the 2007 Madelyn Lockhart Faculty Fellowship in Women’s Studies, which is awarded to emerging scholars within their disciplines and advances women and gender studies scholarship.  Sharon holds a doctorate in Eighteen Century German Literature from the University of Massachusetts.
Sharon Difino’s project at the HBI explores the parallels between the problems of liberal female Jewish intellectuals and writers in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as their possible mutual influence, from the late 18^th century through WWII. The works that she analyzes focus on the cultural understanding of gender and ethnic identity and provide insight into the steps that these women took towards autonomy and emancipation.

Corinne Ducey, 2009
University of Nottingham
Corrine Ducey received her Ph.D. in Russian/Holocaust Studies at the University of Nottingham in July 2007. Previous to her time there, she completed an honors undergraduate degree at Princeton University where she wrote her senior thesis on the "Democratisation of Germany after 1945," which addressed the role of the memory of the war, the Holocaust and German political culture on the development of German democracy. Corrine Ducey's proposed book-length project will examine the philosophical, social and political issues that influenced the discourse surrounding both the Holocaust and Anne Frank over the decades, including the need to focus on life-affirming lessons, the universalization of suffering, the role of iconic symbols in the representation of tragedy and the reluctance to directly confront the horrors of the Holocaust. The project will also examine the role of Anne's gender in her popularity, focusing on the dynamic between victimhood and resistance.

Harriet Friedenreich, 2006
Temple University
Harriet Freidenreich is Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia.  A native of Ottawa, Canada, she earned a PhD in Eastern European and Jewish History from Columbia University.  She is the author of The Jews of Yugoslavia (JPS, 1979), Jewish Politics in Vienna (Indiana University Press, 1991), and Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Indiana University Press, 2002).  She is presently working on a project on Jewish women in academia in the mid-20^th century.
"On the Fringes of Academia: Jewish Women as University Faculty Before 1970." 

Shulamit Gilboa, 2008
Independent Poet, Novelist, Journalist.
Shulamit Gilboa holds a BA in Hebrew literature and an MA in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Since 1984, she has been deputy literary editor and since 2005 she has been the literary editor in chief of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. During those years she also wrote a weekly book column. She received the Tel Aviv Literature and Art Foundation Award and a writing stipend at Oxford in 1999. Her bestseller, Four Men and a Woman, was awarded the Book Publishers Association's Gold and Platinum Book Prizes (2000). Alma's Way, also a bestseller, was awarded the Book Publishers Association's Gold Book Prizes (2003).
During her residency, Shulamit Gilboa prepared and wrote her next novel about the lives of four siblings and the complex relationships within a family. The novel narrates the lives of a sister and her three brothers, and describes through their interactions the development of each of them from infancy to adulthood. The events depict the struggles within the family, the different attitudes each of the siblings has towards the parents, and their individual views, beliefs and expressions. The plot, which takes place in Israel and in Boston, focuses on the youngest sister, who while writing a paper about Gender and Family, projects about her own life, the lives of her brothers and their surroundings, and the events that take place during the 30+ year span of the story.

Stephen Glantz, 2008
Independent Filmmaker
Stephen Glantz’s film and theatre credits include Europa Europa (producer), Babij Jar (creator and writer), and Tanglewood Tale (co-writer).  His most recent film Der Letzte Zug/ The Last Train (writer) tells the story of three Jewish families and the six days they spent in a cattle car during their “relocation” from Berlin to Auschwitz.  The film earned the Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Bavarian Film Awards and also received the imprimatur of the President of the Republic of Germany. At the HBI, Stephen Glantz used his residency to write a novel about the life of the people of a fictional Polish town known as Zolkiew prior to World War II. 

Rebecca Goldstein, 1999-00
Novelist and MacArthur Award winner
Rebecca Goldstein delivered the keynote address at HBI's Spring 2000 Conference on Gender and Jewish Education and completed her novel Properties of Light.

Ellen Golub, 2003-04
Salem State College (Massachusetts, USA)
Ellen Golub attended Hebrew College and holds a Ph.D. in American Literature and Psychoanalysis from SUNY Buffalo. A former professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she currently serves as professor of Communications at Salem State College. In addition to academic articles and journalistic prose, she has written a young adult novel, Is My Mom OK? During her residency at HBI, she worked on a short story and a Talmudic style commentary for a “new Jewish reader.”

Beatriz Guervich, 2004-05
CEIEG-Universidad del CEMA (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Advisor to the Secretary of Human Rights, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Commerce and Culture (Argentina), Professor Beatriz Gurevich is an expert in the fields of Social Anthropology, Political History and Human Rights. She received a Masters degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires where she also received her license in Sociology. She is currently project director of the Program CIRSOF at the Universidad del CEMA in the Institute for International and Globalization Studies. The author of several books and numerous articles, Professor Gurevich’s work at HBI focused on transnational terrorism and Jewish women’s political activism following the AMIA bombing in 1994.
“Passion, Politics and Identity: Jewish Women in the Wake of the AMIA Bombing in Argentina.”

Eyal Katvan, 2006
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Eyal Katvan received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Law, Bar-Ilan University, where he produced his thesis titled: “Compulsory Examinations and Their Connection to the Oppression of Women”.  He is both a post-doctoral student at the Faculty of Law, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Interdisciplinary Program for Science, Technology & Society at Bar-Ilan University (for which he produced his thesis entitled, “The Medical, Physical and Mental Examinations of Jewish Immigrants to Eretz Israel 1919-1938”).  Eyal’s academic interests lie in the fields of bioethics, law & medicine, legal history and the history of medicine; however, he specializes in the topics of “Medical, Physical and Mental Examinations,” as well as “Women in the Law”. Having served as a member of the Israeli Bar since May 1998, Dr. Katvan has served as a Country Representative at The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, (FAB) as well as a visiting scholar in The Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.  He is a member of the Ethics Committee and of the Helsinki Committee at Rabin Medical Center. During his residency at the HBI, Dr. Katvan explored the topic of "Women's Entrance into and Integration within the Legal Profession in Eretz Israel and in Israel".

Judith Katz, 2008
University of Minnesota, Instructor, Jewish Studies, Creative Writer.
Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist, and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Among her numerous awards and grants she has received Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and National Endowment fellowships for fiction, as well as two Minnesota State Arts Board Grants. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for both the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies and the department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, as well as creative writing courses for the Hamline University MFA program.
At the HBI, Judith worked on her novel, Atomic Age. Atomic Age looks at the lives of two Worcester Jewish families during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Set against a backdrop of the development of the atomic bomb, the creation of the new state of Israel, and the arrests and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Atomic Age asks the following questions: How does the unfolding of community histories impact and influence the history of a family and its individual members? How does a family outsider experience that history? How does she contribute to the family narrative? Understand it? Repair it?

Sheila Katz, 2002-03
Professor of World Civilizations, Berklee College of Music (Boston, Massachusetts)
Professor Katz completed her book on Jewish and Palestinian women peace activists, Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalis, and began research on a new project on the history of grassroots contact between Arabs and Jews in Israel and Palestine.

Melissa Klapper, 2007
Melissa R. Klapper is an associate professor of American and women's history at Rowan University.  She has a BA from Goucher College and a PhD from Rutgers University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She is the author of two books, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (NYU Press, 2005) and Small Strangers:  The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925 (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007). At the HBI, Professor Klapper's work focued on American Jewish women's pre-World War II activism in the suffrage, birth control, and peace movements. She has been awarded numerous fellowships for this work from sources as varied as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women at Harvard. Professor Klapper is interested in the ways Jewish identity historically motivated Jewish women's significant activism in social movements.

Hagar Lahav, 2009
Sapir Academic College
Hagar Lahav is the head of the Journalism Program in the School of Communication at Sapir Academic College in Israel. She specializes in feminist politics, journalism studies and feminist media studies.  Hagar has recently become increasingly engrossed in feminist theology and Jewish studies. In her work in this field she combines post-secular theories with political theology.  Prior to completing her doctorate, Hagar was the Deputy Head of the News Division of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz. She received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2006. Hagar Lahav will examine the idea that perceptions of God, which appear in several Jewish theological writings, can empower secular women's self-autonomy. She aims to answer two major questions, How can she, as an atheist, bring God into her life, so that she can use this force? And which kind of God should it be, so that it will meet her feminist perspective and goals? Her study will focus on the writings of 20th century Jewish thinkers that were inspired by Hassidic and Psycho-Kabbalh mysticism, such as Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag and the philosophers Martin Buber and A.D Gordon.

Tobe Levin, 2006
University of Maryland in Europe
University of Frankfurt
Tobe Levin is professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland in Europe and adjunct at the University of Frankfurt. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and has studied and taught at numerous institutions in Europe. Professor Levin is the editor of Feminist Europa, and the chair of FORWARD – Germany against FGM (female genital mutilation). Professor Levin spent her time at HBI editing a collection of articles on the work of the controversial Austrian writer, Nobel Prize winner Elfried Jelinek.
"Public Intellectuals, controversial feminists: Elfriede Jelinek and Alice Walker." 

Judith Lewin, 2008
Union College
Judith Lewin is an Assistant Professor at Union College in New York where she teaches courses on European and American Jewish Literature; Comparative Literature; Women's Studies; and 18th & 20th century French, German and British Literatures. She has written numerous articles and is the author of Literary Jewesses and Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women: A Dynamics of Identification.  She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. At the HBI, Judith Lewin developed the manuscript of her next book devoted to Jewish women writers.

Julia Lieberman, 2008
Saint Louis University
Julia Lieberman is a researcher of early modern western Sephardic Jews, a scholar of Spanish literature, a native Spanish speaker, and a fluent Portuguese speaker.  Julia has also completed extensive research of Hebrew and Sephardic writings, and is the editor of the first Spanish-language textbook on Sephardic history written expressively for use in the classroom.  She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Yale University.
Julia Lieberman’s study at the HBI of the Western Sephardim in the early modern period examined the educational system and the roles of women and children in life cycle events, as well as male attitudes towards education, family life, women and children.

Vanessa Paloma, 2008
Independent Scholar, Soloist, Performance Artist, Writer and Lecturer
Vanessa Paloma is active as a soloist, performance artist, writer and lecturer. She founded and co-directs Flor de Serena, a Judeo-Spanish ensemble based in Los Angeles, and has toured a solo show, Sephardic Songs of the Sea, combining Ladino songs and kabbalistic teachings. Vanessa has recently published her first book entitled, Mystic Siren: Woman's Voice in the Balance of Creation. In addition, Vanessa leads workshops and gives classes on Jewish mysticism, Sephardic culture and women's religious expression.
Vanessa Paloma focuses on the links between women, spirituality and creativity. While at the HBI, she wrote about the formulation of identity through the eyes of women by analyzing secular women's songs of the Spanish-speaking Jewish population of Morocco. Her project was composed of three components including a book on Sephardic women's songs of Northern Morocco, a songbook for the public containing historical and societal information on women singers and their lives in the Moroccan ghettos, and a performance incorporating music and cultural information.

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Reina Reiner, 2007
Reina Reiner’s project is an exploration of the changing nature of orthodox family life in Israeli society as presented in the theatre.  Building on her recent book, The Audacity of Holiness: Orthodox Women’s Theatre, Reina will now analyze repertoire and fringe plays, as well as study the reactions to them through ethnographic fieldwork.  She aims to provide new insights about new emerging Jewish family patterns in orthodox society. A pioneer in the field of anthropological theatre studies, Reina Reiner is among the first to study theatre within the context of Israeli orthodox society.  In addition to her course work, Reina regularly lectures and holds workshops on the connection between drama and teaching.  She has a Masters in Theatre Studies from Tel-Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Anthropology from Hebrew University.  

Larissa I. Remennick, 2004-05
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Larissa Remennick is associate professor and past chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Born in Russia, she holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography of Health from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (1988). While at HBI, Professor Remennick completed an article on changing attitudes towards femininity, sexuality, and gender roles among former soviet immigrant women in the United States.
"‘Being a Woman is Different Here:’ Changing Attitudes towards Femininity, Sexuality, and Gender Roles among Former Soviet Immigrant Women in the U.S.”

Tania Reytan, 2001-02
Human rights activist and Jewish community organizer (Sofia, Bulgaria)
While in residence at the HBI, Tania Reytan laid the groundwork for research on Jewish women's communal participation in the Balkans (Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania and Yugoslavia)

Lilach Rosenberg, 2007
Lilach Rosenberg earned her Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University and is a lecturer in the Martin Szusz Department of Eretz Israel Studies.  The focus of her research is Historiography, Gender, and Israeli Studies.  Dr. Lilach has published many works including, Revolutionaries Despite themselves: Women and Gender in Religious Zionism in the Yishuv Period.  She is also the recipient of the Alon Scholarship. At the HBI Dr. Rosenberg continued her studies of the formation of the female identity in Israel.  In particular, she examined the way cultural, religious and social contexts impact on the development of the female identity, within a historical perspective, as well as a contemporary perspective.  She is currently completing her research concerning Shlihot Aliya from Eretz Israel (envoys for Jewish immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate) by carrying out an integrative analysis of three historical episodes and of the context they took place in.

Moshe Rosman, 2007
Moshe Rosman is a Professor of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University and is the author numerous books and articles on the history of Eastern European Jews. His publications have received many awards including the1996 National Jewish Book Award for /Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov/, which also won the Shazar Prize for Best Book in Jewish History in 2000. Considered one of the finest scholars in the world working on the early modern period (1500 – 1800) of Jewish history in Poland, Professor Rosman is the only male in the field who has done significant history on women. His research while at the HBI focused on gender as a crucial element in understanding the integrated social and economic networks of the Jews in Eastern Europe during this time period.

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Hannah Safran, 2007
Hannah Safran teaches at the Women’s Studies Programin Emek Yizrael College in the North of Israel and also in Women’s Studies and Art at the Lesley University extension in Netanya.  She has been involved in both feminist activism and academic research on feminism for many years and is one of the co-founders of the organization, Women’s Coalition for Just Peace. Her most recent book is titled Don't Wanna be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel.

Susan Sered, 1998-99
Professor of Anthropology, Bar Ilan University.
During her period of residence at HBI, Professor Sered researched women’s health issues in Israel and wrote What Makes Women Sick, published in the Brandeis Series on Jewish Women. Sered also was the guest editor for “Motherhood,” Volume 3 of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, now published by Indiana University Press in conjunction with HBI and the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.

Carmel Shalev, 2003-04
Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy Research (Tel Hashomer, Israel)
Carmel Shalev is director of the Unit of Health Rights and Ethics at the Gertner Institute for Health Policy Research and teaches health and human rights at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is a member of the Israel Helsinki Committee for Genetic Experiments in Human Beings and of the Scientific and Ethical Review Group (SERG) of the World Health Organization Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction, Geneva. Shalev spent the Spring semester at HBI working on a book-length project entitled “Gen-Tech Women,” a gendered exploration of the legal, moral and ethical implications of reproductive and genetic technology.

Susan Shapiro, 2009
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Susan Shapiro is Associate Professor of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has also taught at Columbia University, Hebrew University's Rothberg School, University of Delaware, and at Syracuse University.  Susan is the author of Recovering the Sacred: Ethics, Hermeneutics and Theology after the Holocaust (forthcoming).   Until recently there has been virtually no gender-oriented analysis within Jewish philosophy.  Susan Shapiro will begin remedy this situation with her project which systematically treats a range of Jewish philosophers and makes a sustained argument about the ways in which these texts/philosophers are interrelated as regards to their treatment of the body, gender, and women, forming a specific strand of Jewish philosophy.  She focuses on the strand of Jewish philosophy which begins with Moses Maimonides and goes through Emmanuel Levinas.  By employing practices she terms "reading for gender," the genealogy and consequences of the gender-ideologies of these texts are explicated.