Schusterman Center for Israel Studies

Maham is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and is writing her dissertation on the legal history of Israel from 1992 to 2013. Her research stems from her interests in comparative citizenship, boundaries of membership in nation-states, and courts as political institutions. In Spring 2021, she taught “Defining Status in the Modern State,” an original interdisciplinary course on citizenship, nationalism, indigeneity, and migration. She received her BA in International Studies from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her thesis on citizenship law in Bangladesh. She has previously worked at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and at the American Bar Foundation.

Born in Israel and raised in Japan, Shirah completed her undergraduate studies in liberal arts at Doshisha University in Kyoto, during which she also spent time at Leiden University in the Netherlands and wrote her honour’s thesis on the impact of nationalism on the development of Modern Hebrew and Modern Japanese literatures. Her main interest is in the relationship between modernity and literature in the early 20th century, in particular in how writers processed their place in the world. She is interested in topics such as artistic intertextuality, especially the relationship between literature and music, as well as in themes such as anxiety and the sublime. In her graduate studies, she hopes to further delve into these topics, focusing on Hebrew, Japanese, English, and German literatures. 

Rima Farah is pursuing a doctoral degree in the department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Her research revolves around the cultural and political history of minorities in the Middle East, with an emphasis on the formation and development of their ethnic and national identities. She published an article in the journal Israel Studies titled “The Rise of a Christian Aramaic Nationality in Modern Israel,” and she is in the process of writing her dissertation on “The Predicament of the National Identity of Christians in Israel: 1980-2014.” She holds an MA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Haifa, the city where she was born and raised, as well as an MA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University. Having grown up in a multicultural and multilingual society, Farah is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. She teaches Hebrew at Brandeis University and Middlebury College.

Working at the intersection of cultural history and political theology, her dissertation examines a group of hegemonic Israeli literary and public figures who converted from 'left' to 'right' wing in the aftermath of the 1967 war, paving the way for the Israeli right wing and the settlement movement as we know it today. Her research interests include Jewish political thought, religious and secular messianism, gender and nationalism, place studies, as well as Israeli and Palestinian visual arts and literature. Eva speaks fluent Hebrew and Russian, has advanced proficiency in Yiddish, and is gaining proficiency in German. In 2019-2020 she was a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. 

Mika holds an MA in Politics from Brandeis University, an MA from the University of Haifa in Peace and Conflict Management, as well as an honors degree from the University of Cape Town in Justice and Transformation and a BA from the University of Auckland in Politics and History. She specializes in comparative politics and her research focuses on militant democracy with a specific interest on party bans. Her research interests also include comparative regime types; democratic transition and consolidation; and democratic regime persistence. Focusing most particularly on Israel and Germany, Mika’s dissertation explores when and why political parties are banned.