Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education

Ziva R. Hassenfeld

Ziva Hassenfeld

Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor in Jewish Education
Assistant Director of Research

Ziva R. Hassenfeld is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Assistant Professor in Jewish Education at Brandeis University, and Assistant Director of Research for the Mandel Center. She studies reading comprehension from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on how children develop interpretations of the Hebrew Bible as a case of student reading development. She uses a variety of qualitative methods including ethnographic observation, stimulated recall interviewing, and think-aloud interviewing.

These investigations connect her to the worlds of biblical hermeneutics, both contemporary and rabbinic, as well as literary theory and criticism. 

In addition to her research, Ziva is a passionate educator. She has taught Hebrew Bible in a variety of settings, including at JCDS, Gann Academy, Genesis/BIMA at Brandeis, Silicon Valley Beit Midrash, Stanford Hillel, Congregation Beth Jacobs, Congregation Emek Beracha, Congregation Shaarei Tefilla, Pardes, Brandeis Hillel, and the Lehrhaus. She is a Wexner Fellow and Davidson Scholar, Class 25.

Research Agenda

Ziva Hassenfeld’s research sits at the intersection of language, literacy, and religious education, with a particular focus on how students make meaning of texts and how the power dynamics of the classroom impact that meaning making process. Her first book, The Second Conversation: Interpretive Authority in the Bible Classroom (Brandeis University Press), explores how students and teachers negotiate meaning in the study of sacred texts, foregrounding the generative, cultural, and theological dimensions of textual interpretation. Across her research, she consistently attends to how students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds shape their engagement with classical Hebrew, biblical texts, and broader religious discourses.

Her current book project extends this agenda by offering a bold counter-narrative to dominant frameworks such as the "science of reading" through investigation of religious reading practices. Rather than treating reading as a technical skill to be mastered for utilitarian purposes, Hassenfeld draws on Jewish mystical traditions, as well as broader religious conceptions of language, to articulate an alternative vision of reading as a sacred, transformative act. She argues that religious literacy practices, especially in communities where language is imbued with spiritual and cosmological significance, open up new possibilities for how we understand reading, comprehension, and meaning-making. This work contributes to growing conversations about the limitations of reductive literacy paradigms and the need to reclaim more expansive, interpretive, and relational models of reading. It offers compelling answers to the current reading crisis we are living through where young students struggle to learn how to read, college students struggle to engage in deep reading, and AI is forcing the question: What is reading for?

MCSJE Projects and Programs

Current

Past

Highlighted Publications

(See her faculty page for a complete list of publications.)

Brandeis Courses

Her courses at Brandeis include Reading (and Talking Back) to Educational Research (ED 165a) and Religious Education in America and The Reading Wars. She has previously taught The Centrality of Literacies in Teaching and Learning, a required course for all teacher candidates in the Stanford Teacher Education Program.

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