Master's Students
Seth Eislund is a master’s student in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies program. His
research broadly focuses on historical and contemporary religious persecution and genocide
against ethnoreligious minorities, as well as the characteristics of violent religious and
nationalistic ideologies. More specifically, his research is concerned with the history of
antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the 2014 Yazidi Genocide in northern Iraq. Seth graduated
from Carleton College in 2022 with a BA in History and is also the founder of the Yazidi
Genocide Archive, a digital project that aims to educate the public about the genocide through
interviews with survivors and scholars, as well as by preserving primary sources.
Julianna Jackson is a master’s student in the joint Conflict Resolution and Coexistence and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies program. Raised in Seattle, she pursued her lifelong passion for politics at Western Washington University. After graduating with a bachelor’s in Political Science in 2018, she moved to Jerusalem to study at the Mayanot Women’s Program. Her main research interest is analyzing the role of intergenerational trauma in the continuation of conflict, namely amongst Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Outside of school, she loves to paint and host Shabbat dinners with friends.
Claudia Politanski is a Brazilian lawyer by training, having attended University of São Paulo Law School for her bachelor degree and University of Virgina Law School for her LLM. She is also a former EVP of Itaú, Brazil’s largest bank. After retiring from her successful career of over three decades in 2021, she decided to pursue one of her lifelong passions of studying history. She now joins the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis to deepen her knowledge on Jewish history and foster her dream of becoming a historian.
Benjamin Timbers is a Master's Student in the combined NEJS-Hornstein Program, focused on Jewish texts and practices and how they adapt throughout history. His emphasis is on the stories in the Tanakh and their different meanings for generations of Jews thousands of years apart.