The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry

Eugene R. Sheppard is Interim Director of the Tauber Institute. He serves as an editor of the Tauber Institute Series and managing editor with Samuel Moyn of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, published by Brandeis University Press. He is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. His publications include Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher. He is currently writing a book that examines the life, writings, and reception of Valeriu Marcu (1899-1942), a German-language popular historical writer, essayist, and publicist of Romanian Jewish origin whose historical sketches, profiles, and extended book-length historical studies traced and expressed the origins of the present and unfolding horizon of the future. Sheppard co-edited The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz with ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Sylvia Fuks Fried. 

Sylvia Fuks Fried is Executive Director of the Tauber Institute and an editor of the Tauber Institute Series. She also serves as editorial director for Jewish Studies of Brandeis University Press. In 2015, Fried coedited The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz with ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Eugene R. Sheppard. 

David Briand is the Assistant Director of the Tauber Institute. He was previously the institute's program director, the coordinator of the program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, the project manager for the Ethics Center's Ad Hoc Tribunals Oral History Project, and the lead researcher and coordinator of the Columbia Center for Oral History's Rule of Law Oral History Project. 

Jehuda Reinharz is the Founding Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry and the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is an editor of the Tauber Institute Series with Brandeis University Press. Reinharz served as president of Brandeis University from 1994 to 2010. In January 2011 he became president of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.

Reinharz has edited, authored and co-authored many articles and books, including The Jew in the Modern World; Zionism and the Creation of a New Society; Glorious, Accursed Europe; The Scientific God: Popular Science in Hebrew in Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the 19th Century; Inside the Antisemitic Mind; The Road to September 1939: The Yishuv, the Jews of Poland and the Zionist Movement and, most recently, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography.

Jonathan Decter is a Faculty Associate of the Tauber Institute and the Edmond J. Safra Professor of Sephardic Studies at Brandeis University. His research focuses on Jewish literature, history, and thought in the Islamic World during the medieval period, and in Sephardic Studies more generally. Professor Decter's most recent course offerings include Jews in the World of Islam; Debating Religion: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue and Dispute; and Biblical Narratives in the Qur'an. His most recent book is Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews of the Medieval Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 

Freeze is co-editor with Jay M. Harris of Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772–1914 (2013) and author of, most recently, A Jewish Woman of Distinction: The Life and Diaries of Zinaida Poliakova (2019).

Laura Jockusch is a Faculty Associate of the Tauber Institute and the Albert Abramson Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the social, political, cultural, and legal histories of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust and engage in comparative, transnational, and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Her first book studied the beginnings of Holocaust research by Jews and from a Jewish perspective immediately after the liberation from Nazi rule.

Jockusch’s ongoing research project investigates how Jews conceptualized legal redress after the unprecedented crime of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. It explores how Jewish individuals and organizations related to the Nuremberg trials and other Allied war crime trials in occupied Germany, and examines the multifaceted ways in which Jews sought to implement their ideas of justice in and outside of the Allied tribunals.

Moreover, Jockusch is working on a monograph on the controversial postwar trials of Stella Goldschlag, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor accused of having been a Gestapo informer.