PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies

Program in JUDAIC STUDIES

Spring 2020 Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies

I am delighted to have the opportunity to establish this program, which will shape intellectual concepts in the field, promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship, and perhaps most important, bring Jewish civilization to life for Princeton students— Ronald O. Perelman

In 1995 financier and philanthropist Ronald O. Perelman, an innovative leader and generous supporter of many of the nation’s most prominent cultural and educational institutions, gave Princeton University a gift of $4.7 million to create a multidisciplinary institute focusing on . The Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Jewish Studies allows undergraduate students to earn a certificate in Jewish Studies, strengthening Princeton’s long tradition of interdisciplinary studies and broad commitment to . The gift from Mr. Perelman, chairman and chief executive officer of MacAndrews and Forbes Inc., also supports a senior faculty position—the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies—and a wide variety of academic and scholarly activities that bring together leading scholars to examine , religion, literature, thought, society, politics and cultures.

Faculty

Executive Committee William C. Jordan, History Leora Batnitzky, Religion Krakowski, Near Eastern Studies Citron, Religion Lital Levy, Comparative Literature Yaacob Dweck, History Marina Rustow, Near Eastern Studies Jonathan Gribetz, Near Eastern Studies Schor, English Martha Himmelfarb, Religion Moulie Vidas, Religion

Associated Faculty

David Bellos, French and Italian AnneMarie Luijendijk, Religion Jill S. Dolan, English, Dean of the College Deborah Nord, English Anthony Grafton, History Anson G. Rabinbach, History Wendy Heller, Music Stacy E. Wolf, Lewis Center for the Arts Heller-Roazen, Comparative Literature Stanley N. Katz, Woodrow Wilson School Senior Research Scholar Daniel Kurtzer, Woodrow Wilson School Ra’anan Boustan, Judaic Studies

Emeritus Faculty

Mark R. Cohen, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Froma Zeitlin, Ewing Professor of Greek Language Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Near and Literature, Classics and Comparative Eastern Studies Literature, Women and Gender, and Judaic Peter Schäfer, Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Studies Jewish Studies, Religion Table of Contents

1 Director’s Message 2 JDS Courses 3 Events, 2019-2020 4-11 Undergraduate Summer Funding Reports 12-15 Graduate Summer Funding Reports 16 Faculty Updates

Director’s Message

As the contents of this newsletter attest, 2019 was another busy year for the Program in Judaic Studies. On p. 3 you can see posters for some of the lectures that JDS initiated or cosponsored. We are grateful to the donors who make possible the several endowed lectures and the week-long scholar-in-residence program. JDS also cosponsored two conferences last spring semester: “Ultra-Orthodox Women through Social and Legal Lenses” and “Legendary Characters: Attribution and Personhood in Ancient .”

The lectures and conferences give an excellent idea of the range of Jewish Studies at Princeton and of JDS’s contribution to the intellectual life of the university. So too do the reports on pp. 4-15 on student research and projects that JDS helps to fund. The number, variety and quality are extremely impressive.

I also want report some good news about JDS faculty. Yaacob Dweck of History and JDS was promoted to the rank of professor, and Jonathan Gribetz of NES and JDS was promoted to associate professor with tenure. We are delighted for both of them. Dweck also published a new book this year. You can find a picture of its cover on p. 16.

Martha Himmelfarb

PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 1 Courses

Fall 2019 Spring 2020 Ancient Judaism from Alexander to the Rise of Apocalypse: The End of the World and the Secrets Islam, Martha Himmelfarb of Heaven in Ancient Judaism and Christianity, Elementary I, Philip Zhakevich Martha Himmelfarb Muslims, and Christians in North Africa: Art and Judaism in the Ancient World, Ra’anan Boustan Interactions, Conflicts and Memory, M’hamed Great Books of the Jewish Tradition, Ra’anan Boustan Oualdi Intermediate Biblical Hebrew, Philip Zhakevich Religion and Law, Leora Batnitzky Contested: A City’s History from Jewish, Texts and Images of the Holocaust, Froma Zeitlin Christian and Muslim Perspectives, Jonathan Gribetz The World of the Cairo Geniza, Marina Rustow Modern Jewish History: 1750-Present, Yaacob Dweck One Text, Many Angles: Merchant of Venice, Leonard Barkan Topics in American Literature: American Jewish Congratulations Writers: Citizens, Immigrants and Iconoclasts, to our 2019 Certificate Students: Esther Schor Miriam Friedman (Politics) Yael Lilienthal (Linguistics) Noreen Anderson (Near Eastern Studies)

PhD students Eliav Grossman (Religion) (l) and Rachel Richman (Near Eastern Studies) were among some 25 participants in the Geniza Lab Transcribe-a-thon in November, where volunteers transcribed Hebrew and Arabic fragments via the Zooniverse platform. (Photo by Michele Alperin)

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PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 3 Undergraduate Summer Funding

Tali Anisfeld ’20 I spent a month in , conducting interviews in the Ethiopian Jewish community. I went into the project hoping to understand the role of land – both physical and mythic – in creating Ethiopian Jewish identities. But on July 1, 19-year-old Teka was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in Haifa. The killing immediately re-ignited a deep and urgent rising up of Ethiopian and allied voices in Israel in the call against racism and police brutality, and it became clear to me that the experience of racism in Israel and its intersections within the Jewish community was what I needed to focus on. I spent the next month talking with Ethiopian Israelis – not experts, simply members of the community in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hadera and Tzipori. Most were born in Ethiopia and had immigrated to Israel in their youth, currently aged between early 20s to mid-50s, some extremely traditional and others entirely secular. One of the most interesting threads was the extent to which this movement for racial liberation in Israel identified with African Americans and the movement for Black Lives in the United States; some identified deeply, while others felt that the comparison was inappropriate and dangerous. The history of the relationship between racial liberation movements of Jews of color in Israel and other racial liberation movements across the globe and the way the current protests in the Ethiopian Jewish community both fit into and diverge from that history are the central explorations of my senior thesis. The time I spent in Israel this summer, creating real connections with and engaging in honest conversations with members of the Ethiopian community, has made me feel responsible to real people in the writing of this work in a way that has forced me to think more deeply about what it is that I want to contribute to this conversation and what the stakes of those contributions might be. Thank you to the Judaic Studies Department for making this possible for me.

Bes Arnaout ’20 With the help of the French and Italian Department, Department of Humanistic Studies, and Judaic Studies, in May 2019 I traveled to Frankfurt to explore a potential thesis topic and deepen my understanding of cinematic storytelling related to the topic of war, genocide and trauma. My goal was to study the archives at the Fritz Bauer Institute, in particular the translated documentation of lived experiences of women prisoners during the Shoah, and later turn to fictional cinema and analyze ethics of representation on the topic of the Holocaust as a case study of fictional models of gendered trauma. Researching women prisoners’ experiences has been elucidating, both of the Holocaust in general, and of the specificities of the role of gender and female experiences at times of mass violence. Understanding that there are spaces and institutions that help serve as a reminder of the history and keep the memory of those who suffered has been very helpful in my work, both morally and educationally. I have gained experience and practice in navigating varied resources, to lead me and my work into directions I would not have had a chance to interpret otherwise.

Eli Berman ’20 I continued to prototype my Xibuccal Dresses, which are wearable musical instruments central to my thesis. I experimented with four different kinds of pipes to test their interactions with human voices, and collected data on each pipe’s resonant frequencies, as well as how each pipe manipulated the amplitude and frequency of five individual singers. After comparing my qualitative analysis with graphs that analyzed the parameters across

4 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 the different materials, configurations and individual singers, I found that one specific brand of corrugated pipe was the most effective in achieving my desired resonance, so I used this information to construct two new prototypes of Xibuccal Dresses made primarily out of corrugated pipes. In Europe, I developed significantly as a solo composer-performer. With Jaap Blonk, I developed much more experimental and nuanced relationships to language and semantics by studying sound poetry in relation to the extended techniques I have been cultivating in my creative practice. At Summer Weimar, I gained more insight into the anti-fascist nature of the Yiddish language and the ways music relates to the socio-political history, present and future, of that language. In Berlin, studies with Ute Wassermann and Christian Kesten gave me the opportunity to learn new vocal techniques and new forms of vocal improvisation. Additionally, I was able to perform with new colleagues in experimental pop music, which has opened up a new dimension of creative practice that will surely weave its way into my thesis and my solo performances.

Celia Buchband ’22 I participated in a PIIRS Global Seminar in Poland, studying the history of Jewish life in Poland, the Jewish ghetto and the idea of the ghetto in the United States. Our class was based at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the Galicia Jewish Museum. In addition to traditional readings on the topic, we undertook thorough examinations of the exhibits at both museums and discussed the different approaches they used to portray Jewish life in the country. We also took advantage of our location and went on walking tours of Jewish Warsaw and Krakow, visited the small towns of Kazimierz Dolny and Chmielnik, and spent a day at Auschwitz- Birkenau. We also studied the Polish language (from scratch!). Our wonderful Polish teachers Gosia and Tomasz spent many hours teaching us proper pronunciation and also shared their perspectives on growing up and living in Poland. During my free time, I enjoyed exploring Krakow and Warsaw with my classmates, visiting many museums and palaces, riding the trams, eating pierogi, and being occasionally mistaken for a local. I also enjoyed interacting with the Jewish community at Shabbat services in Warsaw and the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow Krakow. Thank you so much to the Program in Judaic Studies for contributing to this experience.

Amital Haas ’21 This past summer I spent a month in Uganda visiting and volunteering with various Ugandan Jewish communities. Some were celebrating 100 years of existence, while some were as young as 20 years old. I first visited the Jewish community in Putti, the oldest and most established Orthodox community in Uganda. I then visited the young Jewish community in Mukono, an area more urban than Putti, which considers itself Orthodox

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and upholds Orthodox Jewish practice though members have not yet had Orthodox conversions. Finally, I visited the Jewish community in Apac, a young community in a rural region in northern Uganda, which currently practices but whose leadership is interested in moving the community to a more Orthodox religious practice. I also visited two other Jewish communities in the Mbale region and the only Jewish primary school in Uganda, Hadassah Primary School. In each community I had the opportunity Amital teaching Hebrew in Uganda to get to know people and participate in their daily lives, as well as volunteer informally through teaching and Jewish texts and songs. I celebrated Sabbaths and holidays with different Jewish communities, learning about differences and similarities in religious practice between American and Ugandan Jewish groups. My experiences led me to reflect upon the relationship of diaspora Jews with Israel, the role that wealth plays in normative Orthodox practice, the role of technology as an access point for religious knowledge, and the ways religious practice is informed by neighboring religious communities of different faiths, as well as wider social contexts. I intend to return to East Africa this upcoming summer to do ethnographic research relating to emerging Jewish communities and their connection to the global Jewish community.

Rachel Hazan ’21 In Poland I participated in the six-week Global Seminar called “The Ghetto and the Holocaust,” co-taught by Princeton Professor Mitchell Duneier and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief curator of the Core Exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The seminar centered on tracing the “ghetto” as a sociological concept throughout Jewish history. The first half of the program was in Warsaw, where we used the core exhibition of the POLIN museum as an orienting device for the course, giving us extensive background on the thousand-year history of Polish Jews and the context leading up to the Holocaust. We looked at the Jewish ghetto as a concept that originated in medieval Europe, and how the Nazis co-opted and manipulated the concept to what became the Holocaust ghettos. The second half of the seminar was in Krakow, where we explored the Jewish quarter and the history of Krakow Jews. Here we studied the Holocaust itself, supplemented by visits to Schindler’s Factory and Auschwitz, and the conditions of the ghettos. The last week of the class considered Black and gay ghettos, and how each community has adopted and transformed society’s concept of the ghetto. Studying the Holocaust where it happened made a lot of the concepts more tangible. Being able to better understand how Polish Jews lived, rather than just focusing on how they died, added a lot to the story of the Holocaust that you could not understand without being in Poland. This seminar was an incredibly meaningful experience for me.

Katie Heinzer ’20 For 10 weeks I was an intern in the education department of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in West Hollywood, working on projects that ranged from creating curriculums to handling artifacts. The majority of my work was centered around creating a teacher’s curriculum about the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Terezín, as the

6 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 local population called it, was a Czech fortress-town-turned-ghetto during the Holocaust. Advertised as a “spa town” for elderly and veteran Jews, it covertly operated as a severely overcrowded camp-ghetto for high-profile Jews, such as artists and musicians. My research included looking specifically at the creations of children there, a large collection of poetry and artwork that children were able to create, thanks to the adult prisoners who risked their lives to teach and maintain normalcy for them. Seeing this collection was an immense privilege, and gave me a rare opportunity to see an example of beauty and creation that occurred during the Holocaust. I was also given the opportunity to work with Auschwitz-Birkenau artifacts that were on loan from a Polish museum. I learned how to handle and package artifacts, while holding significant pieces of history in my hands. When new artifacts arrived, I also had the privilege of taking part in the setup of the new exhibition. My work at this museum gave me a more in-depth and empathetic understanding of the Holocaust, Jewish history, current and lingering issues affecting Holocaust survivors and the Jewish community, and global efforts to preserve history and perpetuate remembrance.

Akiva Jackson ’20 I learned Yiddish at the Yiddish Summer Weimar, a music festival that draws academics, young Yiddish anarchists, musicians and retired Germans to a month of intensive music and language classes, concerts, jams and late-night cabarets. My first day in Germany, I took the train from the airport straight to my class. Wandering through the empty streets of Weimar at 10 a.m., I followed a cobbled street to the sounds of klezmer wafting through the air and arrived at an aging building with a facade covered by a massive sign: WEIMAR REPUBLIC OF YIDDISHLAND. Over the course of two weeks I participated in Yiddish immersion courses, first grammar and vocabulary and then an exploration of early 20th-century from Berlin. Fellow students were key to my learning. In our break before the all-evening Yiddish festivities we would go to a restaurant or bar and chat in Yiddish as we nursed our beer. We made a curious group: a Polish polyglot, a retired teacher from an island in Vermont, a punk graffiti artist from Munich working at the Dachau concentration camp memorial, a Russian patriot who flies every week to Warsaw for a Yiddish book club, a young Swiss hippie, a German octogenarian who attended the first post-war Yiddish course in Germany, and me, an American Orthodox Jewish college student. I went from being barely able cobble together a mongrel sentence of Hebrew and German only partially comprehendible to Yiddish ears, to having long discussions in Yiddish and analyzing literature in the language. I am excited to use this new depth of Yiddish for my thesis, where I will study questions of how word choice in polyphonic Yiddish can create community or difference.

Gabriel Lebeau ’22 I participated in the Princeton in Pisa program, a study-abroad opportunity offered by the French and Italian Department, run in partnership with the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Over the course of my time in Italy, I had the opportunity to study a great variety of Italian texts, explore Tuscany, interview local Pisans, and immerse myself in the culture of the city and the university. I emerged from the program with a much greater proficiency in Italian, both in terms of speaking and reading. I hope to continue to study Italian language and culture and, in particular I look forward to using my Italian to study various topics related to Italian Jewry.

Rafi Lehmann ’20 I traveled to Israel to begin the archival research for my senior thesis, which examines the Jewish community of Vilna’s evolving relationship to space and place from 1921 to 1954. I am particularly interested in how the continued

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catastrophic violence of the war years reshaped Jewish approaches to local geography and belonging. I visited the Yad Vashem archives, the National Library, Beit Hatfutsot (Museum of the ) and Beit Vilna, where I was able to access original documents and publications from prewar Vilna, as well as postwar memorial projects for the city. This research opportunity gave me a huge head start on my thesis, and I am so grateful to JDS for their support.

Angelika Morris ’21 This summer in Chicago I researched Black American and Jewish Associational Life, wanting to better understand how different groups establish coalitions with one another. In a highly socially stratified city like Chicago, inter-racial and inter-group interactions are not as common as they might be in other metropolitan cities. Because of this, I wanted to research how marginalized groups, namely Black Americans and Jewish people, build coalitions and move though the world. I did an ethnographic case study of the community-based organization Young Chicago Authors, specifically investigating their youth poetry/rap program entitled “Louder Than a Bomb.” This program empowers Black and Jewish young people to use their artistry as a tool for liberation. Students are given arts mentorship opportunities and a platform to develop and use their voice as socially conscious artists. The founder of the program, Kevin Coval, refers to himself as a “breakbeat poet,” drawing from Black musical traditions such as rap to create an ecletic sound as an artist and activist. He argues that his love of hip-hop “brought him closer to Judaism.” This summarizes a key finding of my project, which is that people tend to better understand themselves and their place in the world through interactions and explorations of other cultures. By creating solidarity and coalitions within marginalized communities, we are not compounding or equating our experiences and struggles; rather, we celebrate our differences and cherish our similarities, which better equips us to revolt against Youth poetry/rap in Chicago institutions and systems that seek to oppress. When we speak together, we are indeed “louder than a bomb.”

Micah Newberger ’22 Before this summer, I did not know any Arabic. I had been wanting to learn the language for a long time and am enormously grateful for the opportunity to attend the Qasid Institute in Amman. For a little over seven weeks, I had class four hours every afternoon from Sunday to Thursday, and would usually spend the time before or after class doing homework, which usually took a few hours. Then I would explore Amman − walk around, try different types of food, meet up with other people from my program. I tried to learn as much as I could about Islam from my teachers and neighbors, but my primary focus was to absorb as

8 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 much Arabic as I could. I would occasionally try to converse with people on the street just to practice more, or go to places I didn’t need to go and spend money I didn’t need to spend in order to do so. On the weekends I traveled outside of Amman to see historical, archaeological and natural sites for which Jordan is famous. I wanted to learn Arabic for both personal and academic reasons. Were I to spend an extended period of time in Israel/ Palestine and get involved with politics and human rights issues there, Arabic is a necessary language. I also am becoming more interested in the religious and cultural histories of the medieval world and, more specifically, the development of Islam and Judaism within it. That being said, I found Arabic grammar, calligraphy and lexicology to be fascinating in and of themselves. This is not to say that I hope to become a linguist (though, perhaps) − only that I thoroughly enjoyed my learning experience this summer and am deeply grateful to those who Micah in Amman made it possible.

Tali Pelts ’20 Thanks to the support of JDS, I had the chance to research pagan material culture in Israel. For the trip I had two main goals: to view mosaics at the House of Dionysus in Tzippori, and to meet with top scholars and archeologists who could provide insights into the art there. The House of Dionysus is a villa with amazing remains that raise questions about life in ancient Palestine. Laid into the floor of the triclinium, the dining room, is a mosaic that depicts scenes from the life of the wine Dionysus and scenes of the cult’s initiates worshipping the god. While this may at first appear to be an ordinary mosaic for a Roman province, the fact that the area was heavily populated with Jews raises questions about the ownership of the villa and therefore the potential cross- influence between Jewish and pagan communities. Though there is strong disagreement on these matters among the scholars with whom I met, and therefore many questions remain, the chance to view the site firsthand and consult with the experts was really invaluable for me.

Lauren Peterson ’20 I interned at the Museum at Eldridge Street, located on the Lower East Side of New York in the middle of today’s Chinatown. This museum grew out of the Eldridge Street Project, a $20-million, 20-year effort completed in 2007 that restored the Eldridge Street , one of the first Orthodox built in America. Although primarily centered around Jewish experience of immigration to America, the museum celebrates the immigrant experience of the Lower East Side. My primary group project (with other interns from Wesleyan, Haverford and Grinnell) was to evaluate staff meetings and prepare a presentation that shared our findings on how the staff interacted with each other and visitors. This gave me a better sense of proper communication during staff meetings and the importance of teamwork in a very small, non-profit organization like Eldridge. We interns were also heavily involved in facilitating a four-hour fundraising festival, “Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas,” that celebrates the Chinese, Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrant communities of past and present on the Lower East Side. We also learned to do an hour-long tour of the building.

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In individual projects, I was in charge of planning and designing upcoming programs for 2020, the “Year of the Woman,” the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment. I helped create monthly adult classes, lectures and other programs to be offered throughout the year. I also worked on blog posts for the museum’s website, on writing a walking tour pamphlet and the museum’s docent newsletter, and on publicity for an upcoming exhibition at Eldridge Street that showcases historic printing plates of photographs from the Forward in the early 20th century. Visiting other museums with the staff and other interns was a highlight of the internship. We were able to visit the Tenement Museum, MOCA, the Jewish Museum and the Henry Street Settlement as a group, which gave us a better understanding of the Lower East Side in general. My time at the Museum at Eldridge Street gave me an amazing opportunity to understand the inner workings of a non- profit committed to the preservation of the history of the Lauren (r) and co-worker at the Frankenthaler Archive community around them.

Tara Shirazi ’21

I was a research intern in the Foreign and Defense Policy department at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., for 10 weeks. I am grateful to the Judaic Studies Program for making my internship possible. As a researcher of AEI, I reported to two scholars, Rubin and Kenneth Pollack, experts in Middle East politics, military strategy and foreign policy. This past summer was tumultuous in the foreign policy world. There were attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and increased sanctions on , as well as the continuing wars in Yemen and Syria. Every day I read foreign newspapers, especially Iranian newspapers, to understand how the events were being portrayed overseas, and whether there was any discrepancy in the American and Middle Eastern portrayals. I also researched military technology advances in Iran and synthesized my research into memos for the scholars on my team. This work was enormously rewarding. Every day my scholars came out with op-eds for widely read publications: The Washington Post, National Review, Nation … and I saw that they had borrowed heavily from the research I had done. I learned so much about domestic and foreign affairs at AEI. I hope more Princeton students will be able to intern there in future.

Alexandra Veyne ’21 Thanks to the Program in Judaic Studies, I was able to spend this summer studying Turkish abroad in Istanbul, Turkey. Given the ongoing Jewish emigration to Israel, I was also interested in learning more about the community’s history at the Jewish Museum of Turkey, which is attached to the Neve Shalom Synagogue, the central Sephardic synagogue in Istanbul. Although I was fascinated to learn about the history of Turkish Jews, from their social status to their accomplishments and countless contributions to Turkish society, what struck me most was the palpable sense of danger. I had trouble even locating the museum: Google Maps led me to the correct street, but the building was not identified. When I happened to stop in front of a small but heavy black door where two men were standing,

10 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 one of them asked me what I was looking for and demanded my nationality. Since Neve Shalom has suffered from three terrorist attacks, this security measure made sense to me, but I had not anticipated it. It was a stark reminder that I am privileged to live in America, where Jews do not have to live in perpetual fear. Upon entering the building, I surrendered my passport and was scanned by security before being allowed to enter the museum. When I asked the lady at the front desk about someone I could contact for my research about the Jewish community, she silently looked at me, eventually offering no more than the trivial suggestion that I send an email. Though she knew I was a young American from Princeton, she viewed me with trepidation. These subtle interactions indicative of underlying societal tensions played an important role in reminding me of the real danger of anti-Semitism and the need for additional study of circumstances of contemporary non-Western Jews.

Elizabeth Wahlstedt ’20 For my research on investment practices and asset classes, I examined a group of rare books. Rare texts and rare books are important to economics and investment for what they tell us regarding distribution, type of consumers, their historic price and contemporary value.

I began with the study of economic practices in Neve Shalom, Istanbul England and Europe in 1300-1500, as well as economic conditions, and the history of the book. This included examining the Oxford project 15c Booktrade, an evidence- based assessment and database construction of the distribution, sale and reception of books in the 13th and 14th centuries; the project also studies the “identity of the buyers and users (private, institutional, religious, lay, female, male, and by profession) and their reading practices,” and the books’ present-day market value, spread and distribution of the texts. I assessed additional data via the Shapero Rare Book Catalogue, University College London, ESTC, SCORPIO, through the Bodleian Library and British Library. Regarding material connected to Jewish history and Judaism, research reveals that culture can influence value and investment in art-related classes. Books connected to liturgy, Jewish history, and the Holocaust (especially memoirs) sell for higher prices than legal, philosophical or theological texts. For instance, according to auction data, a Haggadah dating to 1545 is valued at $35,000 and a 1779 Bible from Mantua at $13,500. By contrast, an 1879 discourse in Marathi on Maimonides’s Thirteen Articles of Faith by Rajpurkar, a leading Jewish scholar in India, was priced at $650. It appears that content affects the value of an item more than its age. For example, despite dating to around 1945, a Holocaust album chronicling the horrors with photographic evidence is priced at around $2,800. With this information, one can ask a variety of questions regarding economic topics in relation to art and creative investment, asset management, and by extension the influence of culture on investment. I thank the Judaic Studies Program for their generosity in supporting my research.

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Elena Dugan (Religion) Thanks to the generous support of Judaic Studies, I had the opportunity to do research with specialists in my field, consult important manuscripts, and explore new and untapped archives in Italy, France and Ireland. It was my pleasure to be invited to participate in and contribute to the annual Enoch Seminar, which convenes a group of specialists in an intensive, weeklong workshop. In Florence I presented my own work and responded to papers on the Slavonic and Ethiopic reception of 1 Enoch, and benefited immensely from meeting and exchanging ideas with the diverse group of international scholars. I was also able to travel to Paris to consult the personal archive of J. T. Milik, which was recently donated to the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir. Milik was the initial publisher of the Aramaic Enoch fragments among the , and the documents in this archive represent over four decades of notes, letters, diagrams and manuscripts illustrating the methods, conditions and background of his pioneering scholarship. I was especially excited to discover personal correspondence, working lists and organizational documents from the very earliest years of Qumran scholarship in the 1950s. Finally, I spent time at the Chester-Beatty Museum in Dublin, where I was able to consult unidentified and unpublished fragments that have been hypothesized to belong to 1 Enoch. Physical consultation with the aid of a magnifying glass, and the wonderful team at the Chester-Beatty Reading Room, further informed my reconstruction of the manuscript and thus my assessment of the character of the Enochic work to which the manuscript attests. It was a uniquely rewarding summer, and I am grateful to JDS for their ongoing support.

Jiani Fan (Comparative Literature) I took a super-intensive German class at the Goethe Institut in Munich. Each day we had six hours of classes, not only reviewing grammar and acquiring new vocabulary, but also making presentations in German. Based on this training, I revised my paper on Water Benjamin, Baudelaire and antiquity, for the December conference “Walter Benjamin et le XIXe siècle aujourd’hui” at University College, London. In addition, with two colleagues I organized a conference on comparative mysticism to take place in the spring semester. I express my sincere gratitude towards the Judaic Studies Program for several years’ support of my language studies and research.

Djair Dias Filho (Religion) Thanks to the funding I received from the Program in Judaic Studies, I was able to spend two months of my summer in Israel. My main purpose was to improve my language skills in Hebrew, and for eight weeks I attended Ulpan at the University of Haifa. The intensive course of study allowed me to make considerable , and occasional trips in the Holy Land during the program afforded me the chance to see a number of important historical places. The tools I acquired during this trip have strengthened my research in Judaism and Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world, giving more immediate access to a wealth of primary and secondary sources relevant to my interests. I am deeply grateful to the Program in Judaic Studies for making all of this possible.

12 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 Eliav Grossman (Religion) This past summer I studied German here at Princeton in a wonderful course run by the Germanic Studies department. In six weeks, students acquired reading facility in modern German through diligent study of the department’s remarkable Der Die Das textbook and its cutting edge pedagogy. I am also grateful to JDS for providing funding for a revitalized Judaic Studies Book Club, which convenes every month or so over lunch to discuss a recent book in the field, offering all interested graduate students the chance to keep up with recent literature and forge cross-departmental relationships.

Rebekah Haigh (Religion) With the help of the Program in Judaic Studies, I was able to present a paper at the 23rd annual International Organization of Qumran Studies conference in Aberdeen, Scotland, where the focus was on engaging the Dead Sea Scrolls in the wider landscapes of antiquity. My paper, entitled “Who Says I? The Scribal Voice of the Genesis Apocryphon,” explored narrativity and the fluidity of ancient literary techniques through the lens of the Near Eastern world. The conference proved to be a phenomenal opportunity to engage peers and international scholars within the field of early Judaism. The trip also allowed me to visit Dunnottar Castle with colleagues and help start an informal group of next-generation Qumran scholars. The experiences, connections and feedback from that trip will certainly enrich my future projects.

Carlos Kong (Art and Archaeology) With support from the Program in Judaic Studies, I was a research fellow at the Whole Life Academy in Dresden, Gemany, an archival-based workshop co-organized by several German art institutions. In the Archive of the Avant-Gardes, newly acquired by the State Art Collections of Dresden, I pursued curatorial research on interwar and postwar avant-gardes, especially in relation to exiled artistic cultures. I also visited two archives related to figures of ongoing interest in my work: the half-Jewish German-language novelist, dramatist and artist peter Weiss, and the French-Jewish philosopher Kofman. At the Peter Weiss Archive at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, I looked at visual and textual documents related to my research on the objects of art history, the aesthetics of montage and German-Jewish exile in Weiss’s novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands. At the Sarah Kofman Archive at the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC) in France, I gathered materials for a short text-in-progress on the relations between photography, Jewish mythology and traumatic memory across Kofman’s philosophical and literary texts—especially in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, her autobiography of her childhood in Vichy France.

Isaac (Yitz) Landes (Religion) In my dissertation I use medieval manuscripts of the in order to learn about the various ways in which this work was studied during the Middle Ages. Thanks to the generous funding of Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies, I was able to visit North Italy and consult a number of these manuscripts. I spent several days in the Bibliotheca Palatina in Parma, where, with the help of local scholars, I read through an 11th-century Italian manuscript that may be the earliest complete manuscript of the Mishnah that we have. Towards the end of the 16th century, papal authorities in Italy confiscated a significant amount of Hebrew manuscripts, tearing many of them into fragments that were then used as bindings for notarial and other documents currently located in various archives throughout Italy. While visiting archives in the Modena region and in Bologna, I identified, copied and photographed manuscript fragments that will play an important role in my dissertation research. I am extremely grateful to the Program in Judaic Studies for providing me with the opportunity to conduct this research. continued

PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 13 GRADUATE SUMMER FUNDING continued

Mark Letteney (Religion) Summer 2019 was a productive time for me, and especially so due to generous support from the Program in Judaic Studies. I was able to attend the 29th International Congress of Papyrology in Lecce, Italy, where I listened to new research, shared my own work with colleagues in the field of manuscript studies, and forged new connections. One highlight was a paper that alerted me to a new piece of evidence that has since come to form the center of a chapter of my dissertation. I thank the Program in Judaic Studies for continuing to support my work generously and in a variety of ways beyond the financial. JDS is a priceless resource for graduate students at the University, and I am honored to be a part of it.

Patrick Monson (History) I benefited from generous funding from the Judaic Studies Program to do research in the Estonian and Russian State Historical Archives and to help compensate a paleographer to help me decipher difficult passages. The funding came at a critical time, as I was moving my family and newborn son abroad for nine months. During the course of my dissertation research on legal reform in imperial Russia’s Baltic provinces, I have learned interesting things about Russian Jewish history. Following a reform of the Baltic judiciary, many Jewish jurists went to the Baltics, where some became members at the law faculty of Yuryev (Tartu) University, and one later became rector (president). Similarly, many Jewish craftsmen and merchants came to the Baltics in the second half of the 19th century. Only select Jews were permitted to settle outside of the Pale of Settlement, however, and those who did so without meeting certain criteria were in violation of imperial criminal law. Had the tsarist government not enacted discriminatory legislation towards Jews, many more would likely have stayed in the empire and participated to a greater extent in imperial life, in all its varieties.

Joseph Moore (Philosophy) Funds from the Judaic Studies Graduate Conferences fund helped pay for my airfare to Israel and hotel in Haifa for the University of Haifa’s Conference on the Meaning of Life so that I could present my paper, “Morality for Meaning in Life.” The feedback on my paper was immensely helpful, and the discussions of other papers on meaning in life and its connection to Judaism were enlightening as well. Thanks to JDS for their generous support.

Rene de Nicolay (Classics) Thanks to the generosity of my sponsors, I was able to study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University in July and August. I started Hebrew from the very beginning, arriving in Jerusalem with only a recently acquired knowledge of the alphabet. Classes in both programs were conducted in an atmosphere of full immersion. I was impressed by the quality of the pedagogy and learned a lot as a would-be language teacher myself. This was the main reason why I chose to learn Modern and not Biblical Hebrew, even if my interests lie mainly in ancient and medieval Judaism. The experience has given me motivation to continue learning Hebrew here at Princeton. I participate in the bi-weekly Hebrew table, listen to podcasts in Hebrew and learn some vocabulary every day. The benefits of my stay in Israel are uncountable. I acquired a first knowledge of a fascinating language, learnt new teaching methods, lived in two extraordinary cities, and met very interesting people, both students and teachers. I also visited some very important sites for a classicist, including Masada and the Israel Museum, with its exceptional archeological collections. I would like to thank the Program in Judaic Studies, as well as the University Center for Human Values and the Classics Department, for giving me this opportunity.

14 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 Molly O’Brien (French and Italian) For the summer of 2019, I traveled to Italy and Spain for research and language learning relevant to my dissertation research on Jewish women writers of the Mediterranean. In Italy I consulted the manuscripts and library of the Italian Jewish writer Elsa Morante at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma for an article on the novel L’Isola di Arturo. In Spain I visited various institutions relating to Sephardic history and memory in Cordoba, Girona, Granada, Madrid and Toledo for my work on Sephardic identity and memory in contemporary French and Spanish literature. Additionally, for five weeks I attended the TANDEM Escuela Internacional Madrid to achieve reading proficiency in Spanish in order to consult Spanish scholarship on the Sephardim.

Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande (Religion) The Program in Judaic Studies generously supported my Intensive Hebrew course at Tel Aviv University, where I studied in August, five days a week for five hours a day. Due to the intensity of the program and the dedication of the teachers, I quickly felt confident in using my newly gained language skills during weekend explorations of the city and neighboring towns. While honing my Hebrew is certainly an ongoing process, I am reaping the fruits of this summer’s labors already. I now feel much more comfortable using both primary and secondary literature for the last of my dissertation chapters, and I have the JDS funding to thank for it.

Yoav Schaefer (Religion) Thanks to the generous support of the Program in Judaic Studies, I had an extremely productive and enriching summer. It began in Israel, where I was fortunate to meet with leading Israeli scholars in the fields of modern Jewish thought and modern Jewish intellectual history. I also worked on a paper exploring the themes of gender and masculinity in the German-Jewish . Following my visit to Israel, I spent six weeks studying German at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin. Cultivating a strong working knowledge of German is critical to my academic pursuits and research interests, especially since most of the primary source material I hope to explore in my dissertation research is untranslated. Beyond studying German, my summer in Berlin was deeply fulfilling. Leading scholars of the German-Jewish experience congregate in Berlin during the summer months, and I was fortunate to attend talks by and meet with scholars from North America, Europe and Israel. One highlight was participating in several sessions of the Leo Baeck Summer University in Berlin. While in Germany, I also wrote a review of Paul Mendes-Flohr’s recent biography, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith of Dissent, which is to be published in the Jewish Review of Books. Most of all, I enjoyed walking the streets of Berlin, exploring its many neighborhoods and immersing myself in the language, culture and history of the Jewish community that is the focus of my academic work.

Nomi Schneck (Art and Archaeology) My summer funding was used to supplement tuition at CUNY’s summer Greek Institute. Studying Greek is instrumental for my work on late antique material culture. My dissertation, which I plan to begin writing in the coming spring, will focus on the mosaics of the urban hub of Sepphoris, which reflect the diversity of its Jewish, Christian and late-Roman communities. My course work has guided my interest in this complex and multilingual site, where material evidence contains Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions. My experience at CUNY immersed me in daily Greek studies and provided me with tools needed to pursue my dissertation work. I am extremely grateful to the Program in Judaic Studies for supporting my work and providing me with funding for language learning that will open opportunities for future research.

PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 15 Faculty Updates

Ra’anan Boustan’s recent publications include “3 Enoch,” in The Textual History of the Bible, vol. 2B: The Deuterocanonical Scriptures, ed. Frank Feder and Matthias Henze (2019); “Artistic Influences in Synagogue Mosaics: Putting the Huqoq Synagogue in Context,” with Karen Britt, and “Inside the Huqoq Synagogue,” with Karen Britt, Jodi Magness et al., both in Biblical Archaeology Review. He is currently writing a book entitled “The Holy Remains: Tokens of Cult and Kingship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity,” which traces the afterlives of sacred objects associated with the biblical past within the Jewish and Christian cultures of late antiquity.

Eve Krakowski co-edited (with Jessica Goldberg, UCLA) a handbook to “Documentary Geniza Studies in the 21st Century” that was published in December as a triple issue of the journal Jewish History. Her 2018 book Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture recently won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Medieval and Early Modern Studies from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently working on a book about the textualization of Judaism in the 10th-century Middle East.

Esther Schorr, co-director of the Migration Lab (PIIRS), received a Bernard and Audre Rapoport Fellowship from the Rader Marcus Center, American Jewish Archives (2018-2019) to research a biography of Horace Kallen. She published a review essay on Kallen, “America’s Jewish Bridegroom,” in the Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2019). Her article “L. L. Zamenhof and Covenantal Judaism” is forthcoming in Language as Hope: L. L. Zamenhof and the Dream of a Cosmopolitan Wor(l)d (Hentrich and Hentrich, 2020).

new Books

16 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 Program office and seminar room, Scheide-Caldwell Hall, second floor

Contact Us Program in Judaic Studies Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Judaic Studies Princeton University 201 Scheide Caldwell House Princeton, NJ 08544 609-258-0394 [email protected] www.princeton.edu/judaic

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