Faculty Research

The following digest presents an incomplete but representative sampling of current faculty research within the Center for Jewish Studies, in all of its stages.

Pat Ahearne-Kroll conducts research focused on religious practices in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods and how these practices operated at local levels, especially in terms of political power and identity formation. She is particularly interested in the different dynamics of religious activity during the Ptolemaic period, during which the Ptolemies, Egyptian priesthood, and several Greek-speaking communities (Jewish, Ionian, Macedonian, and others) interacted. She is currently completing a book on the ancient Jewish novel, “Joseph and Aseneth.”

Alejandro Baer is interested in the socio-political consequences of memory narratives and the delicate relationship between processes of collective remembering, reconciliatory initiatives, and the demands of justice in post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies.  He has recently published Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era. The Ethics of Never Again, with Natan Sznaider. UK: Routledge, 2017, and "The Politics of Holocaust Rescue Myths in Spain: From Francoist Humanitarianism to the Righteous Diplomats," with Pedro Correa Martin-Arroyo. In Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoa. Eds. Corry Guttstadt, Thomas Lutz, Bernd Rother, and Yessica San Román. Germany: Metropol. 2016: 205-216.

Bruno Chaouat has published Is Theory Good for the Jews? French Responses to the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2016). He will be a visiting fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University in spring 2018. He has two essays forthcoming this year--one in French on George Steiner and Nazi anti-Semitism, and one in English on Emmanuel Levinas's response to Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew.

Michelle Hamilton has published widely on multi-confessional Iberia. Recent publications include "Medieval Iberian Cultures in Contact: Iberian Cultural Production as Translation and Adaptation,” in Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies. Eds. Javier Munoz-Basols, Laura Lonsdale, Manuel Delgado. New York: Routledge, 2017: 60-61, and In and Of the Mediterranean Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, Michelle Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-FernandezVanderbilt eds. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015.

Hanne Loeland Levinson grounds her research in the academic study of the Hebrew Bible. She specializes in gender studies, metaphor theory, prophetic literature, and biblical narratives concerning death and death wishes, and she is currently writing a book about the rhetorical function of death wishes in the Hebrew Bible.

Bernard M. Levinson recently published a co-edited volume that brings together the most recent European, Israeli, and North American perspectives on the Torah, The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe, Israel, and North America (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016). This 1200 page volume includes essays by more than fifty international scholars seeking to enrich their approaches and provide new insights. Levinson has also recently published an article on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, seeking to integrate traditional philology with the newest techniques of digital humanities: “Refining the Reconstruction of Col. 2 of the Temple Scroll (11QTa): The Turn to Digital Mapping and Historical Syntax,” Dead Sea Discoveries: A Journal of Current Research on the Scrolls and Related Literature 23:1 (2016): 1–26.

Leslie Morris’s research navigates the boundaries between German studies, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies, exploring the ways in which these fields inform each other and have an impact on each other. In addition to multiple invited lectures in the past year, she has published Three Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational.  Jay Geller and Leslie Morris, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016; “German Studies and Jewish Studies: Symbiosis of Two Fields.” German Studies Review. 2016: 601-610; “Epistemology of the Hyphen: German-Jewish/-Holocaust Studies. Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies. Eds. Jennifer M. Kapczysnki and Erin McGlothlin. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016: 107-119; “Reading H.G. Adler (tangentially).” In H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy. Eds. Julia Creet, Sara Horowitz and Amira Dan. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016: 375-391; “Reading Place, Placing Reading//Lesort, Ortslese: Zur Lyrik Paul Celans und Rose Ausländers.” In “Toposforschung (...) im Lichte der Utopie”:. Literarische Er-örterungen in/aus MittelOsteuropa.  Eds. Andrei Corbea-Hoisie and Ion Lihaciu. Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, forthcoming 2017. Professor Morris’s most recent book is titled The Translated Jew: German-Jewish Writing Outside the Margins. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2018.

Rick McCormick’s most recent research focuses on the transnational films of German Jewish American director Ernst Lubitsch.  He has published “Transnational Jewish Comedy: Sex & Politics in the Films of Ernst Lubitsch—From Berlin to Hollywood,” in Three Way Street: Germans, Jews, and the Transnational. Eds. Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016: 169-96; “A Serious Man? Lubitsch’s Anti-War Film The Man I Killed (a.k.a Broken Lullaby, USA 1932),” in Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936. Eds. Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016: 291-305; “Ernst Lubitsch & the Transnational Twenties: The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.” Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World. Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2016). In 2017 Professor McCormick completed his book manuscript on Lubitsch, currently titled Sex, Comedy, and Politics: The Transnational Jewish Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch--From Berlin to Hollywood (under review at Indiana University Press).

Renana Schneller has written on Pedagogies, Ideologies, and Secular Jewish Identities in U.S. Hebrew Schools, and continues to conduct research on second language acquisition and pedagogy.

Daniel Schroeter studies the Moroccan Jewish communities from early modern times through the 20th century. Recent publications include “Moroccan Jewish Studies in Israel,” in Jews of Morocco and the Maghrib: History and Historiography. Ed. Aomar Boum, Jessica Marglin, Khalid Ben-Srhir and Mohammed Kenbib, Hespéris-Tamuda, vol. 60, fasc. 2, Part I (2016): 83-105; “The Changing Landscape of Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Modern Middle East and North Africa,” in Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East. Eds. S.R Goldstein-Sabbah and Heleen L. Murre-van den Berg. Leiden: Brill, 2016: 39-67; “Vichy in Morocco: The Residency, Mohammed V and His Indigenous Jewish Subjects,” in Colonialism and the Jews. Eds. Ethan Katz, Lisa Leff, Maud Mandel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017: 215-250, and “Philo-Sephardism, Anti-Semitism and Arab Nationalism: Muslims and Jews in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco during the Period of the Third Reich,” in Nazism, the Holocaust and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish Responses. Eds. Frank Nicosia and Boĝaç Ergene. New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2018: 179-215.