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Dr. Ayelet Even-Ezra

Dr. Ayelet Even-Ezra

Department Chair
Humanities Building, Room 6514. Office Hours: Wednesday, 10:00-11:00

I am studying the intellectual and religious culture of the high Middle Ages, in search for ideas and modes of thought different from mine. In particular, I am attracted by the way medieval theologians attempted to provide rational explanations for Christian doctrinal issues, magic and the supernatural.

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This year I have completed a book addressing the way 13th century Parisian theologians analyzed altered states of consciousness, and in their discussions I find a continuous search for their own self definition as new knowledge agents in European society, among other "knowers of God": believers, philosophers and prophets. My current project delves into cognitive practices of medieval students, and especially visual thought. I spend, therefore, a lot of time looking for and looking at medieval manuscripts searching for personal notes and diagrams. I am fond of placing intellectual and scientific texts in the vibrant context of medieval universities, monasteries, politics, literature, architecture and music. The people of the high Middle Ages continue to surprise me with their vigor and originality, from writing highly complex  scholastic works, to intricate polyphinic music and cathedrals, from religious activism to chivalry.

I teach courses on monastic movements, heresies, perceptions of the supernatural, altered states of consciousness, medieval knowledge, the year 1215 and medieval Paris.

Publications:

 

*Ayelet Even-Ezra, Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021)

*Ayelet Even-Ezra, Ecstasy in the Classroom: Trance, Self, and the Academic Profession (New York: Fordham University Press; 2019) 

 

 

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Ofer Ashkenazi

Prof. Ofer Ashkenazi

Director of the Koebner Minerva Center for German History
Humanities Building, Room 6508.

Ofer Ashkenazi is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for Germany History.

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He is the author of the monographs "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (2020); "Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity" (2012); and "A Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Film" (2010). He published articles on a variety of topics in German and German-Jewish history, including on the interwar German peace movement; German-Jewish emigres in Palestine; and the discussion of Heimat and otherness in contemporary German culture. His current research project considers Jewish photography under Nazism.

 

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Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten

Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten

Rabin Building, Room 4006. Office Hours: Wednesday, 10:00-12:00

Elisheva Baumgarten’s research focuses on the Jewish communities of medieval Germany and northern France. She is a social historian  who uses gender methodology and comparative methods to examine the daily life of medieval Jews within their Christian surroundings. Her work has examined family life, life-cycle rituals, education, midwifery and piety.

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Her first book was Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2004; Hebrew publication: Zalman Shazar Center, 2006).

Her second book, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) focuses on how the daily activities of medieval Jews expressed their gendered and religious identities. She has edited several collections of essays on medieval Jewishher third book, Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 2022) focuses on how we can learn about daily life from biblical stories. Baumgarten has edited ten collected volumes/journal issues. Her recent research project is Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe and was funded by a European Research Council Grant. 

 

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Prof. Yitzhak Brudny

Prof. Yitzhak Brudny

Social Scienses Building, Room 4317.

Prof. Brudny teaches at the department of political science and history. His main fields of interest include nationalism and ethnic conflicts; social movements, elections, political parties and political institutions in the former communist states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

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His books deal with the restructuring of post-communist Russia, and Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991. 

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Prof. Raz Chen-Morris

Prof. Raz Chen-Morris

Humanities Building, Room 6513. Office Hours: Wednesday, 10:30-12:00

Raz Chen-Morris holds an M.A. (cum laude, in the history of medieval and Renaissance science) and a Ph.D. (2001) from Tel Aviv University. Throughout his studies Chen-Morris taught at several high schools and colleges, among them IASA High School in Jerusalem, The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Seminar Hakibbutzim. For From 2003-2014 he was a senior lecturer at the STS graduate program at Bar Ilan University. Today Chen-Morris is an associate professor in the History department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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He has published widely on Renaissance science, concentrating on Kepler’s optics. His major publications to date are: Measuring Shadows: Kepler's Optics of Invisibility ((University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016). With Ofer Gal, Baroque Science ((Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).  Together with Ofer Gal he edited Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas, Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2012. Together with Hanan Yoran and Gur Zak, he edited a special issue of The European Legacy, (20:5, 2015) on  Humanism and the Ambiguities of Modernity.

Among his publications, one can note:  “Optics, Imagination, and the Construction of Scientific Observation in Kepler’s New Science”, The Monist (2001); “Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler’s Somnium”, Journal for the History of Ideas (2005); “From Emblems to Diagrams: Kepler’s New Pictorial Language of Scientific Representation”, Renaissance Quarterly (2009); (With Ofer Gal) “Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler’s Optics to Descartes’ Doubt”,  Journal of the History of Ideas (2010); with Rivka Feldhay, "Framing the Appearances in the Fifteenth Century: Alberti, Cusa, Regiomontanus, and Copernicus" (2017); and more recently "Geometry and the Making of Utopian Knowledge in Early Modern Europe", in Nuncius 35:2 (forthcoming September, 2020).  

Currently his research is entitled “Geometry and the Making of Utopian Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”. The aim of this research project is to investigate the relationship of knowledge and especially practices of knowledge, Renaissance and Baroque poetics and political power in the crucial early stages of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. This research project is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 312/20). 

Chen-Morris is married and has three children, living on the slopes of the Judean Hills over the Ella Valle.

 

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jonathan_dekel-chen

Prof. Jonathan Dekel-Chen

Rabin Building, Room 6003. Office hours (during school year): Wednesdays 10:30-12:00 or by appointment

Professor Jonathan Dekel-Chen is the Rabbi Edward Sandrow Chair in Soviet & East European Jewry at the Hebrew University. He holds a dual appointment in the Department of Jewish History and in the Department of General History.

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He served as the Academic Chairman of the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry from 2009-2015 and Chairman of the Russian Studies Department and Jewish History Department. Prof. Dekel-Chen has held visiting professorships and research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania (2008-2009), Columbia University (2015-2016) and Rutgers University (2021-2022). His research and publications deal with the modern Jewish world, Applied Humanities, transnational philanthropy and advocacy, non-state diplomacy, agrarian history and migration.

In 2014 he co-founded the Bikurim Youth Village for the Arts in Eshkol, which provides world-class artistic training for gifted, under-served high school students from throughout Israel.

 


Selected Publications:

 

Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1923-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

 

Mahane meshutaf? Kooperatsiia b'hityashvut ha-yehudit ha-haklait be-Rusya u-beolam, 1890-1941. Jerusalem: Magnes Press & Yad Tebenkin Press, 2008.

 

Editor (with David Gaunt, Natan Meir, Israel Bartal), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

 

Editor (with Eugene Avrutin and Robert Weinberg), Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

 

“Putting Agricultural History to Work: Global Action Today from a Communal Past.” Featured article in: Agricultural History 94, no. 4 (2020): 512-544.

 

“A Response to R. Douglas Hurt, Ben Nobbs-Thiessen and Nahum Karlinsky.” Agricultural History 94, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 562-567.

 

“Israeli Reactions in a Soviet Moment: Reflections on the 1970 Leningrad Affair.” Kennan Cable #58. September 2020. 

           

“A Light unto the Nations? A Stalled Vision for the Future of the Humanities.” AJS Perspectives. Fall 2020, pp. 56-58.

 

“Transnational Intervention and its Limits: The Case of Interwar Poland.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2018): 265-286.

 

“Between Myths, Memories, History and Politics: Creating Content for Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.” The Public Historian 40, no. 4 (2018): 91-106.

 

“Philanthropy, Diplomacy and Jewish Internationalism.” In: The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume VIII: The Modern Period, c. 1815 – c. 2000. Edited by Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

 

“Jewish Threads in the Fabric of International History.” In: International History in Theory and Practice. Edited by Barbara Haider-Wilson, William Godsey, Wolfgang Mueller, pp. 477-500. Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017.

 

“Dueling Visions of Rebirth: Interwar Palestine versus Soviet Russia,” Journal of Jewish Identities 9, no. 2 (July 2016): 139-157.

 

“Rethinking Boundaries in the Jewish Diaspora from the FSU.” In: The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel and Germany. Edited by Zvi Gitelman, pp. 77-88. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

 

“Faith Meets Politics and Resources: Reassessing Modern Transnational Jewish Activism.” In: Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History. Edited by Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, pp. 216-237. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

 

“Liberal Answers to the ‘Jewish Question’: Then and Now.” In: Church and Society in Modern Russia. Edited by Elise Wirtschafter and Manfred Hildermeier, pp. 133-156. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015

 

“East European Jewish Migration: Inside and Outside,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, no. 3 (December 2014): 154-170.

 

"A Durable Harvest: Reevaluating the Russia-Israel Axis in the Jewish World." In: Bounded Mind and Spirit: Russia and Israel, 1880-2010. Edited by Brian Horowitz and Shai Ginsburg, pp. 109-129. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2013.

 

“Activism as Engine: Jewish Internationalism, 1880s-1980s.” In: Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, pp. 269-291. Edited by Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

 

“Crimea 2008: A Lesson about Uses and Misuses of History,” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 1 (April 2009): 101-105.

 

“‘New’ Jews of the Agricultural Kind: A Case of Soviet Interwar Propaganda,” Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 424-50.

 

“An Unlikely Triangle: Philanthropists, Commissars, and American Statesmanship Meet in Soviet Crimea, 1922-37.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (2003): 353-376.

 

“Farmers, Philanthropists, and Soviet Authority: Rural Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1923-1941.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 849-885.

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Yaacov Deutsch

Dr. Yaacov Deutsch

The pre-modern section, the Middle Ages
The pre-modern section, the early modern period
Office hours: by appointment
His research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages and the Early New Age, and especially on Christian Hebraism.
Aya Elyada

Dr. Aya Elyada

I am a senior lecturer at the History Department, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My fields of interest are German and German-Jewish history and culture; Christian-Jewish relations; the history of the Yiddish-German encounter; and the social and cultural history of language and translation.

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 Before joining the Hebrew University in 2012 I spent five years as a visiting PhD student at the University of Munich, and another three years as a visiting post-doctoral fellow at Duke University. My book, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, appeared in 2012 with Stanford University Press. The book explores the unique and unlikely phenomenon of “Christian Yiddishism” in early modern Germany, namely the Christian interest in and engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. It explains why some Christians were preoccupied with Yiddish and discusses the various ways in which they depicted this Jewish language and literature in their writings. In the process, it sheds light on the broader linguistic, theological, cultural, and social concerns of early modern Christian authors and their intellectual environment.

My current project explores the cultural history of German translations of Yiddish literature from the sixteenth century and up to the present day.

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