2013-2014 Fellows

Jeffrey Rubenstein

Skirball Professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. He was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He received his B.A. in Religion from Oberlin College, his M.A. in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he also received rabbinic ordination, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion of Columbia University. 

Research:

Talmudic Stories and their East Christian and Persian Parallels

Haim Shapira

Senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University where he teaches Jewish Law and Jurisprudence. His research interests include institutions of law and learning in the Talmudic period, Jewish Political Tradition, law and religion.  

RESEARCH:

Cana Werman

Associate professor in the Department of Bible, Archaeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where she coordinates the Deichmann program for Jewish and Christian Literature of the Hellenistic-Roman Era.  

RESEARCH:

Exception in Tannaitic Halakhah

Shira Wolosky

Received her B.A. from Brown University (summa, Phi Beta Kappa) and her Ph.D. with distinction from Princeton University in Comparative Literature in 1981.She was an Associate Professor of English at Yale University before moving to the Hebrew University in 1985, where she is Professor of English and American Studies.

RESEARCH:

The New Paulinism: Resurrecting Universalism and the Assault on Law

Robert Yelle (Joint Tikvah/Senior Emile Noël Fellow)

Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. He grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Phillips Andover Academy (1984) and Harvard College (A.B. in Philosophy 1988), cum laude in General Studies. He received a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1993), Order of the Coif, and a Ph.D. in History of Religions from the University of Chicago (2002), based on research conducted in Calcutta, India, on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. 

RESEARCH:

Sovereignty and the Sacred: Judaism, the Exception, and the Political Theology of Secularism

Steven Aschheim (Joint Straus/Tikvah Fellow)

Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem where he taught Cultural and Intellectual History in the Department of History since 1982 and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. He also acted as the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German Literature and Cultural History. 

RESEARCH:

Varieties of Empathic Experience

Ra'anan Boustan

Associate Professor of Ancient and Jewish history in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Boustan completed his B.A. in Classics at Brown University in 1994 and received a graduate degree in Classics and Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam during his stay in the Netherlands as a Fulbright Fellow in 1994–95. 

RESEARCH:

Ronnie Goldstein

Received his Ph.D. from Hebrew University in 2006. He teaches with the Bible department in the Hebrew University. His work focuses mainly on the cultural interactions between Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern literature and its impact upon the history of Biblical literature and its historical context.

RESEARCH:

Jonathan Yovel (Joint Straus/Tikvah Fellow; Berkowitz Fellow)

Professor of law and humanities at the University of Haifa, Israel. He has studied law, philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv, Oxford, Northwestern and Chicago. 

RESEARCH:

The Languages of Justice