Creating the Next Generation of Jewish Studies Sourcebooks

Sarah Bunin Benor received her PhD from Stanford University in linguistics in 2004. She has published and lectured widely about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages, especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino. Her award-winning books include Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Dr. Benor co-edits the Journal of Jewish Languages and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which features the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces.

Dr. Berman’s research focuses on the political history of the United States, including the history of Jewish philanthropy and Jewish urban politics. Her forthcoming book, Who Is American? Jews, Citizenship, and Belonging (Princeton University Press), explores how categories of citizenship and rights changed over the course of the twentieth century and what this meant for Jewish belonging in the United States. Berman’s work draws attention to the ways Jews have defined, debated, and sought national membership in a variety of contexts. As a teacher, she prioritizes close and careful reading of primary sources and models a diversity of methods for understanding the meaning and lessons of the past.

Erez DeGolan’s research and publications combine textual, historical, and critical methods in thematic studies of rabbinic literature from the first to the seventh centuries. He is especially interested in emotion in rabbinic literature and in the ways figures in emerging Judaism negotiated authority and empire. Dr. DeGolan holds a BA in Hebrew literature and Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University, an MTS in Jewish studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD in religious studies and ancient Judaism from Columbia University. He was the 2023–25 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish studies at Wellesley College and has taught and lectured on topics related to rabbis, bodies, humor, and politics in premodern Judaism.

Eitan Fishbane has published and taught extensively on sacred time and ritual practice in Jewish mysticism from medieval to modern times. Among Dr. Fishbane’s authored and edited books are The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Sabbath Soul: Mystical Reflections on the Transformative Power of Holy Time (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2012), a volume designed for a general readership and with an eye toward theological and spiritual meaning. He is currently completing a related volume entitled The Sabbath in Hasidic Thought: Sacred Time and Mystical Consciousness. You can find out more about him at www.eitanfishbane.com. 

Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian specializing in Jewish migration, family life, and legal pluralism. She holds an MA in history from Yale University and a PhD in history from Brandeis University. She has conducted extensive comparative and transnational research at the intersection of Jewish citizenship, gender, and family law in migratory contexts, with a particular focus on France and the United States. She is currently working on a book project about connections between family life and the state among Russian immigrants to France and another about Baghdadi Jews in late-colonial Singapore.

Geoffrey Levin is a 2025–26 Koch Junior Fellow in history at the University of Oxford, where he is working on a book entitled The Other Part of Us: American Jews and Middle Eastern Jewish Dilemmas, 1941–1979, which will examine the broader encounter between MENA Jews and American Jews in the years surrounding the mass migration of Jews from Arab lands. Levin’s first book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948–1978 (Yale University Press, 2023), won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book Prize. He has received an honorable mention for an Israel Institute Syllabus Prize and a 2025 Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Ronnie Perelis has taught the history of the Jews of Spain and their diasporas in academic and popular settings throughout the world. His research investigates connections between Iberian and Jewish culture during the medieval and early modern periods, especially the dynamics of religious transformation among crypto-Jews (Jews who continued to practice Judaism in secrecy after conversion to Catholicism). Perelis was awarded an NEH grant for his project Translating the Americas, together with Flora Cassen. As part of this project he will prepare a critical edition, English translation, and historical study of the rediscovered manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal, a sixteenth-century Mexican crypto-Jewish thinker.

Karen Skinazi is the author of Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018). She writes widely on Jewish culture and Jewish gender studies and is currently working on a book about British Muslim and Jewish women’s writing, entitled Chani and Fatima Join a Book Club: Reading for Peace, and a study of English-language literature by Sephardic and Mizrahi writers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Her teaching includes courses on Jews in popular culture, contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, and rabbis in the cultural imagination.