Jewish Studies Faculty

Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English; Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House

Talya Fishman, Associate Professor of Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

Nili Gold, Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature

Jessica Goldberg, Assistant Professor of Medieval History

Kathryn Hellerstein, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages; Undergraduate Director of the Jewish Studies Program

Arthur Kiron, Schotteinstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections; Adjunct Assistant Professor of History

Robert A. Kraft, Emeritus Professor of Early Varieties of Judaism and Christianity

Ian S. Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Chair in Political Science

Benjamin Nathans, Associate Professor of History

Joshua Perelman, Post-Doctoral Fellow of American Jewish History

Annette Y. Reed, Assistant Professor in Religious Studies

Ruth Rin, Hebraica Cataloging Librarian

David B. Ruderman, Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Jewish History; Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Nechama Sataty, Senior Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Language

Jonathan Steinberg, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History

David Stern, Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew

Jeffrey Tigay, A.M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Language & Literature

Liliane Weissberg, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences; Professor of German and Comparative Literature; Graduate Chair in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures

Beth Wenger, Associate Professor of History; Director of the Jewish Studies Program

Barbie Zelizer, Professor of Communication; Raymond Williams Chair of Communication

Visiting Faculty

is a Yiddish lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching Yiddish, Alexander teaches music and choir at Har Zion Temple, and music at the Kaiserman JCC. Alexander served at the music director for a documentary film about the artist and Holocaust survivor Toby Knobel Fluek. The film, entitled Toby's Sunshine, had its premier showing in June, 2008, followed by a concert featuring the songs from the film performed alongside a slide show montage of the artist's work. Alexander recently performed in three Yiddish concerts at Haverford College with singers Cantor Naomi Hirsch, Sherm Labovitz and Richard Lenatsky. In addition, Alexander has just completed preparing a book of his father's music, after many years of work on this lengthy (370-page) project. Publication of this book, From Holocaust to Life, is expected in the near future. Office Hours: TR 11:30-12 and by appt. in 751 Williams Hall.

Jonathan Karp is Associate Professor in the Judaic Studies and History Departments at Binghamton University of the State University of New York. He is the author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and editor, with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, of The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania, 2007). Dr. Karp is also co-editing with Adam Sutcliffe The Cambridge History of Jews in the Early Modern Period and is completing a book on Black-Jewish economic and cultural relations. He has taught at Columbia University, Franklin & Marshall College, and in 2006 was Blackstone Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Yechiel Y. Schur (Ph.D., New York University, 2008) is the Director for Public Programs at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. His research interests include the history of death and the history of religious practices in medieval Europe. Before coming to Penn he taught courses on medieval Hebrew texts, Modern Hebrew, and Israeli culture at Yale University.