Faculty News

Professor Max Abrahms wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News about the killing of al-Zawahiri in July.

Professor Phil Brown was a panelist on an event held by The Forward, “The Borscht Belt and the rise of American Jewish comedy,” in September 2021. The recording is here.

Professor Jeffrey Burds has submitted for publication new research on bounty hunters in Galicia and Volhynia: Shmal’tsovniki: Civilian Bounty Hunters in German-Occupied Western Ukraine, 1941-1944. An expanded version of his book Holocaust in Rovno was published in Ukrainian in 2017 and in Russian in 2021. He also published “‘Turncoats, Traitors and Provocateurs’: Communist Collaborators, the German Occupation and Stalin’s NKVD, 1941-1943,” in East European Politics and Societies Volume 32, Number 3 (August 2018): 606-638. Professor Bill Miles delivered three lectures in Israel in June 2022 at the conclusion of his Fulbright Global Scholar award. He spoke At Tel Aviv University on “Brain Drain Reversal Policies in a Post- Pandemic Era: A Comparative and Diasporic Approach;” at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies on “Assimilation, Integration, and the Druze: A Comparative Analysis of the Nationality Law Pushback;” and delivered a paper at the Association of Israeli Studies conference at Bar Ilan University entitled “ ‘Fanonian Masks’ and ‘Rising Expectations’: Interpreting Druze Reactions to the 2018 Nationality Law.” Professor Miles also has an article in the most recent edition of The Jewish Quarterly 249, August 2022, entitled “My Jewish Martinique,” and in Relief: Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise, 15(2), pp. 106–116, “How the Slave Trade and the Shoah Gave Rise to a Musical Marvel. An Interview with Jacques Schwarz-Bart.”

Simon Rabinovitch published an article in Haaretz, “A Jewish ‘Golden Age’ Ends in Spain and Portugal,” about Spain and Portugal’s Sephardic nationalities laws that ties into a book he is completing about Jewish collective

Director of Jewish Studies Lori Lefkovitz taught at the 2021 Limmud Festival on Jephtha’s daughter and other feminist reclamations. rights. He will also soon be launching an online interactive map of Jewish Collective Rights around the World that is the result of a Tier 1-funded project to map different forms of collective rights globally, built in collaboration with Martha Davis of the Law School. In September 2022, Prof. Rabinovitch presented and demonstrated his mapping project to a working group at the University of Vienna focusing on the theory and practice of nonterritorial autonomy in Europe.

During summer 1, 2022, Professor Becky Rosengaus led a Dialogue of Civilizations “Sustainable Living in a Harsh Desert Environment” to the Arava Desert in Israel. This DOC included two newly developed courses for NU students: “Desert Ecology” and “Energy in the Desert Ecosystem.” The program was affiliated with the Arava Institute and the Center for Creative Ecology. Dr. Rosengaus intends to take a new cohort of students in summer 1 of 2023.

Emeritus Professor Jim Ross is writing a weekly substack newsletter covering conflicts. A compilation with which he assisted with discographic research (Rivka Havassy and Edwin Seroussi, East Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish Songs from The EMI Archive Trust, 1907-1912, Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) received a 2021 Award for Excellence from the Association for Sound Recorded Collections. The songs and the booklets are available free, in their entirety, at this link.