The Jewish Studies Program ensures that the richness of Jewish culture and its impact on civilization are vigorously presented to the Cornell community. The program offers training in the languages, literature, and history of the Jewish people, as these developed across the globe and over thousands of years. It also focuses on the tense and productive relation between Jews and their various others. Jewish studies course offerings cover Jewish civilization from its ancient Near Eastern origins through its contemporary history. The program is interdisciplinary, and serves as a common address for faculty from an array of departments, such as Near Eastern studies, English, history, anthropology, German studies, government, comparative literature, and linguistics.
The Jewish Studies Program offers a minor, and provides instruction and specialization in the fields of Semitic languages; the Hebrew Bible; medieval and modern Hebrew literature and film; ancient, medieval and modern Jewish history; Holocaust Studies; Jewish ethnography; and Yiddish culture.
Department websiteChumie Juni
Post Doc Associate
Education
Brown University, PhD
Bernard Revel Graduate School, MA
Stern College for Women, BA
Departments and programs
Mayer Juni
Bruce Slovin Assistant Professor
Noah Tamarkin
Associate Professor
Publications
Book:
- Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Articles and Book Chapters:
- "Legislating Forensic Genetics in South Africa: Science, Justice, and the Occlusion of Race in Postapartheid DNA Databasing" in Law, Practice and Politics of Forensic DNA Profiling: Forensic Genetics and Their Technolegal Worlds, eds. Victor Toom, Amade M'charek, and Mattias Wienroth, 2023. 72-90. New York: Routledge.
- "Afterword: Data, Life, and Worlds in an Anthropology of Bioinformation" in Bioinformation: Worlds and Futures, eds. Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo, 2022. 183-188. New York: Routledge.
- “Forensics and Fortification in South African Self-Captivity.” History and Anthropology, 2019. 30.5: 521-526.
- Year in Review Essay: “Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017.” American Anthropologist, 2018. 120.2: 305-327.
- “Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS: Introduction,” co-authored with Kristina Lyons and Juno Parreñas. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017. 3.1: 1-10.
- “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017. 3.1:14-19.
- “Jewish Genetics.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies, edited by Naomi Seidman. New York: Oxford University Press. October 26, 2015.
- “Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa.” Cultural Anthropology, 2014. 29.3: 552-574. (Awarded the 2015 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship; Reprinted 2016 in Déjá Lu. 4.1: 1)
- “African Indigenous Citizenship,” co-authored with Rachel Giraudo. The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, 2014. Edited by Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers, 545-556. New York: Routledge.
- “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ in South Africa.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011. 637.1: 148-164.
Education
- PhD Cultural Anthropology with a notation in Feminist Studies, University of California Santa Cruz
- MA Cultural Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz
- BA Anthropology, Colorado College
Departments and programs
- Anthropology
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- Jewish Studies Program
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program
- Science and Technology Studies
- Society for the Humanities
Links
- Department of Anthropology
- WISER Website
- Academia.edu page
- Department of Science and Technology Studies
Keywords
Sociocultural, political, and legal anthropology. Feminist, global, and postcolonial science & technology studies. Jewish studies. Race and ethnicity, citizenship, diaspora, indigeneity, genetics and genomics, policing, gender and sexuality. South Africa.
Jason Sion Mokhtarian
Herbert and Stephanie Neuman Associate Professor and Director of Jewish Studies Program
Publications
Books
- Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015)
- Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Remedies between Magic and Science (University of California Press, 2022).
Edited Volumes
-
The Aramaic Incantation Bowls in Their Late Antique Contexts (under contract, Brown Judaic Studies). Co-edited with Alexander Marcus.
-
Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, special edition on “Ancient Jewish Memories of Achaemenid Persia.” Co-edited with Kristin Joachimsen (PERSIAS research group).
- Iranian Studies, special edition on “Religious Trends in Late Ancient and Early Islamic Iran.” Volume 48.1 (2015). Co-edited with David Bennett.
Selected Articles
-
“Families and Lists of Protections in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls” (forthcoming)
-
“A Judeo-Persian Translation of the Book of Esther (Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Hébreu 127)” (forthcoming)
- “Material Culture of the Jews of Sasanian Mesopotamia.” In A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: Third Century BCE to Seventh Century CE, eds. Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Gwynn Kessler (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2020), 145-166.
- “Zoroastrian Polemics against Judaism in the Doubt-Dispelling Exposition.” Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations 3.1 (2018)
- “Clusters of Iranian Loanwords in Talmudic Folklore: The Chapter of the Pious (b. Ta’anit 18b-26a) in Its Sasanian Context.” In The Aggada of the Bavli and Its Cultural World, eds. Geoffrey Herman and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018), 125-148.
- “Excommunication in Jewish Babylonia: Comparing Bavli Mo‘ed Qatan 14b-17b and the Aramaic Bowl Spells in a Sasanian Context.” Harvard Theological Review 108 (2015): 552-578.
- “Empire and Authority in Sasanian Babylonia: The Rabbis and King Shapur in Dialogue.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 19 (2012): 148-180.
Departments and programs
David Forman
Visiting Lecturer, Yiddish language
Publications
Book Translation
(2021) The Clever Little Tailor. Translation of Dos Kluge Shnayderl, 1933, by Solomon Simon. Kinder-Loshn Publications.
Education
- PhD (in Psychology), The University of Iowa, 2002
Departments and programs
Cristina Florea
Assistant Professor
Publications
Peer-reviewed Articles
"Frontiers of Civilization in the Age of Mass Migration from Eastern Europe," Past and Present, 21 February 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab041
"New Perspectives in German Studies: A View From the Margins," New German Critique, November 2023.
Book Reviews and Review Essays
Review of Patrice Dabrowski, The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2021), History: Reviews of New Books, 50(5), pp.83-84.
Review of Astrid Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (OUP, 2019), H-Borderlands.
"Hidden Metropolis: Modernization and Urban Culture in Eastern Europe," Journal of Urban History, January 2020.
Review of Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-Prei, eds. Crossing Central Europe: Continuities and Transformations, 1900 and 2000 (University of Toronto Press, 2017), Austrian History Yearbook, April 2019.
Public Writing
"Ukraine's Long Self-Determination," New York Review of Books, December 7, 2022. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2022/12/07/ukraines-long-self-determination/
“The Crisis in Ukraine Has Disturbing Echoes of the 1930s,” TIME, February 28, 2022. https://time.com/6152294/ukraine-invasion-europe-1930s/
“Putin Knows That Controlling History Is the Key to Total Power,” CNN Opinion, April 4, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/opinions/putin-destroying-ukraine-history-archives-florea/index.html
“Putin’s Perilous Imperial Dream: Why Empires and Nativism Don’t Mix,” Foreign Affairs, May 10, 2022. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-05-10/putins-perilous-imperial-dream
Education
Ph.D., Princeton University
M.A., Princeton University
B.A., Williams College
Departments and programs
Joe Regenstein
Emeritus Professor
Education
- Doctorate, Brandeis University, 1972
- Master of Science, Cornell University, 1966
- Bachelor of Science, Cornell University, 1965
Departments and programs
Olga Litvak
Laurie B. and Eric M. Roth Professor of Modern European Jewish History
Publications
Select publications:
• Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
• Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
“The Jewish Boswell: Y. D. Berkovich and the Invention of Sholem-aleichem [Heb.],” Ot 7 (2017): 129-154.
“The New Marranos,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry Annual 29 (2016): 245-267.
“Rome and Jerusalem: The Figure of Jesus in the Creation of Mark Antokol’skii,” The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 441-496.
“The Poet in Hell: H. N. Bialik and the Cultural Genealogy of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1 (2005), 101-128.
Departments and programs
Samantha Zacher
Professor