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 websiteBook:
Articles and Book Chapters:
Public Scholarship:
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
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
“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
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.
· Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)
· Revolution: An Intellectual History (London-New York: Verso, 2021)
· The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2018; Chicago: Haymarket, 2019)
· The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London-New York: Verso, 2019)
· Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)
· The European Civil War 1914-1945 (London-New York: Verso, 2016)
· The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Books, 2016)
· The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003)
· The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1995)