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 website

Enzo Traverso

Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities

Publications

· 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)

Klarman Hall
K261 Klarman Hall
vt225@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Deborah A. Starr

Professor

Publications

Books

Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema. (University of California Press, 2020). Open Access: www.ucpress.edu/9780520366206

Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff.
Co-edited with Sasson Somekh. (Stanford University Press, 2011).

Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture and Empire. (Routledge, 2009).

Published Articles

“Reading, Writing, and Remembering: Ronit Matalon and the Literature of Egyptian Jewish Memory” (In Hebrew) Mikan: A Journal of Israeli and Jewish Literature and Culture. 18 (September 2018), 141-154.

“Chalom and cAbdu Get Married: Jewishness and Egyptianness in the Films of Togo Mizrahi.” The Jewish Quarterly Review. 107, no.2 (2017): 209-230. doi: 10.1353/jqr.2017.0007.

“In Bed Together: Coexistence in Togo Mizrahi’s Alexandria Films,” in Post-Ottoman Co-Existence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, edited by Rebecca Bryant, 129-156. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. Open access: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/OpenAccess/BryantPost-Ottoman/9781785333750_OA.pdf.

“Masquerade and the Performance of National Imaginaries: Levantine Ethics, Aesthetics, and Identities in Egyptian Cinema,” Journal of Levantine Studies 1, no.2 (2011): 31-57.

“Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo’s Harat al-Yahud,” Prooftexts, 26, no. 1-2 (2006): 138-162. doi: 10.1353/ptx.2007.0010

“Drinking, Gambling, and Making Merry: Waguih Ghali’s Search for Cosmopolitan Agency,”
Middle Eastern Literatures 9, no. 3 (2006): 271-285. doi: 10.1080/14752620600999896

Revised and updated version printed in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English, edited by Nouri Gana (University of Edinburgh Press, 2013).

“Recuperating Cosmopolitan Alexandria: Circulation of Narratives and Narratives of Circulation,” Cities. 22, no.3 (2005): 217-228. doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2005.03.009

“Reterritorializing the Dream: Orly Castel-Bloom’s Remapping of Israeli Identity,” in Mapping Jewish Identities, edited by Laurence J. Silberstein (NYU Press, 2000).

“Egyptian Representation of Israeli Culture: Normalizing Propaganda or Propagandizing Normalization?” in Review Essays in Israel Studies, Books on Israel 5, edited by Laura Eisenberg and Neil Caplan. (SUNY Press, 2000).

Open Access Digital Archive

“Waguih Ghali Unpublished Papers: Diaries (1964-1968) and Manuscript Fragments” [http://ghali.library.cornell.edu].

Selected Short Essays

“Writing about Writing about Alexandria,” Politics/Letters. 13 (September 2018).

Interview with Diana Athill, The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Manic Depressive in the Swinging Sixties, edited by May Hawas. Vol. 1 (American University in Cairo Press, 2017).

Interview with Samir Basta, The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Manic Depressive in the Swinging Sixties, edited by May Hawas. Vol. 2 (American University in Cairo Press, 2017).

Klarman Hall
415 White Hall
deborah.starr@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Shalom Shoer

Senior Lecturer, Hebrew language

Publications

"Shalom 1, Beginners Comprehensive Course in Modern Hebrew," Createspace Independent Publishing

"Shalom 2, Intermediate Comprehensive Course in Modern Hebrew," Createspace Independent Publishing 

"Shalom 3, Advanced Intermediate Comprehensive Course in Modern Hebrew," Createspace Independent Publishing

Klarman Hall
418 White Hall
shalom.shoer@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Links

Elliot Shapiro

Senior Lecturer, Director, Writing in the Majors

Klarman Hall
101 McGraw Hall
elliot.shapiro@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Gavriel Shapiro

Emeritus Professor of Comparative and Russian Literature

Publications

Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993)

 

Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998)

 

(Ed.) Nabokov at Cornell (2003)

 

The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009)

 

The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014)

 

 Thanksgiving All Year Round (2016)

 

Klarman Hall
gs33@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Daniel R. Schwarz

Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow

Publications

View articles by Daniel R. Schwarz published in the "Cornell Sun"

Klarman Hall
250 Goldwin Smith Hall
drs6@cornell.edu
607/255-9313

Departments and programs

Links

Elissa Sampson

Lecturer

Publications

"Yiddish Leftists as Early Inter-Ethniks," In American Jews and Comparative Ethnicity, editor Jonathan Karp. Series "The Jewish Role in American Life." Purdue University Press. Casden Center at USC.  December, 2023.

"Jewish People’s Fraternal Order," article. Jewish Americans, article in Encyclopedia of the American Left, edited by Paul Buhle, Mari Jo Buhle. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming, Winter 2024.

“Revisiting Their Words: An Archive of the Jewish Immigrant Left,” in Cultura Judeo-progresista en las Américas, edited by Nerina Visacovsky. Imago Mundi Publishing House and its Archives Collection (CEHTI), August 2022.

"Critical introduction for catalogue and exhibit: Tikkun Olam, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Neuenhaus, Germany. 2021. Online-Ausstellung: Tikkun Olam auf Ruth Sergels Website https://streetpictures.org/tikkunolam/

“Grunge Authenticity: The Tenement as Upscale Tourist Destination,” in Tourism Gentrification in Contemporary Metropolises, International Perspectives, Taylor & Francis, Fall 2017.

“Yosl Rakover Speaks to God,” in Imagining the Jewish God, edited by Leonard Kaplan and Ken Koltun‑Fromm. Rowan & Littlefield, Lexington Books, Summer 2016.

“Riding Memory,” final essay in See You in the Streets: Art, Action & Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire, public history series, edited by Ruth Sergel. University of Iowa Press, Spring 2016.

"Louis Wirth and the American Image of the Frankfurt Ghetto” (with Jonathan Boyarin) in Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge, No. 40: 2015, Frankfurt’s ‘Jewish Notabilia’ (‘Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten’): Ethnographic Views of Urban Jewry in Central Europe around 1700.

Review of Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. November 20, 2015. East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 45, 2-3, special issue: New Jewish Museums in post-Communist Europe.

“Moral Lessons from a Storied Past,” Moral Encounters in Tourism, Ashgate Current Developments in the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism series edited by Mary Mostafanezhad and Kevin Hannam on behalf of the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). August 2014.

“Lower East Side Landings,” AJS Perspectives, The Land Issue, Spring 2014 (with Dr. Jonathan Boyarin). All accompanying photographs by E. Sampson.

Contributing researcher and writer. Synagogues of the Lower East Side, Gerard Wolfe, Fordham University Press, 2012.

Film and Podcasts, Consultancy

·       Featured Onscreen Interviewee, Podcast series, Fire!, An American Burning, Belt Magazine, November 10, 2023

·       Featured Onscreen Interviewee, “The Future of America’s Past.” Lance Warren, Co-Director (Fall 2019) 

·       Featured Onscreen Interviewee, “Luckiest Guys in the Lower East Side.” Anthony Amatullo, Director (Spring 2019) 

·       Featured Onscreen Interviewee, “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream.” Michael Levine, Director (Spring 2016) 

Klarman Hall
409 White Hall
ejs362@cornell.edu

Education

PhD, Urban Geography, UNC, Chapel Hill

Departments and programs

Keywords

Urban Geography, Migration, Immigration, Jewish Left-Wing Social Movements, Triangle Fire, Tourism Studies, Museum Studies, Lower East Side, Space, Place, Memory Studies, American Jewish History and Culture, Gentrification, Historical Preservation, Digital Humanities, History of Geography; Practice of Genealogy; Digital Humanities, Anthropology of Breast Cancer Genetics; New York City Water Ecology and History

Eric Rebillard

Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities

Publications

Books

  • The Early Martyr Narratives: Neither Authentic Accounts Nor Forgeries. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
  • Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
  • Transformations of Religious Practices in Late Antiquity. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
  • Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012 (paperback 2016).
  • The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009 [English translation of Religion et sépulture: l’Église, les vivants et les morts dans l’Antiquité tardive (IIIe-Ve siècles). Civilisations et sociétés 115. Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2003].
  • Musarna. 3, La nécropole impériale. Collection de l’École française de Rome 415. Rome: École française de Rome, 2009.
  • In hora mortis: évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort aux IVe et Ve siècles dans l’Occident latin. Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 283. Rome: École française de Rome, 1994.

Edited volumes

  • Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity. Edited by Éric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015.
  • Les frontières du profane dans l’Antiquité tardive. Edited by Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel. Rome: École française de Rome, 2010.
  • Economie et religion dans l’Antiquité tardive. Edited by Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel.  Special issue of Antiquité tardive 14 (2006): 15-116.
  • Hellénisme et christianisme. Edited by Michel Narcy and Éric Rebillard. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2004.
  • Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire = Orthodoxy, christianity, history. Collection de l’École française de Rome 270. Edited by Susanna Elm, Éric Rebillard and Antonella Romano, Rome: École française de Rome, 2000.
  • L’évêque dans la cité du IVe au Ve siècle: image et autorité. Collection de l’École française de Rome 248. Edited by Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel. Rome: École française de Rome, 1998.
Klarman Hall
120 Goldwin Smith Hall
er97@cornell.edu
607/255-8640

Education

Professor Rebillard received his PhD from the Sorbonne (Paris, France) in 1993 and is a former member of the Ecole française de Rome. He came at Cornell in 2004 after having held a research position in the French CNRS between 1996 and 2003.

Departments and programs

Links

Keywords

 

 

Roman History

 

David Stephan Powers

Professor

Publications

Monographs

  • “Law and Sufism in the Maghrib, ca. 829/1425,” in Islam on the Margins: Studies in Memory of Michael Bonner, ed. Robert Haug and Steven Judd, 147-200, Brill, 2023.

  • “In Memorium: Aharon Layish (1933-2022),” Islamic Law and Society, 29:2 (2022), 217-220. Also published in Aharon Layish, Islamic Law, Tribal Customary Law and Waqf: Studies in the Legal History of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Brill, 2024, xi-xiv.

  • Zayd (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
  • Muhammad is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009)
  • Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300-1500 (Cambridge  University Press, 2002)
  • Studies in Qur'an and Hadith: The Formation of the Islamic Law of Inheritance. University of California Press, 1986. Translated into Bahasa Indonesia as Peralihin Kekayaan dan Politk Kekuasaan: Kritik Histois Hukum Waris (LkiS, Yogyakarta, 2001)

Articles

  • “Sinless, Sonless, and Seal of Prophets: Muḥammad and Kor 33, 36-40, Revisited,” Arabica 67:4 (2020), 338-408

  • “The Qur’ān and its Legal Environment,” in Approaching Islam: Classical Categories and Modern Scholarship, ed. Majid Daneshgar and Aaron W. Hughes (2020), 9-32.

  • “Le Coran et son environnement légal,” in Le Coran des Historiens, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and Guillaume Dye, Cerf, 2019, 615-649.

  • “Adoption,” In Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies. Ed. John O. Voll. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, April 2016
  • “From Nuzi to Medina: Q. 4:12b, Revisited,” in Structures of Power: Law and Gender across the Ancient Near East and Beyond, ed. Ilan Peled, Oriental Institute Seminars, vol. 12 (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 2016).
  • “Inheritance.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies. Ed. Andrew Rippin. New York: Oxford University Press (2015).
  • “Finality of Prophecy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, ed. A. Silverstein and G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • “’A Bequest May Not Exceed One-Third’: An Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis – and Beyond,” in Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts, edited by Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Ahmed, Robert Hoyland, and Adam Silverstein.  Leiden: Brill: 2014 (co-authored with Pavel Pavlovitch)
  • “Wael B. Hallaq on the Origins of Islamic Law: A Review Essay,” Islamic Law and Society, 17:1 (2010),
  • "Demonizing Zenobia: The Legend of al-Zabba' in Islamic Sources", in Histories of the Middle East: Studies in Middle Eastern Economy, Society, and Law in Honor of A.L. Udovitch (Brill, 2010)
  • "The Abolition of Adoption in Islam, Reconsidered," in Droit et Religions Annuaire 4 (2009-10), 97-107
  • "From the Mi`yar of al-Wansharisi to the New Mi`yar of al-Wazzani," co-authored with Etty Terem, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 33 (2007), 235-260
  • "Law and Custom in the Maghrib, 1475-1500: On the Disinheritance of Women," in Law, Custom, and Statute in the Muslim World: Studies in Honor of Aharon Layish (E.J. Brill, 2006), 17-40.
  • "Qadis and their Courts: An Historical Survey," with M. Khalid Masud and Rudolph Peters, in Dispensing Justice in Muslim Courts: Qadis and their Courts, ed. M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters, David S. Powers (E.J. Brill, 2006), 1-46.
  • "Women and Courts in the Maghrib, 1100-1500, in Dispensing Justice in Muslim Courts: Qadis and their Courts, ed. M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters, David S. Powers (E.J. Brill, 2006), 383-410.
  • “Women and Divorce in the Islamic West: Three Cases,” Hawwa, vol. 1:1 (2003), 29-45.
  • "Parents and their Minor Children: Familial Politics in the Middle Maghrib in the Eighth/Fourteenth Century," Continuity and Change, August 2001, 177-200.
  • "The Islamic Family Endowment (Waqf)," Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 32:4 (1999), 1167-90.
  • "Introduction: The Islamic Inheritance System," Islamic Law and Society, 5:3 (1998): 285-90 [theme issue]
  • "The Art of the Judicial Opinion: On Tawlij in Fifteenth-Century Tunis," Islamic Law and Society, 5:3 (1998): 359-81.

Edited Volumes

  • Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Global Muslim Societies, ed. David S. Powers and Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell University Press, 2023)
  • Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, ed. O. Arabi, D.S. Powers and S. Spectorsky (E.J. Brill, 2013)
  • Dispensing Justice in Muslim Courts: Qadi and their Courts, ed. M. Khalid Masud, Rudolph Peters, David S. Powers (E.J. Brill, 2006)
  • Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and their Fatwas, ed. M. Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick and David Powers (Harvard University Press, 1996)

Encyclopedia Entries

  • "Appeal", "Adoption", Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3nd ed.,
  • "Inheritance", "Judicial Review", "Wansharisi", Encyclopaedia of Legal History
  • "Endowments", "Inheritance", "Qadis", Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia
  • "Inheritance, Islamic", Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, E-I (2002)
  •  “Wakf”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. XI, 69-75
  • "Inheritance," "Endowment," and "Alms-Tax" in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages. New York: Scribners, 1983
Klarman Hall
421 White Hall
dsp4@cornell.edu
607/3514998

Departments and programs

Christopher M. Monroe

Senior Lecturer

Publications

2021 “The Enchanting Scale: Magic and Morality in the Bronze Age Economic Balance.” In J.-C. Moreno Garcia (ed.) Markets, Money and Exchanges: Their Economic Logics in Pre-modern Societies. Oxbow.

2020 “Informed or at Sea: On the Maritime and Mundane in Ugaritic Tablet RS 94.2406.” In A. Gilboa and A Yasur-Landau, eds. Nomads of the Mediterranean: Trade and Contact in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Brill.

2020 “Money and Traders.” In D. Snell, ed., Blackwell Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2nd ed., pp. 145-64.Wiley-Blackwell.

2020 “Markets, Ancient Near East,” “Ships, Shipping, Ancient Near East,” and "Trade, Ancient Near East.” Entries in R. Bagnall, et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Blackwell.

2018 “Marginalizing Civilization: the Phoenician Redefinition of Power, ca. 1300-800 BC.” In K. Kristiansen, T. Lindkvist, and J. Myrdal, eds. Trade and Civilisation Economic Networks and Cultural Ties, from Prehistory to the Early Modern Era. Cambridge University Press.

2016 “Measure for ‘Measure’: Connecting Text to Material through Late Bronze Age Shipping Jars.” In S. Demesticha A.B. Knapp &, eds., Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology pocket book, pp. 79-96. Uppsala.

2015 “Tangled Up in Blue: Material and Immaterial Relations of Exchange in the Late Bronze Age World.” In T. Howe, ed., Traders in the Ancient Mediterranean (Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians 11), pp. 7-46. Chicago: Ares.

2011 “From Luxuries to Anxieties: A Liminal View of the Late Bronze Age World-system.” In T. Wilkinson, S. Sherratt and J. Bennet, eds., Interweaving Worlds: Systemic interaction in Eurasia 7th to 1st millennia BC (Sheffield).

2010 "Sunk Costs at Late Bronze Age Uluburun," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357:15-29.

2009 Scales of Fate: Trade, Tradition, and Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1350–1175 BCE. In series, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 357 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag).

2009 "Seeing the World." Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 356:67-73.

2007 “Vessel Volumetrics and the Myth of the Cyclopean Bronze Age Ship.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50:1-18.

Klarman Hall
407 White Hall
cmonroe@cornell.edu

Education

  • B.S., (Anthropology), Michigan State University, 1985
  • M.A., (Nautical Archaeology), Texas A&M University, 1990
  • Ph.D., (Near Eastern Studies), University of Michigan, 2000
  • M.A., (Information Science), University of Michigan, 2001

Departments and programs

Links

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