About

Prof. Ram Ben-Shalom is Professor of Jewish History and co-editor of the Hispania Judaica Bulletin. Since October 2021, Ben-Shalom has served as the Chair of the department of the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published widely on medieval European Jewish history and is a specialist in the Jewish–Christian discourse of the Middle Ages.

Selected Publications

R. Ben-Shalom, Facing Christian Culture: Historical Consciousness and Images of the Past among the Jews of Spain and Southern France during the Middle Ages [Hebrew], 2006, Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

R. Ben-Shalom, Medieval Jews and the Christian Past: Jewish Historical Consciousness in Spain and Southern France, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford 2016.

R. Ben-Shalom, The Jews of Provence: Renaissance in the Shadow of the Church [Hebrew], The Open University of Israel, Raanana 2017.

Forthcoming, an English translation: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Liverpool University Press); In editing. 

R. Ben-Shalom, The Letter of Salomea, Carmel. Publishing House, Jerusalem (forthcoming). [Hebrew].

R. Ben-Shalom, “The First Jewish Work on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Virtues,” Mediaeval Studies, 75 (2013), pp. 205-270.

Selected Awards

2007 - Samuel Toledano Prize by the Misgav Institute in Jerusalem was awarded to the book "Facing Christian Culture: Historical Consciousness and Images of the Past among the Jews of Spain and Southern France during the Middle Ages (2006)", for its contribution to the Sephardi past in its Christian context.

2018 – Ben Zvi Institute Prize for the book "The Jews of Provence: Renaissance in the Shadow of the Church (2017)".

2019 - "Am Olam" Prize of the Historical Society of Israel for the book "The Jews of Provence: Renaissance in the Shadow of the Church (2017)".

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

The Jewish Renaissance in Medieval Provence

Jewish-Christian Polemics: History & Literature

Introduction to the History of the Jews in Spain

The Jews of Provence: Troubadours, Heretics and Mystics

The Jewish Culture in the 13th Century - A New World?

Jewish-Christian Encounter and Polemics

Under the Cross: Jewish Life in Medieval Europe

The Jews of Provence: Renaissance and Crisis

Facing the Cross: A Journey in Provence

Eros Romantics and Medieval Misogyny

Master's degree courses

The Jews in 15th Century Spain: Crisis or Flourishing?

The New language of Conversion in Christian Spain

Who is a Jew in Fifteenth Century Spain? Anusim, Jews and Christians

The Jews in Provence and the Mediterranean Sea.

History and Jewish Literature in Medieval Texts.

The Challenges of the 15th Century: Criticism and Intellectual Innovation

About

Louise Bethlehem is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath (2006) was translated into Hebrew by the Resling imprint (2011). She has co-edited nine volumes on South African literature, anti-apartheid expressive culture, African studies and cultural studies and was the Principal Investigator of the prestigious European Research Council project, APARTHEID-STOPS between 2014-2019.

Selected Publications

1. Bethlehem, Louise and Tal Zalmanovich, (eds). (2020). “Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle.” Special edition of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 34(1), 128 Pages. Taylor and Francis: London and New York.

2. Bethlehem, Louise. 2018. “Restless Itineraries: Anti-Apartheid Expressive Culture

                and Transnational Historiography.” Social Text 36 (3 [136]): 47-69. 

https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-6917766.

3. Bethlehem, Louise. 2018. “Continuity and Change in Postapartheid Fiction,” Oxford Research             Encyclopedias: Literature, DOI.10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.193

4. Bethlehem, Louise. 2013. “Lauren Beukes’s Post-Apartheid Dystopia: Inhabiting Moxyland,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50(5): 522-534. Article featured in September 2015 among top twenty articles published in this journal in the previous five years.

5. Bethlehem, Louise. 2006. Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath.  xvii + 145 Pages. Unisa (University of South Africa) Press, Pretoria; Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden.

Selected Awards

Consolidators’ Grant European Research Council for the project APARTHEID-STOPS: “Apartheid the Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation, 1948-1990.”

Teaching

Postcolonial Theory

Gender, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism

Postapartheid Literature

Globalization and Solidarity in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Modernism and Beyond

J.M. Coetzee: Postcolonial Metafiction

About

Menahem Blondheim is a member of the departments of History and of Communication& Journalism, and serves as the academic director of undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rothberg International School. Trained at the Hebrew University (BA) and Harvard University (MA and PhD), Prof. Blondheim studies the role communication plays in American and Jewish history, as well as the history and theory of communications and media technologies.

Selected Publications

1. News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-    1897. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. (305 pp.)

2. “Divine Comedy: The Jewish Orthodox Sermon in the United States." In: Multilingual America:          Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: New York University Press, 1998, pp. 191-214.

3. Copperhead Gore: Benjamin Wood’s Fort Lafayette and Civil War America. Bloomington:

            Indiana University Press, 2006. (xi, 291 pp.)

4. “America’s Global Standing According to Popular News Sites from Around the World,”

            Political Communication 30: 1 (2013): 139-161 (with Elad Segev).

5. Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: Two Thousand years of Saying Goodbye without

            Leaving. New York: Israel Academic Press, 2020 (edited with Hananel Rosenberg).

Selected Awards

National Endowment for the Humanities

Covert Award (AEJMC)

Donald L. Shaw Lifetime Award for Outstanding Service to Journalism History

Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Journalism History

Excellence in Teaching Distinction, Hebrew University (awarded the prize numerous times)

About

Prof. Breuer has been part of the Hebrew University research community forover 40 years, he is a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He deals mainly with Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic.

Selected Publications

The Hebrew in the Babylonian Talmud according to the Manuscripts of Tractate Pesahim, Jerusalem 2002

From Aramaic into Hebrew: the Method of Translation in the Book Hilkhot Re’u, Jerusalem 2020

“Perfect and Participle in Description of Ritual in the Mishnah”, Tarbiz LVI (1987), pp. 299-326

“Dissonance between Masoretic Accentuation and Vocalization in Verse Division of the Biblical Text”, M. Bar-Asher (ed.) Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift, Jerusalem 1992, pp. 191-242

“The Babylonian Aramaic in Tractate Karetot: According to MS Oxford”, Aramaic Studies 5.1 (2007), pp. 1–45

Teaching

Mishnaic Hebrew

Babylonian Aramaic

The Massora

The Language of S.Y. Agnon

Linguistic Studies in the Interpretation of the Bible

About

Prof. Hillel Cohen was born in 1961 in Jerusalem. Cohen studies the dynamics between the Zionist movement (and later the state of Israel) and the Palestinian Arabs, as well as the history of Jewish-Muslims relations prior to Zionism, and the history of Mizrahi (aka Oriental) Jews before and after 1948.

Selected Publications

Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism 1917-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Good Arabs: The Israeli Intelligence and the Israeli Arabs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Politics and the City 1967-2007 (London: Routledge, 2011).

Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (Brandeis University Press, 2015).

Selected Awards

Ben Zvi Prize for the best book on Israel history for Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: 1929.

Azrieli Institute Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies, Concordia University; for Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: 1929

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

The Palestinians: Political and Social History (B.A. seminar)

Zionism and the Arabs

Jerusalem - al-Quds

Jewish-Muslim relations from Muhammad to present: selected topics

Master's degree courses

1948: The real story (MA seminar)

Sephardi and Oriental Jews: History and Identity (MA seminar)
 

Research Fields

Zionist ideology and practice

Palestinian society and politics

Palestinian collaborators and Israel's intelligence agencies

Mizrahi Jews

Palestinian refugees

Jerusalem

holy places

al-Aqsa

Religion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Islam and Judaism - Jews and Muslims

Palestine under the British mandate

Land issues

About

Prof. Hillel Cohen was born in 1961 in Jerusalem. Cohen studies the dynamics between the Zionist movement (and later the state of Israel) and the Palestinian Arabs, as well as the history of Jewish-Muslims relations prior to Zionism, and the history of Mizrahi (aka Oriental) Jews before and after 1948.

Selected Publications

Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism 1917-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Good Arabs: The Israeli Intelligence and the Israeli Arabs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Politics and the City 1967-2007 (London: Routledge, 2011).

Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1929 (Brandeis University Press, 2015).

Selected Awards

Ben Zvi Prize for the best book on Israel history for Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: 1929.

Azrieli Institute Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies, Concordia University; for Year Zero of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: 1929

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

The Palestinians: Political and Social History (B.A. seminar)

Zionism and the Arabs

Jerusalem - al-Quds

Jewish-Muslim relations from Muhammad to present: selected topics

Master's degree courses

1948: The real story (MA seminar)

Sephardi and Oriental Jews: History and Identity (MA seminar)

About

Dr. Uri Davidovich is a lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, Biblical Section. His research interests revolve around environmental and landscape archaeology, especially of marginal landscapes; field and analytical methods of archaeological surveys; regional archaeology of the Judean Desert; human activity in natural caves; and the development of complex societies surrounding the transition to urbanism (Chalcolithic period and Early Bronze Age). Davidovich’s current studies include: settlement dynamics in the Upper Galilee in the Early Bronze Age and early urbanization in the southern Levant, involving multi-annual excavations at the mega-site of Tel Qedesh; archeology and landscape of refuge in cliff caves of the Judean Desert during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age; environmental and cultural changes in the Judean Desert during the Holocene (together with Dr. Nimrod Marom, University of Haifa); and comparative archaeology of ancient activity patterns in complex caves in the southern Levant.

Selected Publications

Davidovich U.PI, Ullman M.PI, Langford B.C, Frumkin A.C, Langgut D.C, Yahalom-Mack N.C, Abramov J.C, Marom N.C 2018. “Distancing the dead: Late Chalcolithic burials in large maze caves in the Negev Desert, Israel.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 379: 113-152. DOI: 10.5615/bullamerschoorie.379.0113

Wachtel I.PI, Davidovich U.PI, corres. auth. 2021. “Qedesh in the Galilee: The emergence of an Early Bronze Age Levantine megasite.” Journal of Field Archaeology 46: 260-274. DOI: 10.1080/00934690.2021.1901025

Lazagabaster I.A.PI, Rovelli V.PI, Fabre P.-H.C, Porat R.C, Ullman M.C, Davidovich U.C*, Lavi T.C, Ganor A.C, Klein E.C, Weiss K.C, Nuriel P.C, Meiri M.C, Nimrod MaromPI. 2021. “Rare crested rat subfossils unveil Afro-Eurasian ecological corridors synchronous with early human dispersals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2021: 118(31): e2105719118. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105719118

Mascher M.PI, Schünemann V.J.PI, Davidovich U.C, Himmelbach A.C, Hübner S.C, Fahima T.C, Korol A.C, David M.C, Marom N.C, Riehl S.C, Schreiber M.C, Vohr S.H.C, Green R.E.C, Dawson I.K.C, Russell J.C, Kilian B.C, Muehlbauer G.J.C, Waugh R.C, Krause J.PI, Weiss E.PI, Stein N.PI 2016. “Genomic analysis of 6,000-year-old cultivated grain illuminates the domestication history of barley.” Nature Genetics 48: 1089-1093. DOI: 10.1038/ng.3611

Davidovich U.PI, Porat N.PI, Gadot Y.PI, Avni Y.C, Lipschits O.PI 2012. “Archaeological investigations and OSL dating of terraces at Ramat Rahel, Israel.” Journal of Field Archaeology 37: 192-208.

Selected Awards

Rothschild Foundation Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Rotenstreich Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Students in the Humanities, National Council for Higher Education

Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University

President Fellowship, HU Honors Program for excelled PhD Students in the Humanities, The Hebrew University

The Bernard M. Bloomfield Prize for excelled PhD Dissertation, The Hebrew University

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

GIS applications in Archaeology

Introduction to Spatial Archaeology

Caves and complex societies

Unsuccessful revolution: The Chalcolithic period

The Negev, Arabah and Edom in the Iron Age

Regional Campus: Judean Desert

Advanced survey and Regional Analysis

Bronze Age Landscapes

In the footsteps of kings and rebels: Judean Desert during the Roman and Byzantine periods

Topics in Biblical Archaeology: Violence and its archaeological expressions (B.A Seminar)

Regional Campus: Golan Heights

The Early Bronze Age I in the Southern Levant

Regional Archaeology: From Theory to Practice (in collaboration with G. Shelach-Lavi)

The Ghassulian Culture: Society, Economy and Cult

Early Pottery (in collaboration with N. Panitz-Cohen)

Introduction to the Archaeology of Israel and the Levant: 8th-4th Millenia B.C.
 

Master's degree courses

Topics in Biblical Archaeology - Transitions (M.A Seminar, in collaboration with N. Yahalom-Mack)

Topics in Biblical Archaeology - Borders and Boundaries (M.A Seminar, in collaboration with N. Yahalom-Mack)

The Desert and the Sown in the Levant (M.A Seminar, in collaboration with I. Sharon)

About

Dr. Aya Elyada is a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem History Department and a permanent academic member at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. She joined the Hebrew University in 2012, and since October 2020 she has been serving as the Chair of the History Department. Her current book project explores the place of Old Yiddish literature in modern German and German-Jewish culture.

Selected Publications

Protestant Scholars and Yiddish Studies in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 203 (2009), 69-98"

A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 280 pp.

Zwischen Austausch und Polemik: Christliche Übersetzungen jiddischer Literatur im Deutschland der Frühneuzeit," Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 69 (2017), 47-73"

Early Modern Yiddish and the Jewish Volkskunde, 1880-1938," Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (2017), 182-208"

Contested Heritage: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Yiddish Biblical Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Zion: A Quarterly for the Research of Jewish History 86:4 (2021), 563-91 [in Hebrew]"

Selected Awards

2012-2015 Yigal Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Junior Faculty, Israeli Council for Higher Education

2013-2017 "Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (CIG), "From Yiddish into German: A Cultural History of Translation

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

The Protestant Reformation as a Theological, Social, and Cultural Revolution

Luther, the Reformation and the German Language

Religion and Society in Sixteenth-Century Germany

Poverty and Crime in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Subordinated Groups in Early Modern Germany

Christian-Jewish Relations in Early Modern Germany

Christian-Jewish Relations in the First Reich: 1096-1648

Women and Gender in the Protestant Reformation

Books and Readers in Early Modern Germany

Master's degree courses

Language and Identity in Early Modern Germany

The Yiddish-German Encounter Throughout the Ages

Christian Hebraism in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Hebrew-Yiddish-German: Cultural History of Language
 

About

Dr. Amir Engel is a lecturer in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem German department. He studied philosophy, literature and culture-studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD at the German studies department at Stanford University, California, USA. Subsequently, Engel taught and conducted research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His main topics of interest include German Romanticism and German postwar literature and culture, theories of myth, literature and philosophy and history of culture. He is also interested in intercultural transference, Jewish German culture, and German 20th century intellectual history. He has written a book about Gershom Scholem and has published articles about Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Martin Buber, Jacob Taubes, Salomon Maimon and others.

Selected Publications

Amir Engel, Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) (Paperback edition Summer 2019).

Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture. Eds. Amir Engel and Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 445 pp.

Amir Engel, “A Brave New Word: Hannah Arendt’s Postwar Reading of Kafka” in Kafka after Kafka Eds. Iris Bruce and Mark Gelber (Rochester: Camden House), 2019, 29-44.

Amir Engel, “Between Consequential Memory and Destruction: Karl Jaspers, Jean Améry, and the Intellectual History of Postwar West-Germany,” New German Critique 140, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2020, 1- 20.

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

Love and Romantics in German Literature (Fall-Spring 2018-9)

Literature after the Catastrophe: Postwar German Culture (Spring 2019)

Freud-Nietzsche-Marx: Meditations on a Changing World (Fall 2019)

Introduction to German Literature in the 19th and 20th centuries (Spring 2019)

Introduction to German Literature in the 18th and 19th centuries (Fall 2018)

The German Enlightenment (Spring 2018)

Introduction to German Literature in the 19th and 20th centuries (Spring 2018)

Introduction to German Literature in the 18th and 19th centuries (Fall 2017)
 

Master's degree courses

______

About

Prof. Fassberg teaches and researches Biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Aramaic dialectology, Northwest Semitics, and Comparative Semitic philology. He has served in several administrative positions at the university and is a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Selected Publications

Studies in the Syntax of Biblical Hebrew (סוגיות בתחביר המקרא). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994. 202 pp. (in Hebrew)

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Challa. Semitic Languages and Linguistics 54. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 314 pp. + XVIII.

An Introduction to the Syntax of Biblical Hebrew (מבוא לתחביר לשון המקרא). Biblical Encyclopaedia Library 36. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2019. 286 pp. +  XXI.

Teaching

Aramaic of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Biblical Hebrew

Comparative Semitic Linguistics: Phonology and Morphology

Hebrew and the Semitic Languages

Hebrew Morphology

Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls

History of the Hebrew Language (from Its Origins to the End of the Amoraic Period)

Introduction to Aramaic (Parts I and II)

Language of Biblical Poetry

Language of the Book of Job

Late Western Aramaic

Old Aramaic Inscriptions

Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions

Ugaritic

Western Neo-Aramaic