About

Jonathan Dekel-Chen is the Rabbi Edward Sandrow Chair in Soviet & East European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current research and publications deal with transnational philanthropy and advocacy, non-state diplomacy, agrarian history and migration. In 2014, Dekel-Cohen co-founded the Bikurim Youth Village for the Arts, which provides world-class artistic training for under-served high school students from throughout Israel.

Selected Publications

Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1923-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Editor (with David Gaunt, Natan Meir, Israel Bartal), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Editor (with Eugene Avrutin and Robert Weinberg), Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

“Between Myths, Memories, History and Politics: Creating Content for Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.” The Public Historian 40, no. 4 (2018): 91-106.

 “Putting Agricultural History to Work: Global Action Today from a Communal Past.” Featured article in: Agricultural History 94, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 512-544.

Selected Awards

2005-2008  Israel Science Foundation Award, “A World of Good: Jewish Philanthropy and Politics

in Russia and the USSR, 1890s-1990s”.

Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines, Hebrew University, 2007.

Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2008-2009.

Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2008-2009.

Israel Institute Visiting Professor at Columbia University, N.Y., 2015-2016

Bildner Visiting Scholar at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University.

Vernon Carstensen Memorial Award for the best article in Agricultural History from the Agricultural History Society for “Putting Agricultural History to Work: Global Action Today from a Communal Past” (Issue 94, no. 4 [2020]: 512-544).

Teaching

“From Revolution to Crisis: Russia, 1789-1855.”

 “From Crisis to Revolution: Russia, 1856-1917.”

 “Russian Foreign Policy in the Middle East and Israel”

“From Bukhara to Brooklyn: Modern East European Jewry”

“The Jewish Farmer in Modern Times.” (M.A.)

"Jewish Politics and Philanthropy in the 20^th Century" (M.A.)

"The Global Campaign for Soviet Jewry: Moscow, Washington, London, Jerusalem” (M.A.)

"Diplomacy and Philanthropy in the Modern Jewish World" (M.A.)

"Jewish and Non-Jewish Migration in the Modern World: Theory and Practice" (M.A.)

“Kibbutz: Beginnings, Glory, the End?” (M.A.)

About

Prof. Miriam Frenkel is professor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s  Department of Jewish History and the Institute of History. She is The Menahem Ben Sasson Chair in Judaism and Islam through the Ages, head of the Institute of History, and Vice President of the Society for Judeo-Arabic Studies [SJAS].

Selected Publications

Miriam Frenkel, `The Compassionate and Benevolent`: Jewish Ruling Elites in the Medieval Islamicate World, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021

Miriam Frenkel (ed.), The Jews in Medieval Egypt, Boston, ASP, 2021

Miriam Frenkel. Alison Salvesen, Sarah Pierce (eds.), Israel in Egypt, Leiden, Brill, 2020

Teaching

Bachelor's degree courses

Portraits of Conspicuous Figures in Medieval Jewish History in the Lands of Islam

The Jews of Islam: Historical and Social Perspectives

Tutorial teaching for outstanding undergraduate students at the School for History

Introduction to Medieval Jewish History (Cornerstones Program)

Jews and Judaism in Medieval Islamic Lands

Introduction to Jewish Medieval History in the Lands of Islam; Jewish Marginal Groups and Individuals in the Medieval Lands of Islam 

In the Footsteps of Travelers and Travelogues in the Middle East

Daily Life in History (Cornerstones Program)

Master's degree courses

Literary Activities and Products of the Judeo-Arabic Culture

The Mediterranean as System, Idea and Vision

Jewish Material Culture in the Lands of Islam and Christianity

Jewish Ritual Poetry (piyyut)

Jewish Religious Life in the Lands of Islam

 Mysticism, Magic, and Messianism among the Jews in the Lands of Islam

Basic Themes in the History and Culture of Mizrahi Jews

Jewish Material Culture in the Mdieval Lands of Islam
 

About

Prof. Yitzhak Hen is an historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Professor Hen’s research focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history of the post-Roman Barbarian kingdoms of the early medieval West; Western Liturgy; early medieval Latin Palaeography and Codicology.

Selected Publications

The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877), Henry Bradshaw Society, subsidia 3 (Boydell & Brewer: London, 2001)

Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early Medieval West (Palgrave-Macmillan: London and New York, 2007)

Sermo doctorum: Compilers, Preachers and Their Audiences in the Early Medieval West, co-edited with Max Diesenberger and Marianne Pollheimer (Brepols: Turnhout, 2014)

Barbarians and Jews: Jews and Judaism in the Early Medieval West, co-edited with Tom F.X. Noble (Brepols: Turnhout, 2018)

East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, co-edited with Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox and Laury Sarti (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2019)

Teaching

• Bachelor's degree courses
  • Introduction to Middle Ages
  • The Vikings in History
  • Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance
  • England under William the Conqueror
  • Gregory of Tours and his World
    Master's degree courses
    • Historiography and Memory in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
    • The Passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages - Cultural and Religious Aspects

Dr. Iris Nachum is a historian of Central Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, focusing on Austria and the Bohemian lands, with a special interest in compensation and restitution; liberalism and nationalism; ethnic conflict and expulsion.

In her studies, she focuses on the rise of German nationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy, the intriguing interplay between liberalism, nationalism, and Nazism, and the post-1945 expulsion of ethnic German peoples from Central and Eastern Europe to Germany and Austria. Most of her research and publications explore the complex interactions between demands, practices, and discourses of compensation (Wiedergutmachung) in the intra-German, German-Israeli, and German-Jewish contexts.

Since 2020, she serves as a Senior Lecturer at the History Department and as Deputy Director of the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Selected Publications
Iris Nachum. 2022. “Coming To Terms With The Nazi Past'?: The West German Compensation Policy In The Long 1950s”. In Studies In Jewish History and Culture, Vol. 70, Pp. 11-24. Leiden: Brill. Read more.

Iris Nachum. 2021. Nationalbesitzstand und "Wiedergutmachung": Zur historischen Semantik sudetendeutscher Kampfbegriffe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Read more.

Iris Nachum. 2019. “Heinrich Rauchberg (1860–1938): A Reappraisal of a Central European Demographer's Life And Work”. Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 50, Pp. 78-98. doi:10.1017/s0067237818000619. Read online.

Iris Nachum and José Brunner . 2012. "Die Deutschen" als die Anderen – Deutschland in der Imagination seiner Nachbarn. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Iris Nachum. 2010. “The History of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp As Reflected In Its Changing and Expanding Functions”. In: A Holocaust Crossroads: Jewish Women and Children in Ravensbrück, Pp. 17-36. London: Vallentine Mitchell.

Iris Nachum and Susan Neiman. 2010. Margherita von Brentano – Das Politische und Das Persönliche. Eine Collage. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 

Selected Awards

Co-Organizer of the Research Group on Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context.

The Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, 2023-2024.

Member of the Young Scholars Forum in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018-2019.

Margherita von Brentano Prize, Free University Berlin, for the comprehensive processing and publication of Margherita von Brentano's literary estate, May 2010.

Teaching

Undergraduate courses

History of the Habsburg Empire in the Long 19th Century

History of Political Concepts and Ideas

Modern Central European History: The Bohemian Lands

Modern European Political Theories 

Politics, Society and Culture in the Habsburg Monarchy (1848-1918)

Prague: Between the Hidden and the Revealed

Graduate courses

Law in Times of Crises: The Jurist Jacob Robinson (1889-1977)

The Compensation Project: Reparations for Historical Wrongs in Europe after 1945

About

Moshe Sluhovsky studied medieval history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to Princeton University, where he earned his PhD in 1992 under the supervision of Professors Natalie Z. Davis and Peter Brown. After three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, he moved back to Israel and to the Hebrew University, where he has been teaching ever since. He became a Full Professor in 2013 and holds the Paulette and Paul Kelman Chair for the Study of the History of French Jewry. He has served as the Chair of the Department of History and the Institute of History, and as director of the Lafer Program for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Currently he has shifted his research interest to the history of the entanglement of Jews and homosexuality in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. Prof. Sluhovsky  has received grants from the German Israeli Foundation, the Einstein Stiftung, and the Israel Science Foundation to pursue this topic.

Selected Publications

 2017             Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press), 232 pp.

 2007             “Believe not Every Spirit": Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (The University of Chicago Press), 373 pgs.

2021                         Co-editor (with Andreas Krass), Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine (Frankfurt: Transcript), 300 pp.

2019                         (ed. and Introduction) Into the Dark Night and Back: The Mystical Writings of Jean-Joseph Surin (Leiden and New York: Brill), 548 pp.

2007 – 2011              Editor in Chief, On the Threshold of a New Era, a series of 10 textbooks on early modern European History, The Open University of Israel (in Hebrew)

Selected Awards

2022-2024                                ISF Research Grant (wth Prof. Yuvaul Yonay, Haifa University and Dr. Michal Shapira, TLV), 920,000.00 NIS

2020 - 2023                              Einstein Stiftung grant (465,000.00 Euros)

2017-2020                                German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research Fellowship (GIF) (200,000.00 Euros)

2013-2014                                Distinguished Fellow, Advanced Research Collaborative Initiative of the Graduate Center, City University of New York

2013-2014                                Remarque Center Fellow, New York University

2012-2013                                Davis Center Fellow, Princeton University

2002 – 2003                              National Humanities Center Fellowship, North Carolina

Teaching

Introduction to 19^th Century Europe

Introduction to 20^th Century Europe

History of Modern Sexuality

The French Revolution

French Theory after 1945

Colonial Encounters

History and Theory (M.A.)

Theories of the Subject (M.A.)