Faculty
Deena Aranoff
Ph.D. Columbia University, 2006. Assistant Professor of Medieval Jewish Studies. She completed her doctorate in early-modern European history and has taught medieval and modern Jewish history and the Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College in Massachusetts. Her specialty is Renaissance Hebraism.
Naomi Seidman
Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1993. Associate Professor of Jewish Culture. Her book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997. She is also a translator and in 2006 published the book Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation.
Holger Michael Zellentin
Ph.D. Princeton University (2007). Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Late Antique Judaism. He has published a series of articles on Jewish adaptations of Greco-Roman literature such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and the Gospels; and is co-editor of Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck, 2007). He is currently preparing for publication his dissertation, Late Antiquity Upside Down- Rabbinic Parodies of Christian and Jewish Literature.
Shana Penn
Visiting scholar Shana Penn is completing a book on the revitalization of Jewish culture in Poland after Communism. The author of Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005), Penn has organized CJS symposia on Polish Jewish history and on oral history as counter narrative in Jewish studies.