Yael Aronoff will participate this spring in several public symposia at other universities. On April 14, 2024 she will be part of a roundtable for the Pearl and Troy Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law at Ohio State University, where she and three other scholars will discuss current events in Israel and Palestine from the perspective of international law and regional politics.
Dr. Aronoff will also participate in four roundtables at the 40th Annual Conference of the Association of Israel Studies at Charles University, Czech Republic, July 1-3, 2024. These include roundtables about the history, past, and present of the Association of Israel Studies; teaching about Israel during the war; and the books, Americanization of the Israeli Right (Eds. Ilan Peleg and Yoav Former) and Netanyahu vs the Generals (Guy Ziv).
She will also make several local presentations to Congregation Shaarey Zedek in East Lansing, Michigan. On January 21st she will discuss “Negotiating a Peace Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: Progress Made in the Past and Hopes for the Future;” on January 28th she will discuss “Analyzing Wars Between Israel and Hamas in the Past and Present.”
On campus, Dr. Aronoff continues to educate about antisemitism through her participation in the four-part series “Conversations on Antisemitism and Islamophobia” with colleagues Mohammad Khalil, Kirsten Fermaglich, Amy Simon, Morgan Shipley, and Ariana Mentzel. She is contributing to the development of a 1- credit online course on antisemitism with 7 colleagues from the Serling Institute, and is working with colleagues to lead workshops on antisemitism and Islamophobia for students and staff involved in MSU Athletics, and the East Lansing police on antisemitism and Islamophobia. She is also updating the Serling Institute Guide on Antisemitism for the MSU community with Kirsten Fermaglich, Amy Simon, and Ariana Mentzel.
Steven Gold published “Racial and Ethnic Consciousness” in the Wiley/Blackwell Encylopedia of Sociology, 27 November 2023. Access to the article is currently provided through the QR code:
Kirsten Fermaglich’s article, “‘To assume another name’: Race, gender, family and name changing in New York City, 1887–2012” will appear in Gender and History this spring. Access to the article is currently provided through the QR code:
Kirsten will speak on the history of American antisemitism in a Virtual Lecture Series at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and for Longmeadow Public Schools later this spring; she spoke on the same subject for Colorado College in December. Kirsten will work this semester with Amy Simon and Yael Aronoff to lead Conversations on Antisemitism and Islamophobia at MSU. She will also work this semester with a team of Serling Institute faculty to develop a 1-credit course on antisemitism at Michigan State, to be piloted in the Fall of 2024. She will present her work on name-changing to two synagogues: Temple Beth El in Somerset, New Jersey in February, and to Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles in May.
Amy Simon will be a featured essayist in YIVO’s Bruce and Francesca Czernia Slovin Online Museum’s upcoming exhibition on the Vilna ghetto diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski.
In May, Dr. Simon and her co-editor, Dr. Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh) will convene a workshop of Holocaust scholars working on a special issue of the journal, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, that addresses the topic of personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship. This meeting will take place at MSU and will include ten scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel.
Vered Weiss’s co-edited book Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress (Eds. Weiss, Ronen, and Dinur, Lexington, 2024) comes out this January. Weiss will present a paper at the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Israel Studies held jointly with the 12th Annual Conference of the European Association for Israel Studies. Israel and Israel Studies: The European and International Perspective July 1-3, 2024, Charles University, Prague. The title of her paper is “Empathy and Resilience: A New Epilogue to Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress (Eds. Weiss, Ronen, and Dinur, Lexington, 2024)”. Weiss will also present at The International Comparative Literature Association Conference to be held March 25-26, at San Francisco State University. The title of her paper is “Borderline Outcasts: Intellect and Marginality in ‘Mishael’ by Y. D. Berkowitz and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men”.
Kenneth Waltzer’s “Reflections on Contemporary Antisemitism in Europe,” (2015) has been republished in Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: the Fathom Essays, edited by Alan Johnson, Routledge, 2024. And has a book review, “Challenging the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement: Twenty Years…” edited by Ronald and Lola Fraser. Fathom (Fall 2023).
Yael Aronoff, publications include: Continuity and Change in Political Culture, Israel and Beyond co-edited with Ilan Peleg and Saliba Sarsar (Lexington Books, November 18, 2020); The Political Psychology of Israeli Prime Minister: When Hard – Liners Opt for Peace, (Cambridge University Press, 2014); “The Zionist Center-Left Opposition to the Netanyahu Governments,” in Israel Under Netanyahu: Domestic Politics and Foreign Affairs, ed. Robert Freedman, Routledge, 2019; “Israeli Prime Ministers: Transforming the Victimhood Discourse,” in The Victimhood Discourse in Contemporary Israel, Ed. Ilan Peleg. Roman & Littlefield, 2019; “Predicting Peace: The Contingent Nature of Leadership and Domestic Politics in Israel,” Democracy and Conflict Resolution: The Dilemmas of Israel’s Peacemaking eds. Hendrik Spruyt, Miriam F. Elman, and Oded Haklai. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.
Marc Bernstein, Marc is the author of Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations Between Judaism and Islam (2006), which focuses on a Judeo-Arabic account of the biblical Joseph and explores the interdependence of Muslim and Jewish traditions around shared sacred figures.
Kirsten Fermaglich, publications include: ; A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America (2018); American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965 (2006); Co-editor of The Feminine Mystique(2013).
Steven Gold, publications include: Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration (Purdue University Press, 2020); The Israeli Diaspora (Routledge/University of Washington Press 2002) ; Ethnic Economies (Emerald Publishing, 2000), co-authored with Ivan Light.
Matthew Pauly, Pauly is currently engaged on a book project entitled, “City of Children: Juvenile Poverty, Crime, and Salvation in Odessa, 1881–1940.” He is the author of Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2014).
Ronen Steinberg, publications include: The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press ,2019).
Alon Tal publications include: Gulati, Ashok, Huang, Jikun, Tal, Alon, From Food Scarcity to Surplus – Innovations in Indian, Chinese and Israeli Agriculture, ( Springer Press, 2021); Michael, K. Tal, A. Khenin, D., Lindenstrauss, G., Bukchin, S., Editors, , Climate Change, Environment and National Security, A New Front (Tel Aviv, INSS Press 2021).
Awards: Arava Award, for Contribution to Regional Cooperation and the Environment (2019); Im Tirtsu Prize by Young Judaea for Outstanding International Leadership (2017); Haiken Prize, Best Original Israeli Book on Geostrategic Topics (The Land is Full) (2017)
Kenneth Waltzer, publications include: The Rescue of Children and Youth at Buchenwald. With K. Geissler, he developed The American Identity Explorer: Immigration and Migration CD-ROM (1998, 2001).
Laura Yares’ book, Jewish Sunday schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth Century America, will be published by NYU Press on August 1, 2023. It chronicles the development of the Sunday school as a mechanism for Jewish education in America, and analyzes its distinctively religious curricula. The first Jewish Sunday school in America was founded by a pioneering group of women in 1838. It soon grew to an entire system, led by women, that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. Debates soon swirled, however, around the so-called sorry state of “feminized” American Jewish supplemental learning in Sunday schools, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was feminized, saccharine, and overly dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, this book shows this was not the reality. Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of Jewish Sunday school education.