Yael Aronoff will be participating in the 41st Annual Conference of the Association of Israel Studies (AIS) at Haifa University, Israel, July 6-9, 2025, where she will present research on opposition parties to the current government, and on the political psychology of Benjamin Netanyahu. She will also participate in a roundtable on US-Israeli relations in the wake of 7 October and in the second Trump Administration. Dr. Aronoff serves on the conference program committee and is on the Board of the AIS. She has also been invited by Ghumrawi to participate in a panel discussion at Florida International University on the importance of Jerusalem to the monotheistic religions. Dr. Aronoff will join Dr. Saliba Sarsar and Dr. Mohammad Ghumrawi on that panel, as well as for a book/panel discussion at Coral Gables Congregational Church, “Jerusalem: Reflections of a Sacred Space” on February 2nd. On campus, Dr. Aronoff continues to educate about antisemitism through her participation in the four-part series “Conversations on Antisemitism and Islamophobia” with colleagues Dr. Kirsten Fermaglich, Dr. Mohammad Khalil, Dr. Amy Simon, Dr. Morgan Shipley, Ralph Johnson from the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and with the assistance of Ariana Mentzel. The “Conversations” are scheduled for this Spring semester.
Andreas Bouroutis has had several publications at the end of 2024 and expected in 2025. They include “Israelite members of the Greek Parliament,” V. Gounaris (eds.), Macedonia in the Greek Parliament, Political Discourse and Representation, Museum of the Macedonian Struggle and the Hellenic Parliament Foundation, Athens 2024; “The Abraham Accords and the Palestinian issue”, Journal of the Centre of Middle East Policy, 2 (2024), Panteion University, Athens; “The Final Solution in Corfu: Implementation and Coordination of Various Agencies,” Yad Vashem Studies, 52:2 (2024), Jerusalem, Israel; “The Macedonian Front: An Artist-Soldier’s Experience of War”, in Balkanistica, volume 38 (2025), Mississippi, USA; and with the immense support of the MSU library, The Arab Israeli Conflict: History, Diplomacy and Politics is expected to be published in Greece by June 2025 (Alexandria publications, Athens).
Kirsten Fermaglich will be working this semester to develop a companion exhibit at the Broad Museum, “Americans and the Holocaust: A Michigan Perspective,” with help from a History undergraduate research assistant, Harrison Brown, in addition to bringing the exhibit “Americans and the Holocaust” to the Library of Michigan, and organizing programs to accompany the exhibit. Dr. Fermaglich is also teaching a HST 480 senior seminar this semester, in which students will construct their own digital exhibit to accompany both the Broad and the Library of Michigan exhibits. The Broad exhibit and student exhibits will be displayed at the end of the semester. Dr. Fermaglich will also present her current research on antisemitism and the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 at a colloquium at Yale University this April.
Matthew Handelman co-edited the 10th volume Franz Rosenzweig Yearbook with Christian Wiese (Frankfurt). This edition of the Yearbook, entitled Bildung, Speech Thinking, Translation, will be published January 2025.
Noah Kaye has two works related to ancient Judaism and Jewish history of the Hellenistic, Roman – or 2nd Temple period. A chapter on kingship in the Hellenistic world that is to be published in January 2025 is based around Jewish reactions to changes in the nature of kingship, in Alexandria and Letter of Aristeas in Judea (Book of Daniel, Heliodoros Stele from Tel Maresha): “The Twilight of Charisma: Hellenistic Kingship in Transition,” in The Same but Different? Monarchical Representation in the Hellenistic World: Between Assimilation and Difference (Steiner, Stuttgart). He was awarded an Ada Weintraub Finifter Scholarship for the Study of Romaniote Jews in 2024 by the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at MSU, which helped him finish an article coming out in early 2025, in the T&T Clark Handbook to Hellenistic Jewish Literature in Greek (Bloomsbury, London). His article is called “Jewish Inscriptions.” It is a synthesis of our knowledge of the 3–4,000 known Jewish inscriptions in Greek, and an investigation of a particular case of Greek as a Jewish language in a late Roman synagogue in Akmoneia (Ahat, Turkey).
Aliza Lambert’s article, coauthored with Conley, A. and Fulton, C, “Enhancing Religious and Spiritual Inclusion,” is forthcoming in the journal Inclusion, 13(1) in 2025.
Amy Simon’s book, Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries: Encountering Perpetrators and Questioning Humanity (Routledge, 2023), was released in paperback on December 19, 2024. In April 2025, Dr. Simon will be giving a public lecture and two teacher training workshops at the University of South Alabama. In June and July, she will co-lead (with Dr. Sherman Garnett) a new MSU study abroad trip to Poland “The Jews of Poland, 1917-1945.”
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), Making Climate Tech Work, Policies that Drive Innovation (Washington, Island Press, 2024).
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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)
Amy Simon, publications include: Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries: Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity (2024).
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.