Participants

Jenny Labendz is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn, NY, where she has taught since 2018. She completed her PhD at JTS in 2010 and is the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture (Oxford, 2013). Her second book, Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective, is forthcoming with Oxford in 2025.

Azzan Yadin-Israel is a Professor in the Departments of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. He has published two books on early legal midrash, a study of the biblical and theological themes in the work of Bruce Springsteen, and is the author of a series on learning foreign languages, in which volumes on German, Spanish, and Ancient Greek have been published. His latest book, Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2023 and named one of the ten best books in Medieval Studies for that year.

A.J. Berkovitz is a scholar of Jewish Antiquity. His research explores Jewish texts, traditions, and history from the formation of the Hebrew Bible until the rise of Islam. He received his Ph.D. in Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity from Princeton University and a B.A./M.A. in Jewish Studies/Bible from Yeshiva University. His first book, A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania) explores the history of Psalm reception in late ancient Judaism through the lenses of materiality, exegesis, liturgy, piety, and magic. The book received a Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Honorable Mention in the American Academy for Jewish Research’s Salo Baron Prize. He is also the co-editor of Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Routledge, 2018) and the author of over thirty academic articles and popular essays. His article, “Psalm 45 Between Abraham and Jesus: A Palestinian Rabbinic Polemic and its Shelf Life,” was awarded the 2021 CRINT Prize Essay. He was a Starr Fellow at Harvard and also Wexner Graduate Fellow.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, where she has taught since 2012. She is author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures, Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present, and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud. She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics. Her book What Animals Teach Us about Families: Kinship and Species in the Bible and Rabbinic Literature is forthcoming with University of California Press.

Erez DeGolan is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wellesley College. He holds a BA from Tel Aviv University, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Columbia.

Steven Fine is the Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and director of the YU Center for Israel Studies. A cultural historian of ancient Judaism, Fine's books include: Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge, 2005, 2010, AJS Schnitzer Book Award), The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Harvard University Press, 2016). Recently, Fine edited two volumes celebrating exhibitions which he also curated: The Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome and Back (Brill, 2021) and The Samaritans (Brill, 2022). Fine is a founding editor of IMAGES: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Art and Visual Culture and of Horeb: Studies in Rabbinic Culture.

Steven Fraade is Mark Taper Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he taught from 1979 to 2022. His most recent book is Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism: Before and After Babel, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Danny is a PhD candidate in Ancient Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He earned a BA in Greek and Latin from UCLA and a Postbaccalaureate in Classics from UCLA. His research centers on the ways the rabbis of late antiquity use Greek words in their literature with a particular focus on the creative potential of non-native speakers. Danny's dissertation argues that it is productive to understand rabbinic Greek as a xenophonic Greek dialect. Danny has taught Biblical Greek at Union Theological Seminary, Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Literature Humanities at Columbia University.

Matthew Goldstone is the Assistant Academic Dean and Assistant Professor at the Academy for Jewish Religion, where he teaches advanced courses in Talmud and Codes. He is the author of The Dangerous Duty of Rebuke: Leviticus 19:17 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation and co-author of Binding Fragments of Tractate Temurah and the Problem of Lishana Aharina. He is currently working on a book about the antitheses section of the Gospel of Matthew and tannaitic literature, and is also beginning an exploration of the nature of rewriting in the rabbinic period.

Chaya Halberstam is a Professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism in the department of Religious Studies at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on the legal cultures of Israelite and Jewish antiquity, with an emphasis on early rabbinic literature. Her work explores the role of legal discourse in shaping cultural attitudes and practices – and its limits. Her first book, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature, came out in 2010 and received the Salo Baron prize for best first book in Jewish Studies. Her most recent book, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice came out in 2024 with Oxford University Press.

Rabbi Dr. Richard Hidary is a professor of Judaic Studies at Yeshiva University and a rabbi at Sephardic Synagogue. He is the author of Dispute for the Sake of Heaven: Legal Pluralism in the Talmud (Brown University Press, 2010) and Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Currently, he is writing a literary and philosophical commentary on Talmudic discussions of Jewish holidays. His Daf Yomi classes are accessible at YouTube.com/rhidary and he also runs the websites teachtorah.org, pizmonim.org, and rabbinics.org.

Joanna Homrighausen (PhD, Religion, Duke University) writes and teaches on sacred words, sacred texts, and how individuals and communities reproduce, ritualize, and revere them through lettering arts and scribal crafts. Her recent dissertation, Writing Esther, unpacks the materiality of the Esther scroll in Judaism and shows how Jews have used the written artifact to think through pivotal theological questions raised by the Book of Esther. She currently teaches Biblical Hebrew and Judaic Studies at the College of William & Mary.

Madalina Joubert is Professor of Jewish Studies at INALCO in Paris, France, where she taught since 2011 Bible, Rabbinic Literature and Ancient History. She conducts research applying historical anthropology questioning and method. Her last book, L'idée de nature chez les rabbins antiques. Eléments d'anthropologie historique, Peeters, 2024, analyses the idea of nature in rabbinic literature through the lens of Descola's ontological typology. Also, her recently published article, "Ritual Objects for the Feast of Sukkot: Theoretical Analysis of the Talmudic Prescriptions and Some of their Ethnographical Achievements in the Balkans", illustrates her new research project focusing on the ontology of objects in Judaism (https://balcanica.rs/index.php/journal/article/view/1384/1302).

Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law. She is the editor, along with Marjorie Lehman, of Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens and Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination. Her second monograph, on Bavli Sotah, is forthcoming from Brandeis University Press.

Eva Kiesele serves as Golda Och Visiting Assistant Professor in Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures at JTS. She completed her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin in 2024, and is working on her first book, The Event of Language: Rabbinic Conceptions of Language in Late Antiquity.

Tzipporah Machlah Klapper is a fourth-year PhD Student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She previously earned an MA in Jewish Studies from the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BA in English Literature from The City College of New York (CCNY).

Aaron Koller is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Yeshiva University. Author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought, among other books, Koller has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University and held fellowships at Cambridge, Oxford, the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, and the Hartman Institute. He is currently working on a cultural history of the alphabet around the world.

Marjorie Lehman is Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Area Chair of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures. Her books include: The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma (Brandeis University Press, 2022). Along with Jane Kanarek she has co-edited two books, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization at Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How It Happens (Academic Studies Press, 2017). She is also the co-director of the digital humanities project in Jewish Studies called Footprints: Jewish Books in Time and Place (http://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/). Footprints tracks the global movement of copies of Jewish books since the inception of print. She co-directs the Jewish Librarianship Certificate Program, a joint endeavor between the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Association of Jewish Libraries.

Lennart Lehmhaus is an assistant professor at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research and teaching interests include ancient Jewish cultures and literatures, mainly rabbinic and talmudic texts; premodern medicine, knowledge, and sciences; and trajectories of Jewish traditions, motifs, and customs into contemporary Jewish and Israeli culture. He is founding editor of the series ASK—Ancient Cultures of Sciences and Knowledge (Mohr Siebeck) and coordinator of the collaborative research network “Between Encyclopaedia and Epitome—Talmudic Strategies of Knowledge-Making in the Context of Ancient Medicine and Sciences” (Tübingen University, University College London, Free University, Berlin).

Jesse Mirotznik is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from Harvard University, where he studied the Hebrew Bible and its reception in ancient Jewish literature. His research focuses on how ancient Israelites and their Jewish successors imagined other religions. His book on this topic is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Eva Mroczek is Associate Professor of Classics and Religious Studies and the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (OUP 2016), discussed how early Jews understood their own sacred texts before the Bible was conceptualized as a closed corpus. Her second book, Tales from the Cave: Losing and Finding the Biblical Past, is a study of ancient and modern manuscript discovery narratives as a religious genre.

Dr. Moshe Pinchuk`s areas of interest and research are: Talmud Yerushalmi and Comparative anthropology, in particular comparisons between Biblical and Rabbinic stories with parallels in Greek Mythology. Pinchuk has created an online Talmud Yerushalmi reference database which has gained recognition as a powerful and essential research tool. He is head of the Jewish Heritage center at Netanya Academic College; Adjunct lecturer at Bar-Ilan University; Head advisor to the Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin Museum in Lublin; Board member at Ganzach – Kiddush Hashem and has served as member of the regulatory and innovation team at MedyMatch Inc (Now MaxQ-AI).

Isaac Roszler is a doctoral candidate in the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University focusing on Talmud and Rabbinic literature. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Isaac received a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His current research focuses on the development of narratives in the Babylonian Talmud.

Dr. Gal Sela is a literature scholar focusing on the intersections of religious practices and mysticism in rabbinic literature. Her comparative research explores the figure of the holy man in both monastic and rabbinic traditions, as well as ascetic and theurgic practices in Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship between magic and religion. Dr. Sela is a research fellow at Beyond Canon: Centre for Advanced Study, Universität Regensburg, where she contributes to studying para-canonical religious texts.

Shira Shmidman is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University, Israel. She completed her PhD at Bar Ilan University in 2020, and her research focuses on the development of conceptual thinking in Rabbinic literature, as well as the textual traditions of the Tosefta.

Moshe Shoshan teaches Rabbinic literature and general narrative studies in the Department of the Literature of the Jewish People. He is the author of Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (Oxford, 2012) and numerous other studies on stories in rabbinic literature and the relationship between Halakhah and aggadah. His current work focuses the "Yavne Cycle " of narratives and traditions in rabbinic literature.

Jessica Spencer is a doctoral student of religion at Columbia University. Her work focuses on questions of relationship, authority and care in the Babylonian Talmud. She was awarded the 2023 Whizin Prize in Jewish Ethics for her essay “So the Children Should Ask: a Model of Repair.” Jessica has rabbinic ordination from Hebrew College.

Mira Beth Wasserman teaches rabbinic literature at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she directs the Center for Jewish Ethics and is serving as interim dean. She is the author of Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities. A co-edited volume on Modern Jewish Ethics is forthcoming from the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. Her interest in slavery in rabbinic sources and scholarship grew out of her interest in race, identity, and Jewish ethics.

Holger Zellentin is a scholar of Late Antiquity, with a focus on Talmudic and Qur’anic studies. He combines literary, legal and historical approaches in order to understand shared and diverging patterns within Jewish, Christian and early Islamic cultural traditions. He has received funding from the European Research Council, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2014) as well as an ERC Consolidator Grant, The Quran as a Source for Late Antiquity (2020-2025). He currently serves as the chair of the board of the International Qur’anic Studies Association, and has previously served on the steering committee of the British Association for Jewish Studies. His most recent monograph is Law Beyond Israel: From the Bible to the Qur'an (OUP, 2022). In 2019, he joined the University of Tübingen.

Shlomo Zuckier is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After completing his PhD in Religious Studies at Yale University, Shlomo was a Flegg Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University’s Jewish Studies Department and a Research Fellow in Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. His Theologies of Sacrifice and Atonement in Ancient Judaism is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.