List of Contributors
Rosalie Gabay Bernheim
is a final-year doctoral researcher at the School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on representations of the body in pre-modern Jewish and Christian texts, with a particular emphasis on bodily fluids such as menstruation and lactation. In addition to her primary research, Rosalie has a keen interest in the dynamics of medieval Christian-Jewish relations. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Believing in Blood: Menstruation, Menopause, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval Religious Texts,” offers a comparative analysis of how Jewish and Christian texts perceive, interpret, and value the menstrual cycle, highlighting its role as a key identity marker within both religious traditions.
Amy Fedeski
is the Alfred and Isabel Bader Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at Queen’s University. Amy completed her PhD, “What We Want To Do As Americans”: Jewish Political Activism and United States Refugee Policy, 1969–1981, at the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. She holds a BA (Hons) History and Politics from the University of Sheffield and an MPhil American History from Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.
Benjamin Fisher
is Professor of History at Towson University, and the author of Amsterdam’s People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century (2020). He researches Jewish-Christian relations and the history of Jewish engagement with the Bible, and has been a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Marissa Herzig
is an English PhD candidate at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on the nonhuman in Jewish folklore. She is a Junior Fellow at Massey College, part of the Jewish Studies collaborative programme, and her dissertation primarily examines retellings of the golem and dybbuk from the lens of disability studies, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality studies.
Yuval Katz-Wilfing
has researched and taught about rabbinical literature and Jewish life in the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the CEO of the Austrian Committee for Christian-Jewish Co-operation and is regularly lecturing and writing about inter-religious dialogue from a Jewish perspective. His main academic interests relate to the history of ideas, identity construction, soul concept, conversion, and interreligious dialogue.
Armin Lange
is Professor for Second Temple Judaism at Vienna University’s Department for Jewish Studies as well as a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research specialises in ancient Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, ancient antisemitism, and the cultural and religious histories of antisemitism. He has published widely on all of these research areas. He is the executive organiser of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Awards for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience and series editor of Baron Lectures: Studies on the Jewish Experience.
Kerstin Mayerhofer
holds an PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of Vienna. Kerstin’s PhD dissertation offered a comprehensive history of the motif of Jewish ‘male menstruation’ as a medieval entanglement of sexism and antisemitism. Kerstin has since been conducting research on pre-modern sexism, antisemitism, and racism, on the conceptualisation of the Jewish body, and on gender(s) and sexualitie(s) in Judaism. Kerstin is currently a post-doctoral assistant at the University of Vienna’s Department of Jewish Studies and series editor of Baron Lectures: Studies on the Jewish Experience (since 2021).
Michael Segal
is the Father Takeji Otsuki Professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Editor of the Hebrew University Bible Project. He is the author of The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology (2007); Dreams, Riddles, and Visions: Textual, Contextual, and Intertextual Approaches to the Book of Daniel (2016); The Twelve Prophets: The Hebrew University Bible Edition (with S. Talmon; 2024); and numerous other studies.
Lawrence H. Schiffman
is the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and Director of the Global Network for Advanced Research in Jewish Studies. His publications include From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (1991); Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (1995); Qumran and Jerusalem: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Judaism (2010) and more than 200 articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rabbinic Judaism.
Alina L. Schittenhelm
is a PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam and an ELES research fellow. Her PhD project focuses on topographies and gender in modern Mizrahi literature. In 2023, she completed a research stay at the literature department of Tel Aviv University. Alina holds a MA in Jewish Studies, and a BA in Jewish Studies and Philosophy from the University of Potsdam. Her research interests include the Hebrew language and Hebrew literature, as well as Israel and Mizrahi Studies.
Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald
is a linguist and professor emerita at the department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Bar Ilan University. She is a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an academic correspondent of the Real Academia Española, and president of the Ladino Academy in Israel. Her Research areas include modern Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). She has published several books and numerous scientific articles, edited several books, the journal Hebrew Linguistics, and is currently the editor of Ladinar.
Emanuel Tov
is the J.L. Magnes Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he has taught since 1974. He specialises in the textual criticism of Hebrew and Greek Scripture as well as in the Qumran Scrolls. He was the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project. He has written 17 books, edited more than fifty, and published more than 350 research papers. In 2023, he was awarded the Salo W. and Jeanette Baron Awards for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience.
Daniel Vorpahl
holds a PhD in Jewish Studies and works transdisciplinary in between this field and Religious Studies, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature. Currently working as a research assistant for Hebrew Bible and Its Exegesis at the University of Potsdam, their interests of research involve the literary construction of gender and its religious relatedness in (post-)biblical, rabbinic, children’s and young adult literature, and discourse analytical reception studies on biblical themes.