Notes on Contributors
Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman
is a world-renowned teacher and lecturer, poet, artist, author of twelve books, and creator of the Giro Vocal Motion vocal technique. Her academy, L’accademia per lo Sviluppo della Voce, Torah e Kabalah, is based in Reggio Calabria, Italy. Miriam is the recipient of many awards in the field of vocal art and poetry, and an active participant in numerous philanthropic and interfaith initiatives.
Yaron Catane
is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. The former director of the Conversion Authority of Israel and the legal counsel to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, Yaron was part of the inaugural class of the ICLRS Religion and the Rule of Law program at Oxford, a visiting researcher at the NYU Law School, and has spoken at many international conferences. He holds an LLM in Law and an MA in Public Policy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has been ordained as a Rabbi by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
Magdalena Dziaczkowska
is a PhD fellow in the Center for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her academic interests focus on Jewish-Catholic relations before and after the Shoah. She holds an MA in Jewish Civilizations from the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg and an MA in History of Art from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. Her professional experience includes informal education on the Jewish heritage in Poland. She has been involved in interreligious dialogue through the biannual Emerging Leadership Jewish-Catholic Conferences.
Nada Banjanin Đuričić
is a teacher with eighteen years of experience—mainly with teenage learners—practicing methods of active learning, interactive teaching, and critical thinking. She graduated from the Sociology Department at the University of Belgrade, specializing in the study of child abuse and gender-based violence. She is a member of the Victimology Society of Serbia, the Centre for Public History, and the Association of Civic Education Teachers. She has organized many lectures and programs on the topic of the genocide of the Serbian Jews, as well as several commemorations on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Carolina Grinsztajn Frimer
is a graduate of the MA program at the Swiss Center for Conflict Research, Management and Resolution at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and the modern state, political Islam, and religion in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Johannes Heuman
is an Associate Professor of History at Jönköping University in Sweden, and is also affiliated with the Centre Alberto-Benveniste in Paris. He specializes in modern French history, and his research interests include Holocaust memory, social movements in France, and minority politics. He is the author of The Holocaust and French Historical Culture, 1945–65, and serves as editor of the Swedish magazine Tidskriften Respons, which focuses on new books within the humanities and social sciences.
Rabbi Raanan Mallek
is a Rabbi ordained by the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem (2018). He holds a Master in Jewish Law (Halakhah) and is interested in fostering interreligious scholarship. His recent work includes serving as special event coordinator for the Tantur Ecumenical Institute (where he helped to found Praying Together in Jerusalem and Tuesdays at Tantur), as a board member of Rabbis for Human Rights, and as a dialogue facilitator for Hands of Peace starting in 2016. Raanan is currently the Rabbi of a village in the Galilee called Shorashim, and is a coordinator for the Israeli Jewish Council for Interreligious Relations. He continues to teach people of different backgrounds about Judaism.
Ifat Maoz
is a full professor and Head of the Department of Communication and Director of the Swiss Center and MA and Doctoral Program for Conflict Research, Management and Resolution. Prof. Maoz studies psychological and media-influenced aspects of conflict, conflict resolution, and intergroup relations, in particular the dynamics of intergroup contact and dialogue. Her more than 80 publications on these topics include articles on cognitive processing of social and political information, the dynamics of intergroup encounters in conflict, the perceptual moral and cognitive aspects of conflict, peace and reconciliation, the study of audience responses, and cognitive biases in conflict.
Adele Valeria Messina
is the recipient of a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Calabria, a member of the Central European History Society, and of the Association for Jewish Studies. Her research interests include European history in the 20th century with a special focus on the history of the Holocaust, the history of post-Holocaust sociology, and postwar intellectual history. Her recent research has examined internet-based antisemitism and the intersection of digital humanities and Holocaust studies. She is the author of American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017).
Yiftach Ron
is a lecturer at the Hebrew University and the Kibbutzim College in Israel. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University. His work examines processes of intergroup communication, power relations, discourse, narratives and life stories in conflicted societies, media and psychology-related aspects of intergroup conflict, peace education, dialogue, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
Marta Simó Sànchez
is the recipient of a PhD in Sociology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2018), with the thesis La memòria de l’Holocaust a l’Estat Espanyol. Des d’una perspectiva sociològica i una perspectiva històrica (Memory of the Holocaust in Spain. From a Sociological Perspective and a Historical Perspective). She obtained her Masters in Central and Eastern European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Poland. Since 2012 Simó has worked as a researcher in the Research Group of Sociology and Religious Studies (ISOR) at the same university. From 2013 to 2016 she was a member of the Multilingual Expert Team for the Education Research Project of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Simona Stillitano
is a scholar and teacher of the Catholic religion and a member of the Research Group on Socio-Religious Information (GRIS). She received her Master’s degree in Religious Sciences from the Higher Institute of Religious Studies (ISSR) in Reggio Calabria in 2011. Her research interests focus on the study of the Nazi esotericism. She contributes regularly to the online newspaper In Terris.
Marijana Stojčić
is a sociologist, researcher, feminist, and peace activist. Her areas of interest include the culture of remembrance and politics of education, identity policies, the history of feminism and social movements. Her work focuses on the social functions of remembrance and forgetting, their connection with various forms of historical and contemporary violence, identity issues and policies and the ways in which they are connected personally and publicly, individually and socially. She focuses especially on the Yugoslav heritage, current remembrance policies, the function they serve today and their connections with the broader European and global context. She is a contributor to the Women’s Information and Documentation Centre in Belgrade, and to the Serbian Anti-Fascist Alliance.
Leora Tec
is a writer, speaker, and the founder and director of Bridge To Poland, an organization which seeks to educate people about Jewish history in Poland (with an emphasis on how the Jews of Poland are being remembered by non-Jewish Poles today). Leora is a partner of Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN in Lublin, Poland, and a Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellow at Wellesley College (2018–2019). Her current projects include: a video archive of conversations with non-Jewish rescuers of memory in Poland (in partnership with Brama Grodzka); a presentation/performance called Remembrance of Things Past: Keeping the Stories of Jewish Poland Alive; a memoir about her relationship to Poland. Leora holds a BA from Wellesley College and a JD/LLM in foreign and international law from Duke University School of Law. She enjoys reading, writing, learning languages, and doing improvisational comedy.
Valentina Zecca
is currently collaborating with the University of Calabria, teaching the Arabic language at the Linguistic Center and participating in the Erasmus Plus ENABLE project Self-Learning for Arab Refugee Children. She received her PhD in History of Islamic Countries in 2015 from the University of Calabria with a research focus on the modern Syrian State. Her research interests include Islamic thought, contemporary history of the Middle East, and Arabic language pedagogy.
Tian Zhang
is a professor of English at The Central China Normal University in Wuhan, Hubei, where she teaches courses on British and American literature. She was a 2014–15 visiting scholar of English at Harvard University. Her current academic research focuses on Jewish American literature, Holocaust literature and cultural studies. Her monograph Urban Imagination and Jewish Culture: Saul Bellow’s Urban Fiction (Shanghai People’s Publishing House) is forthcoming in 2019. She has published essays in journals such as Foreign Literature Studies, Forum for World Literature Studies, and CLC WEB. She is the recipient of awards and scholarships from the China National Fund for Social Sciences and Philosophy, the Chinese Scholarship Council, the Hubei Provincial Ministry of Education, the Hubei Foreign Literature Association, and the Central China Normal University.