Laurie Katz is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning. She received her doctoral degree in 1992 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in early childhood education/early childhood special education. Her areas of experience are with young children and their families from birth to elementary grades. Within this age range, her work includes inclusion practices of children with special needs in general education settings, family/school/community relationships and emerging literacy practices. Katz’s research interests in Jewish students began with Oranim College faculty in Kiryat Tiv’on, Israel when she collaborated on designing an online course “Inclusion in Early Childhood: Practices & Experiences from American & Israeli Cultures.” This relationship extended to directing a study abroad program to Israel with Ohio State’s preservice teachers. Her research interests have extended to Jewish children’s literature. This research has developed into a book Dr. Katz wrote with multiple authors entitled Enduring Questions –Using Jewish Children’s Literature in Classrooms. Several presentations have evolved from this published work.
Saul Noam Zaritt joins Ohio State as Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language and Ashkenazic Culture. He studies modern Jewish writing and the politics of translation, examining how writers cross and inhabit boundaries between cultures. He is the author of A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Fordham, 2024) and Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody (Oxford, 2020). He is a founding editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies and recently launched Shund.org, a database of Yiddish popular fiction. Zaritt has received several awards, including a research fellowship from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a Frankel Institute Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and a Yiddish Book Center translation fellowship. He was recently awarded a Berlin Prize fellowship for fall 2025.
