Faculty news
Naomi Brenner, Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, received the 2025 Resnick Fellowship from the National Library of Israel and spent summer 2025 in residence at the National Library in Jerusalem. While there, she gave a public lecture on her research on early twentieth-century Hebrew popular fiction as part of an international workshop on New Directions in the Study of the Hebrew Book. She also published “Sabina vs. Aviva: Translation and Popular Fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew” in Yod: Revue des études hébraïques et juives 25, available open access online. Brenner currently serves as the Modern Jewish Studies book review editor for AJS Review and chaired the Hebrew Forum Executive Committee at the Modern Languages Association in 2025. She also participated in the collaborative project Multi-ethnic Cultural Reproductions in the Middle East, supported by Ohio State’s Global Arts and Humanities Cross-Disciplinary Research Exchange.
Harriet Fertik, (Associate Professor in the Department of Classics), Ben Folit-Weinberg (Associate Professor, Classics) and Paul Reitter (Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures) established a new Humanities Institute-funded working group, "Metaphors of Reception, Reception as a Metaphor" and won a College of Arts and Sciences grant to host a major international conference in 2026.
Ben Folit-Weinberg, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, co-authored an article on the German-Jewish thinker Hans Jonas, "Hans Jonas and Sophocles on the Ethics of the Anthropocene," in Contemporary Political Theory, and a review of The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human by Julia Kindt (Classical World, vol. 118 no. 3, 2025, p. 317-318). Along with fellow Melton members Harriet Fertik and Paul Reitter, he co-organized the "Metaphors of Reception, Reception as a Metaphor" working group and international conference (May 4-5, 2026) funded by an Arts & Humanities Conference Grant from Ohio State. He presented invited papers at the University of Chicago and Oxford University, and at conferences at the University of Coimbra and the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He was also awarded fellowships from Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC) and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung.
Robin Judd, Professor in the Department of History, published “‘The Supreme Function(s) of Life:’ Love, Longing, and Grief in Postwar Encounter Narratives” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a book review of Deborah Dwork's Saints and Liars in The American Historical Review. She presented her work at two conferences: Beyond Camps and Forced Labour and Rethinking Jewish Leadership, delivered four invited lectures, and chaired a panel at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference. In addition to serving as the Director of the Hoffman Leaders and Leadership Fellowship Program, she also served on several different departmental and center committees. Outside of Ohio State, she served as the chair of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute (US), the chair of the Holocaust and Genocide Memorialization and Education Commission for the State of Ohio, and on the boards of OSU Hillel, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Leo Baeck Institute. She was named a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the 2026–2027 academic year.
Laurie Katz, Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, has been studying how early childhood educators document (i.e. from Reggio Emilia approach in Italy) their children’s performance as well as visiting Reggio-inspired preschools in Chicago, IL and Portland, Oregon, during her 2025–2026 sabbatical leave. Another research focus has been studying adolescent Holocaust diaries. She presented her work at the 2025 National Council of Teachers of English in Denver, Colorado. She also traveled to Melbourne, Australia and met with early childhood education faculty from Monash University where she gave an invited talk “Teacher Change: From Skills-based to Problem-solving Strategies with Early Childhood Educators.” She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist award from the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and World and is making plans to research and/or assist with an educational program abroad.
Hannah Kosstrin, Associate Professor in the Department of Dance and Director of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, published her second monograph Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations (Oxford University Press, 2026). She also presented her work at conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies, Dance Studies Association, and American Jewish Historical Society, published a book review in Theatre Survey, and continued her service on the Association for Jewish Studies Board of Directors and on the editorial boards of Dance Research Journal, Journal of Jewish Identities, and the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
Gabriella Modan, Professor in the Department of English, conducted fieldwork among different generations of Jews in Amsterdam about their use of and attitudes towards Yiddish words in the Amsterdam dialect. She presented her work at conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies (Washington, DC), American Anthropological Association (New Orleans, LA), and International Pragmatics Association (Brisbane, Australia). Read more about this project in the section about Dr. Modan's research grant on the next page.
James Moore, Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, launched the Digital Editions of Aramaic and Phoenician Sources (DEAPS), serving as the project’s creator and technical director to provide web-based scholarly editions of Northwest Semitic texts. He published the articles “A Supposed Diaspora Community at Elephantine or How the Persians Reinvented Judean-Ness,” in Judeans in the Land of the Nile: Papers on Achaemenid Egypt, Elephantine, and Hebrew Bible Texts Presented in Copenhagen, August 19-20, 2024, edited by K. Ziemba and F. Poulsen, 63–74, Zaphon, 2026, and “The Legality of Persian Period Memoranda,” in The Dynamics of Early Judaean Law: Studies in the Diversity of Ancient Social and Communal Legislation, edited by S. Jacobs, BZAW 504, 153–180, De Gruyter, 2025.
Suzanne Silver, Professor in the Department of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Art, had a solo exhibition entitled Songs of Joy, Songs of Sorrow at The Garage Gallery in Jackson Heights, NYC in May 2025. This spring (April 2026), her video work, Stitches, with score by Sivan Silver-Swartz, screened at Reel Rhythms (Jazz Meets Experimental Film), Wexner Center for the Arts. Group shows in 2025 include Exposition Collective, TAON, Ivry-sur Seine, France (curated by Oskar Fougeirol); Bien à Vous, MADE Anywhere (MORE Projects), Fondation Fiminco, Romainville, France; TOOMANYRECORDS Disegni a 33 giri, Milano Drawing Week (curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli and More Projects); and Folds, Mariani Gallery, University of Northern Colorado, (curated by Laura Larson and Suzanne Silver with thematic works by the curators and 28 other artists).
Adena Tanenbaum, Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, presented a paper entitled “Ha Ram Be Mazal: The Reception and Veneration of Maimonides in Yemen” at the Translations and Receptions of Maimonides conference at New York University in June 2025. In Autumn 2025, Tanenbaum joined the editorial board of the Journal of Maimonidean Studies. Autumn 2025 also marked the publication of Tanenbaum’s monograph, Beguiling Guidance: Zechariah Alḍāhirī’s Sefer Hamusar, a Hebrew Maqāma from Sixteenth Century Yemen (Leiden: Brill, 2026). In connection with the book’s release, Tanenbaum recorded an hour-long episode of The Podcast of Jewish Ideas, released in December 2025. Tanenbaum also co-edited Mezukak Shivatayim: Studies in Jewish Life and Literature in Honor of Bernard Septimus, edited by Edward Breuer, Elisha Russ Fishbane, and Adena Tanenbaum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and Harvard University Press, 2026). In spring 2026, Tanenbaum presented the new monograph at the Ohio Jewish Studies Workshop and participated in the “Written in Scarlet and Gray: Faculty Author Showcase” at The Ohio State University.
Ori Yehudai, Saul and Sonia Schottenstein Chair in Israel Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History, assumed a new role as co-editor of the Journal of Israeli History. He was selected to be a 2026 Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative Fellow with the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. The Curriculum Initiative creates accessible, primary-source-based teaching modules around core topics in Jewish Studies. He will use the fellowship to create a module on the History of Zionism. Professor Yehudai continued working on his research project on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the 1970s. As part of this project, he published an article in the journal American Jewish History titled “Between Power and Helplessness: American Jews and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in the 1970s,” and presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies. He delivered community talks on his research and on Israeli affairs in Alexandria, Delaware, and Worthington, Ohio, and an interview with WOSU NPR. Contributions to the field also included peer review reports for three books and two articles for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Saul Zaritt, Yiddish Program Director and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, was the Charles Haimoff Fellow in German Studies at the American Academy in Berlin during the 2025 fall semester.