The Posen Society of Fellows

POSEN SOCIETY OF FELLOWS – A FELLOWSHIP FOR EMERGING SCHOLARS 

The Posen Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of fourth Posen Society of Fellows, the 2016-2018 cohort of international emerging scholars working on modernization processes in Jewish history, society, and culture (see below).

The Society of Fellows Program

The fellowship grants $20,000/year for two years, and the opportunity to attend two summer seminars (in the US) led by preeminent Jewish Studies scholars, along with the preceding or subsequent cohort (for a total of 12 Fellows) to share their work, participate in professionalization workshops and attend lectures. Fellows maintain ongoing contact to support each other’s work, and submit an annual report on their progress to the foundation.

The Posen Society of Fellows is open to all with no restrictions, regardless of religion, gender, or nationality.

Criteria for Selection

1. Doctoral candidates working on a dissertation topic related to modernization processes in Jewish history, society and culture
2. Applicants must have met all of their university’s requirements to be Ph.D candidate and have an approved dissertation topic
3. Applicants who have already begun writing their dissertation must anticipates at least two years to completion
4. Applicants may not hold other concurrent fellowships and/or academic awards in excess of $10,000 per year
5. Participants must have a valid USA visa and be able to travel to the US (in August) and present and discuss their own and colleagues’ work in English.

Application Process

Application are submitted on this website, in English only, in the order listed below.  Each document should have your name (Last, First) as the heading.

• A cover letter describing your academic concentration (document name: your last name,_first name_Cover Letter)
• Curriculum vitae (including education, publications, scholarly activities, teaching experience and any other relevant work experience) (document name: your last name,_first name_CV)
• A dissertation synopsis (10-15 pages) covering the key arguments and sources (document name: your last name,_first name_Synopsis)
• A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s major advisor which addresses the significance of the applicant’s work (document name: your last name,_first name_Recommendation_Professor’s name)

Advisory Committee

Professor

Fania Oz-Salzberger (chair)

Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa

Professor

Israel Bartal

Department of Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Chair, The Historical Society of Israel

Professor

David Biale

Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Davis Humanities Institute, University of California, Davis

Professor

Naomi Seidman

Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director, the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley

Professor

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies.

Professor

Michael Brenner

Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC and Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

Posen Society of Fellows Coordinator

Rachel Biale‏

Class of 2016-2018

Doctoral Candidates

Adrien Smith, Stanford University

Yiddish Russian: A People's History of Language and Literature in the Soviet Union.

The thesis traces the role of Yiddish as the linguistic means of ushering Jews into secular modernity in the Soviet Union, while facilitating intercultural crossings from Jewish to non-Jewish cultures.

Anne Perez, University of California, Davis

Attitudes toward conversion to and from Judaism in the Zionist movement and the State of Israel.

Views of conversion from Judaism to Christianity and vice versa in the early and mid-twentieth expose the profound differences between secular and religious Zionist definitions of Who is a Jew. The research shows that Zionists did not have a clear stance on conversion and there was, in fact, much more contact between converts to Christianity and secular Zionists than we might expect. Looking at cases of intermarriage, the position of intellectuals (e.g. Yosef Haim Brenner) and secular and religious parties in the young State of Israel, this thesis elucidates Israeli secularism through a unique, under-researched prism.

Chris Silver. University of California, Los Angeles

Of Harmony and Discord: Jews and North African Music in the Twentieth Century

Advancing a novel approach, the thesis probes Jewish involvement - indeed, prominence - in the defining cultural product of twentieth-century North Africa: music. In the Maghrib, Jewish musicians, commercial agents, record label owners, and music venue proprietors came to play an outsized role in the music scene from the rise of the recording industry there at the turn of the century through Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian independence at mid-century. New light is shed both on Jewish-Muslim interconnectedness and on religious-secular spheres of interaction.

Geraldine Gudefin, Brandeis University

Navigating the Civil and Religious Worlds: Jewish Immigrants & Marital Laws in France and the United States 1881-1939

This is a study of the legal secularization of Jewish family practices in early 20th-century France and the United States. The juridical encounters of Jewish immigrants with civic courts and family law and their impact on the separation of church and state are reflected in the rise of civil marriage and divorce. These processes affected Jewish immigrants' transition to modernity, changing their sense of Jewish identity as they became new French or American citizens

Hadas Fischer-Rosenberg. Tel Aviv University

Jewish Life in a Colonial Home Front: The Yishuv and British Rule in Wartime Palestine, 1939- 1945

The thesis explores the role of the colonial (British) state and culture in the modernization of the Jews of the Yishuv. It examines popular culture and urban everyday life and practices such as domestic habits, dress and consumption, thereby uncovering the profound historical significance of war as an agent of change and modernization in the Jewish community.

Yuval Tal, Johns Hopkins University

The Ethnic Republic: The European Contours of the French Universal Idea and the Making of French Algeria, 1870-1919

Connecting modern Jewish history with questions of empire, religion, race and nationalism in France and French North Africa, the thesis analyses the political meaning of Jewish-Muslim-Christian encounters in Algeria. It touches on both Jewish and Muslim acculturation and assimilation and their interplay with the modern-secularist character of French republicanism, focusing on the recently prominent interest in the history of Empires.

Class of 2015-2017

Doctoral Candidates

Anna Elena Torres, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley

With an Unbuttoned Shirt (“Mit a Tseshpilyet Hemd”): Anarchist Modernism in Yiddish Literature

Marina Zilbergerts, PhD candidate, Stanford University

Rabbinic Textuality and the Rise of Secular Jewish Literatures in Imperial Russia

Michael Casper, PhD candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

The Creation of a National Jewish Culture in Interwar Lithuania

Noëmie Duhaut, PhD candidate, University College London

The Europeanisation of French Jews: French Jewish perceptions of Jews in Southeast Europe, 1840 to 1900

Noga Bar-Or Bing, PhD candidate, Ben Gurion University

Contemporary Hassidism: From Image to Reality. The Slonim Hassidism-test Case

Yemima Cohen Aharoni, PhD candidate, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Commemorating the Temple in Heritage Sites around
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

Class of 2014-2016

Doctoral Candidates

Ofer Dynes, PhD candidate, Harvard University

Jewish Culture and the Logic of the State: 1772-1848

Alec Burko, PhD candidate, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York

Saving Yiddish: Yiddish Studies and the Language Sciences in America, 1940-1970

Alma Heckman, PhD candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

Radical Nationalists: Moroccan Jewish Communists 1945-1975

Hadar Feldman Samet, PhD candidate, the Hebrew University

The Hymns of the Sabbatean “Ma’aminim” in their Ottoman Context

Sebastian Musch, PhD candidate, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg

Jewish Responses to the Influx of Eastern wisdom into German Thought during the Wilhelmine Era and the Weimar Republic

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, PhD candidate, Paris-Sorbonne University

The Role of Women’s Song in the Transmission of Jewish Identity in Northern Morocco

Fiction Writers

Kim Brooks

Elhanan Nir

Class of 2013-2015

Doctoral Candidates

Rivka Brot, PhD candidate, Tel Aviv University

Law and Community: Trials of Jewish Collaborators at Displaced Camps in Germany and in The State of Israel

Tally Gur, PhD candidate, Haifa University

“In-Between” — Jewish Studies in Post WWII Germany 1960–2009

Elizabeth Imber, PhD candidate, The Johns Hopkins University

Jewish Political Lives at the End of Empire: Zionism, Nationalism, and British Imperialism in India, South Africa, and Palestine,

Sarah Frances Levin, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Narrative Encounters of Muslims and Jews in Contemporary Rural Morocco

Fredrik Meiton, PhD candidate, New York University

The Electrification of Palestine, 1917-1948

Gil Rubin, PhD candidate, Columbia University

After Europe: The Transformation of Jewish Politics in World War II

Wojciech Tworek, PhD candidate, University College London

The Experience of Time in the Writings of R. Shneur Zalman of Liady

Sunny Yudkoff, PhD candidate, Harvard University

“Let it be Consumption!”: Modern Jewish Writing and the Literary Capital of Tuberculosis

Fiction Writers

Yelena Akhtiorskaya

Lea Klibanoff