Miriam Udel teaches Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Emory University. Her books include Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (2016), Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature (2020), and a critical study of Yiddish children's literature, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2025.

Project Title:
"What Do We Tell the Children?: Political Ideology and Children's Culture After the Holocaust"

Rachel Gordan is the Samuel "Bud" Shorstein fellow in American Jewish Culture at the University of Florida, where she teaches in the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. Her first book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Project Title:
"How Does One Fight Such Things? The Story of the Making of Gentleman's Agreement and the Woman Behind the Novel"

Andrew Sperling recently earned his PhD in History from American University in Washington, DC. His dissertation, “The Menace Among Us: American Jews Against Antisemitic Extremism,” follows American Jewish strategies against right-wing radicalism between the 1920s and 1960s. His additional research interests include Jewish refugee experiences and Black and Jewish politics.

Project Title:
"The Menace Among Us: American Jews Against Antisemitic Extremism"

Alexandra (Sasha) Zborovsky is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work investigates the departure of approximately 1.5 million Jews from the former Soviet Union in the post-Stalin era. Centering migrant agency, she explores how Soviet Jews re-outlined the USSR's ambivalent stance on population movement and, more specifically, emigration.

Dissertation Title:
"Should I Stay or Should I Go: Jewish Repatriation, Reunification, and Emigration from the USSR 1955 to 1995"

Jacob Morrow-Spitzer is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University, where he is writing a dissertation on American Jewish politics and citizenship between the end of slavery and the start of the New Deal. His academic work has appeared in American Jewish History and Southern Jewish History.

Dissertation Title:
"Useful Citizenship: Jewish Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1863-1933"

Noam Bizan is a History PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the transnational movement for Soviet Jewish emigration in the late Cold War. She has a BA from Brown University in History and an MA from Tel Aviv University in International Relations, Security, and Diplomacy.

Dissertation Title:
"The Transnational Campaign for Free Soviet Jewish (Refusenik) Emigration, 1964-1991"

Alona Bach is a PhD candidate in MIT's Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society, where her research focuses on interwar discourse about electric light in the New York Yiddish daily Der Morgen zhurnal. She is also an actor, playwright, translator, Yiddish instructor, and illustrator.

Dissertation Title:
"Electric Yiddishland: Technology and Culture Between the World Wars"

Alexander Maro is a PhD candidate at New York University's Department of History and Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. His research examines authoritarian and imperial projects, violence, and the Jewish world. He is currently working on his dissertation, which traces the history of anti-Jewish violence on Europe's periphery.

Dissertation Title:
"Anti-Jewish Violence on Europe's Periphery"

Gavin Beinart-Smollan is a PhD candidate in History/Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University and serves as the public historian in residence at The Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. He holds an MA in modern Jewish history from Hebrew University.

Dissertation Title:
"Fragile Ties: The Transnational Family Relationships of Lithuanian Jews, 1899-1949"

Miranda Brethour is a PhD Candidate at the City University of New York's Graduate Center writing a dissertation on rural Polish self-government and the Holocaust in the Lublin region. She received her BA (2017) and MA (2019) in History from the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her research on rural Jewish-Polish relations in German-occupied Poland has featured in The Journal of Holocaust Research, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and the Journal of Historical Geography.

Dissertation Title:
"Faithful German Servants' or 'Good Polish Citizens' Violence, the Village Head, and Daily Life in Interwar and Occupied Poland, 1918 to 1956"