Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by exploring them within their broader historical, geographic, and religious contexts, both Islamic and Christian. Among other works, Fishman has authored Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition Medieval Jewish Cultures (2011).

Project Title:
"Materiality in Medieval Jewish Thought and Experience"

Andrew Kotick is a historian of comic and cartoon media, humor and laughter, mass media, politics, and popular culture in Modern Europe. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. He earned his PhD in History from the City University of New York and is currently writing his first monograph, titled The Humoring of Modern Life: Laughter and Politics in the Cartoon Press of Turn-of-the-Century Paris (forthcoming, The Ohio State University Press), which addresses the impact of antisemitism on French culture.

Project Title:
"Jewish Identity and the Invention of French Bande Dessinée"

Maytal Mark is a doctoral candidate at New York University in the joint program between Hebrew/Judaic Studies and History. She holds a BA in History from Northwestern University and an MA in Modern Middle East History from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her current research focuses on twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq writing about the "Jewish Question" in French and Arabic. Her research interests include intellectual history, minority and diaspora politics, the history of Zionism, and nationalism.

Project Title:
"Localizing the 'Jewish Question': Middle Eastern intellectuals, Zionist politics, and Jewish diaspora before 1948"

Shiyong Lu is a joint PhD Candidate in the History/Hebrew and Judaic Studies Departments at New York University. She is a 2024-25 Mellon Predoctoral Awardee in Women’s and Public History at the New York Historical Society, where she is working on an installation about kosher Chinese food. She has presented her research for both academic and public audiences.

Project Title:
"’We Offer Chicken Chop Suey on Sundays:’ How Chinese Food Purveyors Encountered Jews in Twentieth-Century America"

Jonathan Green is a PhD candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, specializing in modern Jewish intellectual history, with a focus on the 18th century. He has presented papers at the Association for Jewish Studies, World Congress of Philosophy, and the Center for Jewish History. Jonathan has received multiple research fellowships, a New York University Outstanding Teaching Award, and has a forthcoming article in the Review of Metaphysics.

Project Title:
"Moses Mendelssohn's Dialectical Enlightenment: The Problem of Luxury in Ethics and Politics"

Andrew J. Shapiro is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Critical Theory, and Gender Studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. His research investigates the structural and psychic forces that perpetuate and counteract systemic inequalities. His recent article in Men and Masculinities (2022, vol. 25), "On Power's Doorstep," explores themes of complicity and conformism fleshed out further in his current dissertation research. He teaches the sociology of race, class, gender, and sexuality at Hunter College.

Project Title:
"Liminality and Western Conformity in Modern Jewish Politics"

Martin Saps is a writer, researcher, and urbanist focusing on culture and community in contemporary cities. His PhD project in Urban Studies at King’s College London studies the politics of liberalism, Zionism, and multiculturalism in in London’s and New York’s Hasidic Jewish communities. He also studies the contemporary politics of religion, specifically Muslim-Jewish relations in the West. Having worked across journalism, technology, marketing, and academia, Martin's work brings an interdisciplinary critical lens to social issues in cities.

Project Title:
"Radical Traditionalism: Religion and the Politics of Multiculturalism in London and New York"

Hadas Binyamini is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History at New York University, where she researches and teaches American and Jewish history. Her work explores conservative and right-wing movements, Cold War Jewish politics, and the role of race, religion, and state power in daily life. Before her doctoral studies, she worked in Jewish museums and earned an MA in Archives and Records Management at the University of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in +972 Magazine, Jewish Currents, and Public Books.

Project Title:
"Torah-True Urbanism: Orthodox Jews in New York and American Conservatism from 1964 to 1991"

Carol Bakhos is Robert E. Archer Chair in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Los Angeles and director of the Center for the Study of Religion. Her most recent publications include Making History: Studies in Rabbinic History, Literature, and Culture in Honor of Richard L. Kalmin (Brown Judaica Series, 2024), co-edited with Alyssa M. Gray, and Emerging Judaism, the second of the ten-volume Posen Jewish Anthology of Culture and Civilization (Yale University Press, 2025).

Project Title:
"Jewish Studies and the Non-Jewish Question"

Dr. Andrew Fogel is a historian of popular culture whose research and writing explores the place of superheroes in the everyday world and the power they hold over the American imagination for both kids and adults. He completed his PhD at Purdue University and is turning his dissertation on Superman’s real-world impact into a series of books. His public-facing articles have appeared in Batman On Film, Tropics of Meta, and the Skirball Cultural Center.

Project Title:
"Playing WASP"

Lisa Kron is a playwright/librettist/performer best known for writing the book and lyrics for the musical Fun Home which won five Tony Awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other plays include In The Wake, Well, and the Obie Award-winning 2.5 Minute Ride. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Sundance, and MacDowell fellowships, the Creative Capital Award, Doris Duke Performing Artists Award, Cal Arts/Alpert Award, and the Kleban Prize for libretto writing.

Project Title:
"A Music/Theater Adaptation of I.B. Singer’s Short Story ‘Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy’"

Sarah Nimführ is a Hertha Firnberg Fellow at the Department of Cultures Studies at the University of Arts Linz. She holds a PhD in European Ethnology from the University of Vienna. Her dissertation was awarded by the Austrian Federal President in 2019. She teaches, researches, and publishes on collaborative, decolonial knowledge production, negotiations of belonging in the context of forced migration as well as cemetery culture and transgenerational memory work of the Jewish diaspora in the Spanish Caribbean.

Project Title:
"Sharing Memories: Transgenerational Memory Work of Jewish Exile in Sosúa"