Prof. Raanan Rein

Prof. Raanan Rein is the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History and former Vice President of Tel Aviv University. Rein is the author and editor of more than forty books and well over a hundred articles in academic journals and edited volumes. He is a member of Argentina’s National Academy of History, and former President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). The Argentine government awarded him the title of Commander in the Order of the Liberator San Martin for his contribution to Argentine culture. The Spanish King awarded him the title of Commander in the Order of the Civil Merit. In 2016 he won the Reimar Lüst Award (co-sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation).

Prof. Avriel Bar-Levav of the Open University of Israel is head of Judaic Studies at the department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies, and head of the Center for the Study of Relationships between Jews, Christians, Muslims. He is co-editor of Zutot: Perspecives on Jewish Culture (Brill). He has published on Jewish intellectual history in the early modern period, Jewish attitudes towards death, history of the Jewish book, magic, and egodocuments. Among the books he co-edited:  The Path of the Book: Tribute to Ze’ev Gries (Carmel, 2021); Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 31 (2020): Textual Transmission in Modern Jewish Culture; Paths to Modernity: A Tribute to Yosef Kaplan (Zalman Sahzar Center, 2018); Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities (De Gruyter, 2014).

He is the recipient of the 2020 Am Ve-Olam prize for an outstanding paper in history, for his paper “Textual Intimacy and the Bond of Reading between The Expulsion from Spain and Amsterdam”.

Claude B. Stuczynski is an Associate Professor at the Department of General History (Bar-Ilan University), three times fellow at The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and past board member of the Center for the Study of Conversions and Interreligious Encounters (CSOC) at Ben-Gurion University. Having written a number of Contributions in various languages, his two main fields of research are: The Portuguese Converso phenomenon and the first encounters between Europeans and Amerindians, including: early modern racism and anti-Converso antisemitism. He is mainly interested in the relationship between religion and politics in Medieval and Early Modern periods. Actually he prepares a study of the theological-political dimension of the Converso phenomenon (what he calls: “The Marrano Paulinian Moment”).

Among his contributions are the following: The New Christians in Portugal in the XXth Century (Jerusalem: The Israeli Historical Society, 2005), contributing in Adriano Prosperi and John Tedeschi’s Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2010). He is co-editor with David Graizbord of a special issue of the Journal “Jewish History” dedicated to Early Modern Portuguese New Christian Identities (2011); edited a special number of the Journal of Levantine Studies vol. 6 (2016), on the Political Dimensions of the Converso Phenomenon; edited with Bruno Feitler, Portuguese, Jews, New Christians and New Jews: Roberto Bachmann Jubilee Volume, Leiden: Brill, 2018; and with Michael Heyd & Avriel Bar-Levav (eds.), Paths to Modernity: A Tribute to Yosef Kaplan, Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2019; as guest editor of a special number of the Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas n. 20 (2019) on Late Medieval and Early Modern Judeo-Christianity; as author and guest  editor a special number of the Journal of Jesuit Studies on Jesuits and Conversos (2021) and is preparing a book on Converso Apologetics.   

Micha J. Perry (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 2008) is a senior lecturer of medieval Jewish history at the department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. His book: Tradition and Transformation: Knowledge Transmission among Medieval Jews was published in Hebrew, in 2010; His second book was published by Routledge in 2019 under the title: Eldad’s Travels: from the lost Tribes to the Present. He was  the ‘Alan M. Stroock’ Fellow for Advanced Research at Harvard University (2009); and the ‘Jacob & Hilda Blaustein’ Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2010-2011). He won the Fulbright Fellowship (2008); as well as the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust (2011-2012). During 2018-2019, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Yale‘s Judaic Studies Program and History Department.

His main areas of Research are: Medieval Jewish History; Histoire des Mentalités; Sociology of knowledge; Medieval Jewish Material Culture; Jewish-Christian relations in Medieval Europe; and the ties between Jews in the East (under Islam and Byzantium) and Jews in the West during the Middle Ages.

Born and raised in Paris in a post-68 Jewish family, Dr. Cedric Cohen Skalli had studied and worked in academic institutions in several countries, including France, Germany, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the United States. Dr. Cohen Skalli’s first specialization was modern German philosophy (from Kant to Heidegger), especially its interpretation at the hands of French philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida (his esteemed professor). This initial focus continues to constitute the intellectual background of his research and he continues to actively study and translate texts in the field of German speaking thought – focusing primarily on the German-Jewish tradition and its broader political and theological significance as well as the history and philosophy of translation. Dr. Cohen Skalli was recently appointed director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. During his Ph.D. studies (1998-2004), he studied the relationship of Jewish thinkers to Renaissance Humanism – focusing specifically on the work of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508). After completing my dissertation, Dr. Cohen Skalli wrote three books and several articles on various aspects of Jewish thought and literature during the Renaissance. His intellectual biography of Isaac Abravanel was published in the prestigious “the great men of the Jewish people” series of the Zalman Shazar Center and recently translated and augmented for The Tauber Institute Series For Study of European Jewry (Brandeis University Press). Since 2010, he has lectured on early modern and modern Jewish Philosophy at the University of Haifa.

Prof. Debra Kaplan is a social and cultural historian of the early modern period in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, where she is also the Director of the Halpern Center for the Study of Jewish Self-Perception.  She is the author of The Patrons and  Their Poor:  Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford University Press, 2011; Hebrew translation, Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016). Her scholarship focuses on daily life, gender, and Jewish-Christian relations.  

Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner (b. 1968) is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History. He is an associate professor at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er-Shevah Israel (BGU) He is also the director of The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at BGU. His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe. His first book published originally in Hebrew titled:  חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (מרכז שז”ר: ירושלים 2007) was published in English: On the Margins of a Minority (Wayne State University Press: Detroit 2014). He edited of collected essays titled: Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages (History of Daily Life 5) (Brepols: Turnhout 2016). His second book is titled: Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe was published by Wayne State University Press in 2020. He is currently researching the medieval Jewish community of Cologne. 

Prof. Mustafa Abbasi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Galilee Studies at Tel-Hai College. His research focuses on two main fields: the social history of the Palestinian Arab population from the late Ottoman period to the end of the British Mandate (in particular, social changes in the Arab cities and towns in the Galilee), and the history of the 1948 War in the four Galilee cities, and the rural population in their respective districts.

He has published several books, including: The Cities of the Galilee During the War of 1948: Four cities and four stories. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014 (English); Arabs and Jews in a Mixed City: Safad during the Mandate period, 1918–1948. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi. 2015 (Hebrew); Living in Mandatory Palestine: Personal Narratives of Resilience of Galilee During the Mandate Period (co-authored with Roberta Green, Shira Hantman,Yair Seltenrich, and Nancy Green), Rutledge Publishing, 2018 (English). His articles include: “The War on the Mixed Cities: The Depopulation of Arab Tiberias and Destruction of its Old, Sacred City (1948–1949),” The Holy Land Studies, 1/1 (March 2008), pp. 45–80; “The Fall of Acre in the 1948 Palestine War,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 39/4 (Summer 2010), pp. 6–27; “Nazareth in the War for Palestine,” Holy Land Studies, 9/2, November 2010), pp. 185– 207; “Samakh: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Arab Town on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee,” Holy Land Studies, 12/1 (May 2013), pp. 91– 108; “The Education System in East Jerusalem During the Period of Jordanian Rule, 1948–1967,” Journal of Politics and Law, 6/4 (2013), pp.1–13; “Khalsa: The Town with a ‘Golden Fountain”: The Rise and Fall of an Arab Town North of the Huleh Valley, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Volume 44, Issue 3, (May 2016), pp. 448–469; ”The Battle for the Galilee: Maronites and the Palestinian Village of Jish during the 1948 War,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Volume 15.2, (2016), pp. 249–273; “Palestinians Fighting Against Nazis: The Story of Palestinian Volunteers in the Second World War,” War in History (November 2017), pp.1–23.

Dr. Iris Sulimani is a senior lecturer in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at The Open University of Israel. She completed her Ph.D. at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests focus on the history, mythology, geography, religion, and culture of the Hellenistic period. In addition, she explores various literary genres—in particular, historiography, biography, and mythography.

Sulimaniis the author of Diodorus’ Mythistory and the Pagan Mission: Historiography and Culture-heroes in the First Pentad of the Bibliotheke, Leiden and Boston 2011 (Mnemosyne Supplements, 331). She has also published several articles, emphasising the link between history, mythology and geography, such as “Imaginary Islands in the Hellenistic Era: Utopia on the Geographical Map” (2017), “Mimēsis in Diodorus Siculus: The Role of History and Sicilian Role models” (2018), and “Diodorus’ Mythography: The Distinctive Features of Mythology within Universal History” (2019). She is currently working on Plutarch’s biographies of mythical figures.

Tamar Herzig is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University.

She currently serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Humanities and as Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel. In 2014-2021, she served as Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies.

In 2021, she was awarded the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies’ Michael Bruno Memorial Award for groundbreaking research, for her contribution to the study of premodern history and especially of the Italian Renaissance.

In 2020 she won the American Historical Association‘s Rosenberg Prize and later on was awarded Honorable Mention of the Renaissance Society of America‘s Gordan Book Prize in Renaissance Studies (2021) for her book A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019; Hebrew translation under contract with Magnes Press; Italian translation under contract with Viella). For her work on religious conversion in early modern Italy, she also won the Kadar Award for Oustanding Research in 2019. 

Prof. Herzig specializes in the religious, social, and gender history of early modern Europe, with a focus on Renaissance Italy. She is the author of Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2008; Italian edition published by Carocci in 2014); of a book in Hebrew on the Italian Renaissance (2011; 2014); and of  ‘Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman’: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013).

 She is the co-editor of Ebraismo e cristianesimo in Italia tra ’400 e ’600: Confronti e convergenze [Special issue of Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 25 (2012)]; of Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and of Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her articles have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly; Sixteenth Century Journal; Journal of Early Modern History; Church History; Religions; Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte; Genesis; Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft; I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance; Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà; Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo; Memorie Domenicane.

She has been the recipient of a George L. Mosse Fellowship, Hanadiv Postdoctoral Fellowship, Yigal Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Junior Faculty, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and of Israel Science Foundation research grants (in 2010-2013; 2015-2019; 2020-[2024]). In 2012, she was elected member of the Young Academy of Israel (founded by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities), and in 2013 she was awarded a Jean-François Malle one-year fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

In 2015-2021 she was the Renaissance Society of America‘s Discipline Representative for the field of Religion and member of the advistory board of Renaissance Quarterly. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals Mediterranean Historical Review and I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance and of the book series I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, and is a member of the academic board of the Medici Archive Project (Florence); of the research project Observer l’Observance: Diffusion, réseaux et influences des réformes régulières en Europe (École française de Rome); of the scientific advisory board of the international research group for Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (EmoDir), and of the humanities and social sciences editorial board of the Bialik Institute Publishing House.

Moshe Sluhovsky (PhD Princeton, 1992) is Paulette and Claude Kelman Professor of French History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the head of the Institute of History, and as the head of the Lafer Center for the Study of Women and Gender. Over the years, he has held several fellowships—at Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the German Israel Foundation (GIF), and the Einstein Foundation; the National Humanities Center in North Carolina; the Davis Center at Princeton University; and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

 His books include: “Believe not Every Spirit”: Demonic Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism and Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. He also edited several collections of articles—two of which (on 500 years of Protestant-Jewish interactions) will be published in late 2021.

Since 2015, he has been collaborating with Professor Andreas Krass of Humboldt University in Berlin in a joint research project on the Jewish Presence in Gay and Lesbian Berlin during the Weimar Period, and the migration of German-Jewish gay men and lesbians to Palestine in the 1930s. Two collections of articles resulting from this cooperation will be published in 2021.

Prof. Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel, and historian of European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (especially the Jewish Enlightenment, and the trends of secularization and counter-modernity). Recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, 2012. Author of Haskalah and History; The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Hebrew 1995; English, 2002); The Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew, 2002; English, 2004); Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005; German, 2009; English, 2010; Chinese, 2014); The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe (Hebrew, 2010; English, 2011); The Jewish Eighteenth-Century, A European Biography, 1700–1750 (Hebrew, 2017; English [forthcoming 2020]); The Jewish Eighteenth-Century, A European Biography, 1750–1800 (University of Indiana Press 2020).