Leigh Alon, Johns Hopkins University
Jewish Healthcare Workers and the Rise of Jewish American Hereditarian Thought from the Mid Nineteenth into the Twenty-First Century
This dissertation tracks how American Jewish healthcare workers theorized the biology of Jewishness from the late nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries, tracing notions of Jewish biological difference. Alongside this shifting discourse, it also tracks how these theories were expressed in the changing structures of American Jewish healthcare, from the rise of Jewish hospitals in the nineteenth century, to their subsequent decline and the ascendance of the genetic screening program in the late twentieth century, and finally to the twenty-first century rise of a network of Jewish genetic disease centers.

Natalie Bernstien, University of California, Los Angeles
Entangled Histories of Twentieth-Century Tangier: Muslims, Jews, Refugees, Spaniards & Nazis in Morocco’s International City
This dissertation explores Tangier’s urban and Jewish histories during WWII and the transition from the Tangier International Zone to the Spanish occupation (1940-1945) during the war. Throughout this period, thousands of European Jewish Holocaust refugees fled to Tangier, living in relative peace alongside Muslim and Jewish Moroccans, European diplomats, Spanish Republican refugees, Spanish colonial officials, and, with the Spanish occupation, German Nazis. For most of the European Jewish Holocaust refugees, Tangier was a temporary site of refuge. While many did not make Tangier their ultimate home, their journey to Tangier and the years they spent there are worthy of study. Bernstien’s work aims to bridge Holocaust studies and North African studies by building on recent scholarship that analyzes the intersection of colonialism and fascism in colonial North Africa.

Lauren Bradford, Clark University 
With Blood on Their Stockings: Women’s Public Participation in Racial Terror in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America
This doctoral research examines how “Aryan” and white women actively participated in public displays of racial violence during the Holocaust and Jim Crow era. Moving beyond traditional scholarship focused on women’s domestic or professional roles, Bradford’s work analyzes their involvement in individual and collective violence across urban and rural spaces. Crucially, Bradford centers Jewish and Black voices and experiences, recognizing these historically marginalized perspectives as fundamental to understanding the everyday terror of both racist regimes. Through extensive archival research in German, English, and Yiddish, she reveals how women shaped geographies of violence, transforming ordinary civic spaces into sites of persecution. Her comparative approach illuminates how these women reinforced racial hierarchies while navigating, subverting, and reinforcing gender norms in two distinct yet ideologically similar racist systems.

Ariel Horowitz, Stanford University
Precarious Redemptions: Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, S. Y. Agnon
This dissertation explores the concept of redemption in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, and S. Y. Agnon. Deeply embedded in Judeo-Christian religious traditions, the idea of redemption was primarily seen as the anticipated endpoint of time, and, in modernity, as the culmination of a teleologic, progressive philosophy of history. Working across the German, the Hebrew, and the English, and considering the historical and material facets of post-1945 Jewish experience, the dissertation attempts at synthesizing the oeuvres of the three writers, and elucidates their struggle with the question of redemption, incorporating archival material and considering the influence of figures such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Gershom Scholem. Roth, Agnon, and Arendt cultivate their own unique alternative to a redemptive philosophy of history, and offer a poignant account of the modern Jewish condition.

Shiyong Lu, New York University
We Offer Chicken Chop Suey on Sundays: How Chinese Food Purveyors Encountered Jews in Twentieth Century America
This dissertation explores a range of meanings derived from diverse interactions between Chinese food purveyors and American Jews in the twentieth century. It reveals that behind Jewish fondness for Chinese food, and beyond gastronomic attraction and convenience, stands a vibrant, cross-regional, interethnic immigrant story. With its roots deep in Chinese exclusion and Jewish acculturation, this story highlighted the strategy-making of the two communities, once immigrants, to situate themselves in American society through food and business.

Martin Schwartz, University of Washington
Remediating the Rich Jew: Antisemitism in West German Theatre and Film
This dissertation examines continuity and change in the form and content of cultural antisemitism in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. Specifically, it addresses the figure of the Rich Jew (der reiche Jude) as presented in a cross-genre network of interrelated texts drawn from film, stage direction, written drama, and the novel. In complementary fashion, it explores these works’ contemporaneous reception—especially the infamous “Fassbinder Controversy”—in German and Jewish public spheres. Informed by antisemitism theory, history of ideas, media studies, and original archival research, this work considers the means by which and ends to which German post-Holocaust cultural production abstracted Judaism to money, and whether and to what extent the concomitant antisemitism is of a kind with previous forms of Judeophobia.

Sophia Shoulson, Johns Hopkins University
I Have Become a Book: Literary Communication and the Literary Imaginary in Modern Yiddish Fiction, 1863-1936
This dissertation project tracks metaliterary moments—uses of textual production and literary materiality as narrative or rhetorical devices—in Yiddish fiction to develop a theory of Yiddish literary communication which negotiates between the literary imaginary of Yiddish writers and the historical reality of Yiddish readers. The project relies on an inextricable connection between the content of Yiddish literary works and the existential factors shaping their material production through a constellation of influences: writers and publishers, readers and book-lenders. The primary literary sources are five works of Yiddish prose published between 1860 and 1936 analyzed via a range of theories of reading, writing, and media studies to construct a clearer picture of the dynamic literary and historical worlds of modern Yiddish literature.

The American Academy for Jewish Research (www.aajr.org) is the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America. Composed of the field’s most eminent and senior scholars, it is committed to professional service through this initiative and others, including the Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish Studies and workshops for graduate students and early career scholars.