Alina Bojčić, Clark University
Treading the Borderlands: The Cabaret, its Multi-Ethnic Performers and the Holocaust in Zagreb, 1908 – 1946
This dissertation examines how the cabaret and coffeehouse in Zagreb and Sarajevo became targets for cultural purification by the fascist and ultranationalist Ustaša regime in Croatia and how the reconfiguration of cultural life in the urban centers of the Independent State of Croatia became inseparable from the severing of the social relations between its multi-ethnic residents and the erasure of the Jewish population. By following a broad constellation of popular performers, it examines the cultural transformations between 1908 and 1946. Performers treaded the end of empires, the redrawing of borders into nation-states, the severing of professional networks across the former Habsburg Empire, and the attempts to maintain them. This dissertation examines how performers confronted the moments of violence that accompanied such reconfigurations and the emergence of ultra-nationalist ideologies like fascism.

Lara-Sophie Boleslawsky, University of Texas at Austin
Confessing Prejudice: Rudolf Bultmann and the Long Shadow of Antisemitism in Bultmannian Interpretations of the Apostle Paul
This dissertation addresses the work and legacy of Rudolf Bultmann, a prominent German theologian active during the Third Reich, on the Apostle Paul. Bultmann’s public-facing lectures, as well as his involvement with the anti-Völkisch-theology Confessing Church traditionally results in scholars clearing Bultmann’s work from any troubling antisemitic prejudice or Protestant biases. This dissertation, however, argues that Bultmann’s work reveals an interpretive framework that is informed by antisemitic logics that long precede those of the Third Reich. Bultmann’s – and his students’ – interpretations of Paul sever him from his Jewishness and become the nexus for a host of problematic discourses that promote Christian triumphalism and supersessionism, while simultaneously crafting an image of the static, inferior ‘Jew’ through appeals to the purported objectivity of historical-criticism and racist pseudo-science.

Maverick Huneycutt, University of South Carolina, Columbia 
The Architecture of Control: Choiceless Choices on American Plantations and in Nazi Ghettos
This dissertation examines two figures history has struggled to judge: enslaved plantation drivers in the antebellum American South and Jewish policemen in Nazi-occupied Polish ghettos. Working across the archives of plantation households and Holocaust testimony collections, this dissertation argues that both systems of total domination depended on internal hierarchies —
structures that conscripted members of the oppressed community to enforce their own bondage. Drawing on Primo Levi’s “gray zone” and Lawrence Langer’s concept of “choiceless choices,” it
traces how desperate hierarchies and delegated violence shaped the moral lives of intermediary figures caught between the demands of oppressive regimes and the communities they were forced to police. The project draws on sources from Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, and major American plantation manuscript collections.

Nathan Lucky, Clark University
Information Borderlands: The Transformation of Global Jewish News Networks, 1915-1950
This dissertation traces how Jewish news networks reshaped global information flows from WWI through the postwar era. Centering the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and its “non-Jewish” subsidiary, the Overseas News Agency, this project examines how Jewish journalists and refugees became crucial intermediaries—supplying news to thousands of publications, monitoring hundreds of foreign-language newspapers for Allied intelligence agencies, and navigating the boundaries between journalism, propaganda, and espionage. Drawing on the concept of “information borderlands,” this project reveals how knowledge itself was contested, controlled, and reshaped under conditions of surveillance, censorship, and persecution. From the pogroms of WWI to the Holocaust to early Cold War intelligence, this project illuminates how Jewish actors operating at the margins of visibility shaped global awareness of persecution and were a critical node in international politics.

Iris Morrell, University of California, Irvine
Without Law, Without Judge: Mysticism and Catastrophe in Modern Yiddish Literature
This dissertation investigates mysticism and negative theological discourse in modern Yiddish poetry and testimonies about pogroms and the Holocaust. While it has become commonplace to
claim that the Holocaust made many people atheists, this dissertation investigates how a new, apophatic, negative theological form of religious belief arose from the catastrophes of the 20th
century. The chapters compare Yiddish authors such as Elie Wiesel, Peretz Markish, and Arn Zeitlin, examining their use of Jewish mystical frameworks to understand violence, with German-Jewish philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, who theorized divine violence and catastrophe as part of the Jewish philosophy of time. Through close reading and archival research in Yiddish and German, the project theorizes the connection between catastrophe, violence, and mysticism.

Na’amit Sturm Nagel, University of California, Irvine
Unraveling the Self: How Jewish Women Writers Reinvented Literary Form in Postwar America
This dissertation recovers a shared formal project across the work of Jewish women writers during the 1960-90 period, which literary history has cast as the “Golden Age” of Jewish-American fiction, dominated by second-generation Ashkenazi male voices. It examines how, beginning in the early 1960s, Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Vivian Gornick each engaged in genre hybridity to forge inventive forms that represented fractured identity in ways realist and conventional autobiographical modes had not. Working independently, they centered female protagonists and drew on autobiographical writing in their fiction while destabilizing the traditional temporal storytelling that typically structures these genres. Reading their work together, the dissertation argues that rather than disavowing Jewish identity or fully embracing feminist ideals, they craft female protagonists with nuanced relationships to both categories who interrogate contradictions through sustained questioning.

David Selis, Yeshiva University
Worlds Built by Sefarim: Books, Libraries, and the Creation of American Jewish High Culture
This dissertation explores the development of international Jewish high culture between 1872 and 1935 through the lens of library special collections, scholarly production, and the formation
of a Jewish cultural canon. This project offers the first systematic history of American Jewish libraries and book collecting as a cultural phenomenon. It examines the creation of a usable Jewish past as a process of transforming the conceptual canon of Jewish scholarship into physical collections held by Jewish seminaries, public, and university libraries. Books and book collecting offer an underexplored prism through which to trace the movement of Jews to America, and the broader transformation of America into a cultural and scholarly powerhouse on the world stage.

Avery Weinman, University of California, Los Angeles
From Radicalism to Conservatism: the American Jewish Student Press in the Long Seventies, 1967-1984
In the Seventies, the American Jewish student press grew from a paltry handful of newspapers into a robust print culture comprising more than one hundred publications and a national press
network. As the decade unfolded, and students grappled with world-changing, generation-defining events—Watergate, Vietnam, the 1973 War, the Camp David Accords, to name a few—the American Jewish student press developed into a dynamic forum for students’ changing attitudes towards preoccupying issues such as Zionism, Palestinian self-determination, American
imperialism, capitalism, ethnic particularism, feminism, gender and sexuality, religious revival, and environmentalism. The rich range of ideas that students published in these publications—and
the reactions of establishment institutions that funded them—make this print culture a historical bellwether for consequential paradigm shifts in politics, culture, and identity that continue to
shape American Jewish life today.

Dalia Wolfson, Harvard University
The Sentimental Shrayberin: New Woman Writer Protagonists in the American Yiddish Press
This dissertation examines popular newspaper fiction by women writers in the early twentieth century American Yiddish press. It analyzes the relationship between sentiment and gender in
this growing literary corpus, tracking the cultural expectations and literary strategies of newly professionalizing young women writers. With a particular focus on such authors as Yenta Serdatsky, the dissertation locates the intrafictional critiques and historical circumstances that characterized this emerging cohort.

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.