General Information
The Berkowitz Fellowship was created thanks to a generous gift by Mr. Ivan Berkowitz. The Berkowitz Fellow is typically awarded to a more senior scholar. The area of research addresses issues from a broad spectrum of Jewish learning and civilization. The Fellowship will facilitate research and scholarship into areas that examine the historical, cultural and political forces that helped shape the intellectual atmosphere in which the integration of varying traditions of law into an operative jurisprudential system was affected.
The Fellow will become fully integrated with the intellectual community of the Law School, regularly attending events at NYU School of Law, including the faculty colloquia and other similar events. The Berkowitz Fellow will present their research in progress once in the Fall semester and once in the Spring at a Workshop, which will be open to the intellectual community of the Law School, the University as a whole and other interested individuals by invitation.
Current Berkowitz Fellow - AY 2025-2026
Dr. Yael Landman is Assistant Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is the author of Legal Writing, Legal Practice: The Biblical Bailment Law and Divine Justice (Brown Judaic Studies, 2022), which won the 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. Landman’s recent articles include “Of Dowries and Daughters: A Law and Literature Approach to the Achsah Story in Joshua and Judges” (Vetus Testamentum); “A Mother Gets Custody: The Legal Background to Genesis 21:14-21” (Biblical Interpretation); “Centering the Child: The Adoption Metaphor in Nathan's Parable (2 Samuel 12:1-4)” (Adoption in the Hebrew Bible); as well as an article about biblical law for the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature.
Landman previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Yeshiva University, and the Drisha Institute, and also served as acquisitions editor for Gorgias Press.
CONTACT: yl778@nyu.edu
Research Title
The Biblical Legal Imagination: Law, Narrative, and the Performance of Justice
Research area(s)
Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near East, Law and Humanities, Law and Literature, Law and Performance, Biblical Law, Biblical Narrative
Research Synopsis
Scholars of antiquity face an acute version of the methodological problems that confront all scholars of the humanities. Ancient sources, whether textual or material, reflect a skewed sliver of the worlds from which they stemmed; one must contend both with the partialness of the evidence and with the question of how to classify and interpret it, which may defy expectations in unanticipated ways. In the context of law in the Hebrew Bible, the existence of a wider range of documentary evidence from ancient Israel and Judah’s neighboring societies – such as trial records, contracts, administrative texts, and letters from Mesopotamia – shines a particularly harsh light on the absence of such sources that might have helped scholars better assess the evidence within the Hebrew Bible itself. The recent trend within Law and Literature scholarship to soften the perceived boundary between “law” and “literature,” instead seeing the two more porously, makes scholarship from this discipline especially fruitful for thinking about generically complicated biblical texts in new ways. Moreover, precisely because of its generic messiness with respect to law, as well as its role in shaping jurisprudence throughout much of the western world, the Hebrew Bible is uniquely positioned to offer a usable case study for both humanists and legal scholars. Landman’s research participates in law and humanities discourses surrounding topics including the role that the humanities might play in the improvement of law; how to effect justice and deter wrongdoing; and the limits of judicial power. In particular, Landman builds on recent scholarship on law and performance, demonstrating how within the Hebrew Bible one finds a diversity of approaches toward the theatricality of law, and how law’s theatricality can establish authority and/or justice or fail to do so.
Previous Berkowitz Fellows
- Joseph E. David
- Marjorie Lehman
- Hanan Mazeh
- Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
- Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi
- Yosef Sharabi
- Yuval Blankovsky
- Yobu (Job) Jindo
- Eli Schonfeld
- Jonathan Yovel
- Shai Wozner
- Marc Hirshman
- Gabriella Blum
- Rabbi Saul J. Berman
- Joseph David
- Leora Batnitzky
- Shahar Lifshitz