Tikvah Scholars 2012-2013

Stephen Arnoff

Executive Director of the 14^th Street Y, a Jewish Community Center in Manhattan’s East Village and the Founding Director of LABA: The National Laboratory for New Jewish Culture (www.labajournal.com).

Research:

Avishai Bar-Asher 

Currently writing his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Concepts of Paradise in 13th Century Kabbalah (Castile). He is also awarded a Doctoral Scholarship by the PhD Honors Program in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

RESEARCH:

Utopian Realms – Paradisal Legislature

Or Bassok

Earned his JSD and LL.M degrees from Yale Law School where has was a Fulbright scholar and a Robina Foundation Visiting Human Rights Fellow (2011-12). 

RESEARCH:

Yonatan Brafman

Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Religion, specializing in Philosophy of Religion and Jewish Philosophy. He holds a M.A. and M.Phil. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia. 

RESEARCH:

Joshua M. Drapekin

J.D. candidate at NYU School of Law. He completed his undergraduate study in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Hebrew at Emory University as a Woodruff Scholar. 

RESEARCH:

Jewish and Democratic State

Alexandria Frisch

PhD candidate in NYU’s Hebrew and Judaic Studies Department, focusing on Second Temple period history. She graduated with honors from the College of William and Mary, majoring in religion and history (2000), and completed two Masters degrees—one in Jewish Education from Baltimore Hebrew University (2004) and another in Religion from Yale University (2006).

RESEARCH:

Eschatology, Law, and the Problem of Empire in Second Temple Judaism

Rachel Furst

Ph.D. candidate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was awarded a President’s Fellowship.  She received a B.A.summa cum laude in Medieval Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University and an M.A. magna cum laude in Jewish History from Hebrew University.

RESEARCH:

Constructing Credibility: The Makings and Meanings of Gender in the Legal Literature of Medieval Ashkenaz

Debra Glasberg

Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University.  She received her B.A. with honors from Columbia College and an M.A. in modern Jewish history from the Bernard Revel Graduate School. 

RESEARCH:

Controlling Print: Jewish Communal Restraints on Print in Early Modern Italy

Shivi Greenfield (Gruss Scholar-in-Residence)

Holds a PhD in Political Theory from Oxford University, where he was a Weidenfeld Scholar.  He received an M.A. in Political Science (direct PhD track), and a B.A. in Philosophy, Economics and Politics (magna cum laude), both from the Hebrew University. 

RESEARCH:

Talmudic Justice: Revisiting Contemporary Justice Theory in light of Talmudic Deliberation

Anna Koch

Ph.D. candidate at New York University. She received her MA from Ludwig Maximilians-University in February 2008. Since fall 2008 she has been a Ph.D. student in NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and in the Department of History, where she is currently writing her dissertation under the guidance of Professor Marion Kaplan.

RESEARCH:

Rebuilding Lives - Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust

Yael Lifshitz-Goldberg 

J.S.D. candidate from Israel focusing on Environmental Law. Her dissertation, supervised by Professor Katrina M. Wyman, addresses property rights in renewable energies.

RESEARCH:

Karin Loevy

Doctoral candidate at NYU School of Law.  Her dissertation centers on the field of emergency powers in public law as it functions through the ideal of crisis management and crisis containment (supervised by Professor Mattias Kumm). 

RESEARCH:

Containing Threats in the Jurisdiction of Exigencies

Gad Marcus

Steinhardt Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies and Education at NYU.  An officer in the I.D.F., he holds a B.Ed from the David Yellin College for Education in Jerusalem, an M.A. magna cum laude in Jewish Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University and was a ‘Melamdim’ fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

RESEARCH:

Study for its Own Sake – the Philosophy of Study in Jewish Thought

Tamar Megiddo

J.S.D. Candidate at NYU School of Law. Her J.S.D. thesis, supervised by Professor Jeremy Waldron, explores the concept of fidelity to law and its relation to compliance to international law.

RESEARCH:

Fidelity to International Law 

Paul Nahme

Ph.D. candidate in the Centre for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, specializing in philosophy of religion and modern and medieval Jewish Philosophy. 

RESEARCH:

From Critical to Prophetic Idealism: A reconsideration of the “Jewish” Philosophy of Hermann Cohen

Liav Orgad

Assistant Professor at the Radzyner School of Law, IDC Herzliya. He holds LL.D. and LL.M. degrees from the Hebrew University, an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School, and LL.B. and B.A. degrees from the IDC. 

RESEARCH:

Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights

Yakir Paz

Phd student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Talmud and an assistant at the Amirim honors program.

RESEARCH:

From Scribes to Scholars: Rabbinic Interpretation of the Bible in view of the Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria

Pinchas Roth

Received his PhD from the Department of Talmud and Halakhah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2012. He received his BA in Talmud from the Hebrew University, and his MA in medieval Jewish history from Yeshiva University.

RESEARCH:

Questioning the Query: Private Strategies in Responsa Literature

Vered Sakal

Submitted her Ph.D. dissertation on Religion and Liberalism to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed a master’s degree in the Department of Jewish thought at Hebrew University; her thesis topic was Mordecai Kaplan's concept of 'Nationhood'. Vered also completed an M.A. in Nonprofit and Community Organizations from The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work at Hebrew University, and was ordained as a Rabbi by Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. 

RESEARCH:

Truth and the Jewish Public Sphere

Moran Yahav

J.S.D. candidate at New York University School of Law, with research interests in legal and political philosophy as well as in the history and theory of international law. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Liam Murphy, aims to develop an institutional theory of law in the province of general jurisprudence.

RESEARCH:

"An Institutional Theory of Law"