The Center for Jewish History Announces 2025–2026 Fellows

The Center for Jewish History proudly announces its 2025–2026 cohort of fellows at the Institute for Advanced Research—where scholars, librarians, and archivists collaborate to explore the Jewish past and shape future scholarship. This year’s fellows represent a wide range of disciplines and institutions, from early-career researchers to senior academics.

This announcement marks a significant moment for the Center’s evolving research enterprise. With the recent integration of the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and the Center’s Metadata and Discovery Services (online library), the Institute for Advanced Research has become the nucleus of a newly unified scholarly infrastructure—one that places fellows at the center of an ecosystem built for discovery. In this environment, academic researchers work in daily collaboration with librarians, archivists, and metadata specialists to navigate more than 500,000 volumes and 100 million archival documents—making rare materials newly accessible and yielding insights that might otherwise remain hidden.

Founded in 2023, the Institute builds on the Center’s longstanding fellowship program and reimagines it as a platform for interdisciplinary research grounded in archival discovery. Fellows are immersed in the daily life of the Center, participating in work-in-progress sessions, public programs, and symposia.

“The Institute represents the beating heart of the Center’s mission,” said Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld, President of the Center for Jewish History. “By nurturing new scholarship and expanding access to the Partner collections, we are not only preserving the past—we are mobilizing it to speak to today’s most urgent questions.”

Among this year’s fellows is Talya Fishman (University of Pennsylvania), recipient of the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities/Robert S. Rifkind Fellowship, awarded to a senior scholar whose work exemplifies the highest standards of Jewish historical research. Her project, “Materiality in Medieval Jewish Thought and Experience,” attempts to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by exploring them within their broader historical, geographic, and religious contexts, both Islamic and Christian. Fishman is the author of the acclaimed Becoming the People of the Talmud (2011).

The full 2025–2026 cohort includes:

• Andrew Kotick (Pratt Institute/Fordham University): “Jewish Identity and the Invention of French Bande Dessinée”
• Maytal Mark (New York University): "Localizing the 'Jewish Question': Middle Eastern intellectuals, Zionist politics, and Jewish diaspora before 1948"
• Shiyong Lu (New York University): "’We Offer Chicken Chop Suey on Sundays:’ How Chinese Food Purveyors Encountered Jews in Twentieth-Century America"
• Jonathan Green (New York University): “Moses Mendelssohn's Dialectical Enlightenment: The Problem of Luxury in Ethics and Politics”
• Andrew J. Shapiro (CUNY Graduate Center): “Liminality and Western Conformity in Modern Jewish Politics”
• Martin Saps (King’s College London): “Radical Traditionalism: Religion and the Politics of Multiculturalism in London and New York”
• Hadas Binyamini (New York University): “Torah-True Urbanism: Orthodox Jews and American Conservatism, 1964–1991”

Since 2002, the Center’s fellowship programs have supported over 160 researchers from more than 50 institutions worldwide. Their work has resulted in award-winning books, field-defining dissertations, and public scholarship that continues to shape the study of Jewish history. Read more about the 2025–2026 fellows and their research.

In addition to supporting individual scholars, the Institute sponsors Scholars Working Groups, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across generations and fields. These groups enrich the Center’s intellectual community by offering scholars at all stages a forum to exchange ideas, test arguments, and build lasting networks.