The Program in Jewish Studies hosts several year-long research workshops and seminars for faculty members, postdocs, and students as well as one-time multi-day conferences that bring together scholars from around the world around topics of shared interest in the field.
Yale Jewish Studies Workshop
The Yale Jewish Studies Workshop, which meets regularly throughout the fall and spring semester, typically features pre-circulated works-in-progress and seminar-style talks by faculty members, visiting professors, research scholars, and postdoctoral associates. This workshop provides an important opportunity for conversation across temporal and disciplinary boundaries within Jewish Studies. Regular attendance is expected of graduate students and faculty members in Jewish Studies. All members of the university community are warmly invited to join these workshops and learn together. Lunch is provided. For more information, please contact Stefania Baitella.
- Katie Trumpener (October 14)
- David Sorkin (November 18)
- Michele Scarlassara (December 2)
- Elli Stern (January 20)
- Jacqueline Vayntrub (February 3)
All workshops take place 12-1:15pm in the Jewish Studies Reading Room (SML 335b) on the third floor of Sterling Memorial Library.
2025-2026:
- Jacob McNulty
- Rotem Avneri Meir
- Shira Eliassian
- Arash Azizi
- Claire Aubin
2024-2025:
- Sarit Kattan Gribetz
- Ra’anan Boustan
- Edwin Seroussi
- Dov Honick
- Oren Okhovat
- Paul Reitter
Yale Jewish Studies Seminar
The Yale Jewish Studies Seminar, co-organized by graduate students, typically invites junior and mid-career scholars to campus to present their research in a seminar setting and to meet with graduate students over lunch or dinner for continued conviviality and conversation. While the research presentations are usually open to the whole university community, there are also exclusive opportunities for graduate students to interact with the visiting scholars. For more information, please contact Hadas Bram and Gabriel Rom.
- Seminar with Tamar Sella — Thursday, October 1, 2026, 4:00 p.m, Jewish Studies Reading Room (SML 335b)
- Seminar with Charles Lesch — Thursday, December 10, 2026, 4:00 p.m., Jewish Studies Reading Room (SML 335b)
- Seminar with Sarah Greenberg — Thursday, February 11, 2027, 4:00 p.m., Jewish Studies Reading Room (SML 335b)
2025-2026:
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Jillian Stinchcomb
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Eliav Grossman
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Jacob Abolafia
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Yael Segalovitz
Yale Jewish Studies Graduate Colloquium
The Yale Jewish Studies Graduate Colloquium, co-organized by and for graduate students, provides a forum for graduate students working in all areas in and adjacent to Jewish Studies to discuss their own research interests and writing endeavors together. This colloquium is meant to foster intellectual community and a collaborative spirit, and to scaffold students’ coursework-related papers, conference presentations, and dissertation writing. For more information, please contact Yosef Malka and Ruth Foster.
- Emily Howe
- Jacob Morrow-Spitzer
- Michael Lessman
- Gabriel Rom
- Shira Eliassian
- Stefania Baitella
- Oren Okhovat
The Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism Seminar
The Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism Seminar is co-sponsored by the Yale Divinity School and the Program in Jewish Studies. Every year, it brings to campus some of the most significant scholars in the field of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism, both junior and senior, to share their recent research. These lectures make available to the Yale community the breadth of scholarship currently being produced on ancient Israelite and Jewish history, literature, beliefs, and practices. For more information, please contact Joel Baden and Ra’anan Boustan.
- Michael Legaspi (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary)
- Monday, September 28, 5:3pm (YDS): Public Lecture
- Tuesday, September 29, 12pm (SML 335b): Lunch Seminar
- René Bloch (University of Bern)
- Monday, October 12, 5:30pm (YDS): Public Lecture
- Tuesday, October 13, 12pm (HQ 276): Lunch Seminar
- Sonja Ammann (University of Basel)
- Thursday, November 19, 12pm (SML 335b): Lunch Seminar
- Thursday, November 19, 5:30pm (YDS): Public Lecture
2025-2026:
- Dorothea Erbele-Küster, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz: “The Olfactory Love Song: Material and Embodied Philological Pathways”
- Andrew Tobolowsky, College of William and Mary: “Why New Comparisons—and How?”
- Francis Borchardt, NLA University College: “Masada and the Meaning of History”
- Jill Hicks-Keeton, University of Southern California: “From the Abolitionist Movement to the Heritage Foundation: The Making of Esther into American Scripture”
- Joseph Lam, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “‘My god, I did not know’: Ignorance, Affliction, and Sin in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel”
2024-2025:
- Laura Carlson-Hasler, Indiana University: “Is Haggai Worth Reading? On Violence, Affordances, and the History of Interpretation”
- Cory Crawford, Ohio University: “Who’s Afraid of a Female Priest? Biblical Narratives Confront Kenite Traditions”
- Roger Nam, Emory University: “‘Arable Land Planted with Dates’: An Economic Analysis of the Al Yahudu Archive”
- Anathea Portier-Young, Duke University: “Walking Naked and Barefoot: Embodying Confrontation, Captivity, and Coloniality in Isaiah 20”
- Hannah Tervanotko, McMaster University: “Divination as a Knowledge System in Jewish Texts of the Hellenistic Era”
2023-2024:
- Lisa Cleath, Princeton Theological Seminary: “How to Make Textual Authority: Hidden Legitimation in the Ancient and Modern Worlds”
- James Nati, Santa Clara University: “Toward a Biblical Philology of Wonder: The Case of Samson’s Birth”
- Jutta Jokiranta, University of Helsinki: “A Cognitive Framework to Study Cultural Rituals: Dead Sea Scrolls as Reflective of Changes in Second Temple Period”
- Chauncey Hardy, Reed College: “Mestizo Poetics of Belonging: Deuteronomy’s Construction of Israelite Identity”
- Kerry Sonia, Colby College: “Kith and Kiln: Motherhood and Materiality in the Hebrew Bible”
- Joel Kemp, Emory University: “Forging Identities: Bible, Law, and Racial Caste”
2022-2023:
- Liane Feldman, New York University: “Put Down the Pentateuch: Reassessing the Status of Torah in Second Temple Judaism”
- Cate Bonesho, UCLA: “Rabbi Cleopatra, or How the Talmud Coopted an Egyptian Queen”
- Chontel Syfox, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Queering Jubilees: Reading Tamar and Judah with Sara Ahmed and Lee Edelman”
- Stuart Weeks, Durham University: “Why Do We Read Qohelet in the Ways that We Do?”
- Alice Mandell, Johns Hopkins University: “Word Craft in Ancient Israel: Craft Literacy and Transmission of the Alphabet”
2019-2020:
- David Vanderhooft, Boston College: “Babylon as Cosmopolis in Israelite Thought and Achaemenid Architecture”
- William Schniedewind, UCLA: “The ‘Isaiah, (the) Proph[et]’ Bulla and a Prophetic Scribal Guild”
- Daniel Machiela, McMaster University: “Reimagining Israel’s Past in the Hellenistic Period: ‘Biblical’ Interpretation in the Jewish Aramaic Literature from Qumran”
- Matthias Henze, Rice University: “Prayer in 2 Baruch”
- Cynthia Chapman, Oberlin College: “Eating with the Reapers: Food and the Substance of Kinship in the Book of Ruth”
2018-2019:
- Samuel Adams, Union Presbyterian Seminary: “The Book of Ruth as Social Commentary in the Second Temple Period”
- Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, Holy Cross: “Constructions of the Shephelah Landscape in Biblical and Neo-Assyrian Texts”
- Nyasha Junior, Temple University: “The Appropriate of Hagar”
- Wil Gafney, Brite Divinity School: “Womanist Midrash and the Sacred Imagination”
2017-2018:
- Lauren Monroe, Cornell University: “Unearthing Joseph the Hebrew and the Bet-Yosef”
- Dominik Markl, Pontifical Biblical Institute: “The Ethics of Migration in the Pentateuch”
- Laura Quick, Princeton University: “Through a Glass, Darkly: Reflections on the Translation and Interpretation of Exodus 38:8”
- Saul Olyan, Brown University: “Are There Legal Texts in the Hebrew Bible that Evince a Concern for Animal Rights?”
- Susan Ackerman, Dartmouth College: “Drumming Away Demons”
2016-2017:
- Timothy Lim, University of Edinburgh: “An Indicative Definition of the Canon”
- Jacqueline Vayntrub, Brandeis University: “How Biblical Poetry Shaped Western Aesthetics”
- Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Princeton Theological Seminary: “Building a Back-Story: Archaeology and the Crafting of Israel’s Conquest Narratives”
- Carol Newsom, Emory University: “Sin Consciousness, Self-Alienation, and the Origins of the Introspective Self in Biblical Israel and Early Judaism”
- Baruch Schwartz, Hebrew University: “Deuteronomy 1:3 and the Lawgiving in the Pentateuchal Sources”
2015-2016:
- Jo Ann Hackett, University of Texas-Austin: “The Construction of Evil: Foreign Women in Proverbs 1–9”
- Chip Dobbs-Allsopp, Princeton Theological Seminary: “Rejuvenating Biblical Philology”
- L. Juliana Claassens, Stellenbosch University: “An Abigail Optic: Agency, Resistance, and Discernment in 1 Samuel 25”
- Alex Jassen, New York University: “Violence and the Dead Sea Scrolls”
2014-2015:
- Naphtali Meshel, Princeton University: “The World of Sacrifice Broken Down”
- Christophe Nihan, University of Lausanne: “Ritual Standardization and Ritual Innovation in Leviticus: The Case of the Wood Offerings in 4Q (Reworked) Pentateuch C”
- Steven Weitzman, University of Pennsylvania: “Genetics and Ancient Jewish History: A New Frontier or Making the Same Mistake Twice”
- Marc Brettler, Brandeis University: “Those Who Pray Together Stay Together: The Role of Late Psalms in Creating Identity”
- Karina Hogan, Fordham University: “Mother Zion in Baruch and 2 Baruch: Different Models of Intertextuality”
2013-2014:
- Konrad Schmid, University of Zurich: “The Beginning of the Book of Isaiah”
- Bernd Schipper, Humbold University Berlin: “Joseph, Ahiqar, and the Jewish Colony at Elephantine: A New Interpretation of the Joseph Novella”
- Gary Knopper, Pennsylvania State University: “The Place of God’s Own Choosing: Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim?”
- Judith Newman, University of Toronto: “Contesting Confession: A New Reading of Daniel 9 in Conversation with Baruch”
- Christine Yoder, Columbia Theological Seminary: “Contours of Desire in Israelite Wisdom Literature: Desire as Appetite”
2012-2013:
- David Wright, Brandeis University: “The Covenant Code’s Dependence on the Laws of Hammurabi: A Prioritized-Evidential Argument”
- Esther Hamori, Union Theological Seminary: “The Prophet and the Necromancer: Women’s Divination for Kings”
- Christl Maier, Phillips-University Marburg: “Jeremiah as YHWH’s Stronghold (Jer 1:18): The Relationship between Jeremiah and Jerusalem in Jeremiah 1–25”
- Jan Dietrich, Aarhus University: “The Meanings of Suicide in the Bible and the Ancient Near East”
2011-2012:
- Benjamin Sommer, Jewish Theological Seminary: “Reclaiming the Bible for the Humanities and for the Jews: Developments in Contemporary Biblical Criticism”
- Andrew Teeter, Harvard University: “Text History as Reception History in the Transmission of Biblical Law”
- Reinhard Kratz, Georg-August University, Göttingen: “Rewriting Within and Outside the Hebrew Bible”
- David Vanderhooft, Boston College: “Habakkuk and the Judean Prophetic Tradition: Continuity and Challenge”
Conferences
The Program in Jewish Studies regularly hosts conferences in an array of disciplines of Jewish Studies, often co-organized by a team of faculty members and post-doctoral associates. Some past conferences include “Circulating Jews: Mobility, Cultural Transmission and Representation in Judaic Studies (November 2012), “Everyday Writing in the Medieval Near East: Documentary History and the Cairo Geniza” (November 2013), “Rabbis and Other Jews: Rabbinic Literature and Late Antique Judaism” (May 2014), “The Rise of Nationalism and the Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literary Imagination” (April 2015), “Sociality in Modern Jewish Philosophy and German Idealism” (June 2021), “The Aramaic Incantation Bowls in their Late Antique Jewish Contexts” (April 2022), “Talmudic Literature Conference” (April 2023), and “A Symposium in Celebration of Christine Hayes” (April 2024). The Program in Jewish Studies also hosts the Ancient Judaism Regional Seminar on a rotating basis, most recently in 2019 and 2024.
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“Archives of/in Ancient Judaism” (May 6-7, 2027)
- “Mobility, Migration, and Belonging in the Early Modern Global Atlantic”
- “Felix Hausdorff (1868-1942): Between Post-Kantian Philosophy and Modern Mathematics”
- “Rabbinic Narrative in the Jewish-Christian Encounter: New Approaches”