Yosef Malka is a PhD student in the Department of History and will begin his JD at Yale in the fall of 2027. His research examines American legal history, political and legal theory, and modern Jewish politics. He is currently completing a book co-authored with Professor William Forbath (University of Texas School of Law) on early twentieth-century America’s “Jewish Constitutional Moment,” when liberal, progressive, and socialist lawyers debated and helped constitute the legal and cultural terms of Jewish belonging and apartness in America.
His work has appeared in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities (with William Forbath) and the American Journal of the Law and Equality (with James Loeffler). He has presented his research at the Midlands Political Thought Postgraduate Conference, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Centro Primo Levi.
He received his BA from Yale in History in 2024 and his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge, where he held the Mellon Fellowship, in 2025. He has worked as an intern for the New York Attorney General and Dissent magazine, and as a Residential Teaching Assistant for the Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program.