List of Authors

We are proud to work with the following authors:

Geoffrey  Alderman  studied history at the University of Oxford, where he completed his DPhil in 1969. Currently Michael Gross Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham, he is the acknowledged authority on the history of the Jews in modern Britain. In 2006 Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Letters in respect of his work in this field. For more information about Geoffrey Alderman, please visit www.geoffreyalderman.com.

Ruth Amir  is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Emek Yezreel College, and adjunct faculty member at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests and publications include executive governance and Israeli politics and society.

Lewis Aron  is the Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the author of A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis (The Analytic Press, 1996).

Hamutal Bar-Yosef   (Ph.D. Hebrew University) is Professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of Negev. Bar-Yosef has published nine collections of poetry as well as six academic books and many articles on Hebrew literature in its European context. She translates poetry from English, French and Russian. Bar-Yosef has received the ACUM Prize (1987), the President`s Prize (2002), the Brenner Prize (2005) as well as other prizes for her poetry. Her publications include Trends of Decadence in Modern Hebrew Literature  (Jerusalem 1997) and Symbolism in Modern Poetry (2000). She has also edited an anthology of Hebrew literature in Russian translations (RSUH, 2000).

Herbert Basser  (Ph.D. University of Toronto 1983) is Professor of Religious Studies at Queens University, Canada. He is an author of Pseudo-Rabad, 1998, and Studies in Exegesis: Christian Critiques of Jewish Law and Rabbinic Responses 70-300 CE., 2000.

Sigalit  Ben-Zion  received her Ph.D. degree in 2006 from Trondheim University in Norway in Comparative Religion with a specialization in Social Anthropology.

David  Berger  (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1970) is a former President of the Association for Jewish Studies and Ruth and I. Lewis Professor and Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University.

David  Bethea  is a Vilas Professor of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. in 1977 (University of Kansas). Research interests include: Pushkin and his era, modern Russian poetry (esp. Khodasevich and Brodsky), Russian religious thought and cultural mythology, Russian emigre literature, Anglo-American vs. Russian modernism, 20th century Russian/Slavic literary theory (esp. influence studies), biography. Among his books are: Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

Yoram Bilu  (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 1979) is a professor of anthropology and psychology at the Hebrew University.  His main publications include Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (SUNY Press 1997, co-edited with Eyal Ben-Ari) and Without Bounds: The Life and Death of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana (Wayne State University Press 2000).

John E. Bowlt  (Ph.D. University of St. Andrews, Scotland) is Professor in Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director, Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His most recent book, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-1920. Art, Life and Culture (Thames and Hudson), published in 2008.

Valentina Brougher 

Gary Browning  (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1974) is Professor Emeritus at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Penguin Group, 1985) and Leveraging Your Russian with Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes (Slavica, 2001).

Jack J. Cohen  Rabbi Dr. Jack J, Cohen, has had a long career as an educator, author and public servant. Before he settled in Israel (1961), he served as the Educational Director of Park Synagogue, in Cleveland, the Director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation and the Rabbi of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. During the last six and a half years of his tenure in the States, he also taught courses in the philosophy of religion and education at the Jewish Theological Seminary.In Israel, Dr, Cohen served for 23 years as the Director of the Hillel Foundation at Hebrew University, taught an annual seminar for students of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a course in Jewish thought at at the David Yellin College of Education.

Dr. Cohen has been widely published in Jewish journals and is the author of a number of books, among them The Case For Religious Naturalism, Jewish Education in Democratic Society, The Reunion of Isaac and Ishmael,  and Guides for an Age of Confusion and Major Philosophers of Jewish Prayer in the 20th Century.

Julian Connolly  (Ph.D. Harvard 1977) is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (1992) and editor of Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives (1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (2005). He has published over sixty articles on Russian Literature.

Joan Delaney Grossman  (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of California at Berkeley. Her publications include Edgar Allan Poe in Russia, 1973; Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence, 1984; coedited Creating Life, with Irina Paperno,1994 and William James in Russian Culture, with Ruth Rischin, 2003.

Caryl Emerson  (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 1980) is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of The Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and numerous articles on Russian 19th-century prose, the Russian critical tradition,  Pushkin as prosewriter and playwright, Russian music and opera, Eastern and Central European prose and Russian spiritual philosophy.

Jose Faur  is professor Emeritus, Law School, Netanya Academic College, Netanya, Israel. Obtained Ph.D. in Semitic Philology, University of Barcelona, 1964. (First Jew to receive a doctorate from University of Barcelona since the Expulsion, 1492). Taught at JTS, Bar-Ilan University. Published in Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian and English. Main Books: Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Indiana UP, 1986); In the Shadow of History: Iberian Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (SUNY, 1992); Homo Mysticus: A Guide To Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed (Syracuse UP, 1998)

Yoel Finkelman   (PhD Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. He teaches Talmud and Jewish Thought at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem, and is the Director of Projects and Research at ATID, a Jerusalem-based organization that provides resources and training for Jewish educational leadership.

Simcha Fishbane   (Ph.D. - Concordia University, Montreal Canada 1998) is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Executive Assistant to the President of Touro College. His recent publications include Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature, Brill, 2007; Jewish Studies in Violence, edited by and introduced by Simcha Fishbane UPA, 2006; and Voodoo or Judaism, The Ritual of Kapparot: People Medicine and Maaic in Jewish and Slavic Cultural Tradition, Moscow, 2007.

Danusha Goska  Danusha V. Goska (Ph.D. Indiana University, Bloomington) is an experienced teacher and award-winning writer of numerous articles, essays and fiction in Polish Studies.

Gershon Greenberg  Gershon Greenberg (PhD Columbia University) works at American University in Washington, DC, in the fields of Holocaust religious thought, America-Holy Land, and 19th century German-Jewish thought, and has taught in the departments of Jewish thought at Israel’s major universities.

Lev Luis Grinberg  (Ph.D. Tel Aviv University) is a political economist, sociologist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University. He is the funding Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department (2006-2009), and is the former Director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research (1998-2003).  He was a Fulbright visiting professor at UCLA in 1998, and was also granted Koret and Mellon fellowships. His fields of specialization are the history of the Zionist Labor Movement, Israel's political economy, and the sociology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. His publications include Split Corporatism in Israel (1991), The Histadrut Above all (1993), Introduction to Political Economy (1997), Contested Memory: Myth, Nation and Democracy (2000), Mizrachi Voices (2005), Imagined Peace, Discourse of War (2007); Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine, Democracy vs. Military Rule (2010).

Marat Grinberg  (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2006) is Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His recent essays include “’The Problem of Evil’:  an Exchange with Tony Judt” (The New York Review of Books, 2008); “’All the Young Poets have Become Old Jews’:  Boris Slutsky’s Russian Jewish Canon” (East European Jewish Affairs, 2007) and “The Midrash from Joseph: ‘Isaac and Abraham’ as Brodsky’s Ur-Text” Poetics. Self. Place:  Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone (Bloomington, Slavica, 2007).

Zehavit Gross  senior lecturer and the head of graduate program of Policy and Leadership in Informal Education Systems in the School of Education, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She specializes in Socialisation Processes (religious, secular, feminine and civic) among adolescents. Her research on ‘The World of Zionist Religious Women in Israel’ deals with retrospective perceptions of adolescent females in Israel regarding their religious, civic, feminine and Zionist socialisation in school. In 2003, this research was presented in the Israeli parliament (Knesset). In 2007 she was nominated as a representative of the official delegation of the State of Israel to the fifty first session of the Commission of the Status of Women (CSW) in the United Nations.

Isaac  Heinemann  (1876-1957) was one of the leading Jewish humanists and scholars of the early 20th century. His career spanned the golden age of Jewish scholarship in central Europe and the rise of Jewish studies in modern Israel. He was a leading authority in Hellenistic and rabbinic studies, writing major studies of Philo of Alexandria and the rabbinic lore (agada).

Anat Helman  (Ph.D. Hebrew University) is a lecturer in the Jewish History Department and the Cultural Studies Program at Hebrew University. Her most recent publications include: Tel Aviv’s Culture during the Mandate Era (in Hebrew) and ‘The Voice of the First Hebrew City to its Residents’: Municipal Posters in Mandate Era Tel Aviv” with Yael Reshef (in Hebrew -forthcoming in Israel).

Libby Henik  Libby Henik, LCSW, is in private practice in New York and New Jersey.

Dennis G. Ioffe  defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, where he currently serves as an affiliated researcher. He is now preparing his dissertation to appear in print. During the past years he has edited and co-edited two book-length collections of research articles devoted to various problems in Russian modernism and cultural history (published in Moscow and in Amsterdam). He has published a number of scholarly essays (about 50 in number) on different topics in Russian cultural history, theory of language, religion, art-history, semiotics and contemporary literature and culture. He spent one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Russian and German Studies at Memorial University (Canada).

David C. Jacobson  (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University. His publications include Creator, Are You Listening?: Israeli Poets on God and Prayer (Indiana University Press, 2007); Modern Midrash:  The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers  (State University of New York Press, 1987); Does David Still Play Before You?: Israeli Poetry and the Bible (Wayne State University Press, 1997); Palestinian Identities in History and Literature, ed. (with Kamal Abdel-Malek Israeli, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); and History and Literature: New Readings of Jewish Texts in Honor of Arnold J. Band (with William Cutter, Brown Judaic Studies, 2002).

Jack Jedwab   (Ph.D. Concordia University) is Executive Director of the Association for Canadian Studies and a lecturer at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. From 1994-1998 he served as Executive Director of the Quebec Region of Canadian Jewish Congress. He has published essays in books, scholarly journals and in newspapers across the country, notably in the
Montreal Gazette, La Presse and Le Devoir.

Raphael  Jospe   teaches at Bar-Ilan and Hebrew Universities. His books include a 3-volume Hebrew history of medieval Jewish philosophy and Jewish Philosophy: Foundations and Extensions, and Torah and Sophia: The Life and Thought of Shem Tov ibn Falaquera

Haim Katz  is the chairman of the International Commission For Jewish Legal Affairs (ICJLaw) and chairman of the World Center Of B’nai B’rith. In 2000, Israel’s Minister of Justice appointed him to chair the Ethics Committee of Hadassah Hospital. Haim Katz has written several works in the legal field – “The Family and the Law in Israel” (2001),  “Probate and Inheritance -  The Complete Guide” (2009) as well as other works relating to real estate and the law.

Gideon Katz  (PhD Haifa University) is a lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His publications include articles on Israeli culture, Jewish Thought and Ancient Philosophy. He is the author of the book The Soul is Big, Life is Small: The Duality of the Soul According to Plato's Phaedo and Republic (Hebrew University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Iyunim bitkumat yisrael. 

Menachem Kellner  Born and educated in the United States, Menachem Kellner (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, 1973) has lived in Israel for the last 30 years. Author, editor, or translator of 16 books and over 100 scholarly articles, Kellner’s most recent book is Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (2006).

Edmund Kessler  attended the Jan Kazimierz School of Law in Lwow, Poland. He graduated with an Advanced Degree in law in 1931. He was registered with the Bar Association in Krakow and Lwow, Poland. After emigrating to America, he completed a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from New York University in 1958. He worked as an accountant for the New York City Rent and Rehabilitation Commission until his retirement. Mr. Kessler began translating the diary himself shortly before his death. However, he was not able to finish the task that became his daughter’s legacy.

Alfred Kokh  (Ph.D., St. Petersburg School of Economics) is an economist, politician, businessman and journalist. From 1987 to 1990 he worked as a professor of economics, then in 1990-1997 he joined the government service as a member of the cabinet from 1993-1997.  He was leading the election company for the liberal block in 2003. After leaving the state service he was the head of a few major companies, including NTV television company and Gazprom-Media. Kokh is the author of The Selling of the Soviet Empire: Politics & Economics of Russia's Privatization-Revelations of the Principal Insider (1998), Privatization in a Russian Way (in Russian, with A. Chubais, M. Boiko, D. Vasiliev and others,  1999), Case of Vodka (with Igor Svinarenko, 2003-2005), and many articles in Russian periodicals.

Ezra  Kopelowitz  is a sociologist specializing in Israel-Diaspora relations and issues of Jewish identity, education and religion in Israel and the United States. From 2000-2003, Dr. Kopelowitz served as Director of the Research Activities of the Department of Jewish Education of the Jewish Agency for Israel and as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, in 2004.

Diane Kriger  A lawyer by training, Diane Kriger (Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2001) had a strong interest in the classics, ancient languages and Talmudic studies. Dr. Kriger wrote or contributed to several articles on slavery and the status of women in ancient Judaism and in the surrounding societies. In 1997-1998, she co-founded and served as associate editor of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, an academic journal published electronically. Dr. Kriger edited texts and articles on biblical studies, and – most recently – she edited a new Siddur for Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Dr. Kriger died in December 2008.

Oleg Lekmanov  is a professor at Moscow State University. His main interest has focused on Russian poetry of the twentieth century. Dr. Lekmanov has authored over two hundred articles and his latest papers explore the creative writings of O. Mandelstam, A. Akhmatova, and A. Solzhenitsyn. He is the author of Book on Akmeism (2000) and Sergei Esenin (2007, with Michail Sverdlov).

Leonard  Levin   teaches Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York.

Yuri  Leving  earned his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in 2002, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and continued his research in visual arts at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He came to Dalhousie University after two years teaching at The George Washington University (2004-2006). His main field of interest is Russian literature, culture and film. Leving is the author of a book, Train Station – Garage – Hangar. Vladimir Nabokov and Poetics of Russian Urbanism (2004, Short-listed for Andrey Bely Prize). He also co-edited two volumes of articles, Eglantine: Collection of Philological Essays to Honor the Sixtieth Anniversary of Roman Timenchik (2005) and Empire N. Nabokov and Heirs (2006).

Marcus C. Levitt  (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1984) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California. Dr. Levitt is known for both his work on eighteenth-century Russian culture and on Pushkin. Major publications include: Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Cornell University Press 1989), Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Volume 150) in the series The Dictionary of Literary Biography (1995; Editor and contributor) and Making Russia Visible: The Status of the Visual in Eighteenth-century Russian Literature (forthcoming).

Mark Lipovetsky  (Ph.D. Ural State University, 1989) is a professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and joint faculty member at the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Boulder. His most recent book,  Paralogies: The Transformations of (Post)Modern Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie), published in 2008.

Angela  Livingstone    (Ph.D., Cambridge University). After one book on a German literature topic (Lou Andreas-Salome, Her Life and Writings), went on to focus on Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a researcher Dr. Livingstone has specialized mainly in the work of Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrei Platonov. For more than thirty years she taught in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, Colchester, U.K. with which, now retired, she is still closely affiliated, holding the title of Research Professor.

Rachel Margolis  After the Holocaust, Rachel Margolis received a Ph.D. in biology in and taught until the late 1980's.  She then co-founded Lithuania's only real Holocaust museum, the Green House in Vilnius.  She is also responsible for the discovery and transcription of the Kazimierz Sakowicz diary, published here in the US under the title, Ponary Diary: A Bystander's Account of Mass Murder (Yale University Press, 2004).

Marjorie Margolis 

Joseph Margoshes (1866-1955) a writer for the New York Yiddish daily, Morgen Journal

Zvi Mark  is a Senior Lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and a Research Fellow of Shalom  Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His previous publications include Mysticism and Madness; The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (Continuum,  London and New York, 2009) and numerous articles examining the esoterica of Bratslav Hasidism.

Irene Masing-Delic  (Ph.D. University of Stockholm) is a Professor at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; author of Abolishing Death (1992).

Hugh  McLean   (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1956) taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley, now Professor Emeritus. Author of Nikolai Leskov, the Man and His Art, edited In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy

Abraham Melamed  (Ph.D. Tel-Aviv University) is Professor of Jewish Philosophy and holds the Wolfson Chair for the study of the Jewish Cultural Heritage at the University of Haifa, Israel. He has published numerous studies, mainly concentrating on Medieval and Renaissance Jewish intellectual history, history of ideas and political philosophy. His most recent books include The Black in Jewish Culture (Routledge, 2003); On the Shoulders of Giants: A History of the Debate between Moderns and Ancients in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Thought (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2003); The Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy (Haifa University Press, 2010); and Medieval Jewish Political Philosophy (Hebrew, forthcoming).

Alexander Militarev  is a linguist and cultural anthropologist specialized in Semitic, Jewish, Biblical, Near Eastern and African studies, Professor of History and Philology of the Ancient East at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, ex-president of the Jewish University in Moscow, and member of the American-Russian Project "Evolution of Human Languages" at the Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, NM).

Henrietta Mondry  is a Professor and Director of the Russian Program at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her recent books include Populist Writers and the Jews: In the Footsteps of 'Two Hundred Years Together,' St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005 (in Russian); and Pure, Strong and Sexless: Russian Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Dahlia Moore  (Ph.D. Tel Aviv University) is a professor and the Head of the Graduate Program, Department of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies in Israel. Her recent publications include A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Political, Economic and Social Attitudes (with Salem Aweiss. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007) and "Job Concessions, Role Conflict and Work Satisfaction in Gender-typical and -atypical Occupation: The Case of Israel" which appeared in Gender Issues in March 2009.

Ohad Nachtomy 

Jacob  Neusner  is Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism and Senior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Theology, Bard College. He also is a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ, and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, in England. He has published more than 1000 books and unnumbered articles, both scholarly and academic and popular andjournalistic, and is the most published humanities scholar in the world.

Michael Oppenheim  (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976) is Professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal. His latest book is Jewish Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Narrating the Interhuman (2006). He has published books and articles in the areas of modern Jewish philosophy, Judaism in the modern period, philosophy of religion and psychology of religion.

Lyudmila  Parts  (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2002) is Associate Professor at the Department of Russian and
Slavic Studies at McGill University. Her book The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic (2008) explores the intersection of intertextuality, cultural memory, and cultural myth. She has published articles on Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstaya, Petrushevskaya, P'etsukh, and Pelevin.

Monty Noam Penkower  is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Machon Lander Graduate Center of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem. He was Victor J. Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College in New York City, and also taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, and Stern College, and in the graduate History Departments of New York University and Yeshiva University. His numerous publications include The Federal Writers’ Project (1977); The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (1983); The Emergence of Zionist Thought (1986); The Holocaust and Israel Reborn: From Catastrophe to Sovereignty (1994); and Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945 (2002). The Jews Were Expendable received the B’nai B’rith A.D.L. Merit for Educational Distinction and, together with The Emergence of Zionist Thought, garnered the second Samuel Belkin Memorial Literary Award from Yeshiva University.

Meir Persoff  Now a freelance writer and editor, Meir Persoff edited the London Jewish Chronicle’s news, features, arts, Judaism, letters and obituaries sections during a distinguished 40-year career on the paper. He has written extensively on Jewish topics – notably Jewish art and Judaica – and served on the Jewish Book Council and as president of the Israel-Judaica Philatelic Society. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he holds a London University MA (with distinction) in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, having specialised in modern Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism, and earned his PhD from Middlesex University, London, for his research into the British Chief Rabbinate’s relationship with the non-Orthodox movements. He was appointed a Justice of the Peace for the Middlesex Commission Area in 2001.

Pavel Polian  (Ph.D. Moscow University) is a geographer, historian and literary scholar (publishing under the pseudonym Pavel Nerler). His interests range from the history of forced migration, Jewish immigration and emigration, to the history of captivity during the Second World War and history of Holocaust. Polian graduated from the faculty of geography of Moscow University where he later defended two dissertations (1980 and 1998) and where he has been a professor since 2008. He is also a researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Polian is the author of Victims of two dictatorships. Life, labor, humiliation and death of Soviet war prisoners and  Ostarbeiters abroad and in their motherland (1996), Deportiert nach Hause (2001), Against their Will: the History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (2003) and many others.

Eunice G. Pollack  (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of North Texas. She is a member of the Academic Council of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Her published works include The Childhood We Have Lost: When Siblings Were Caregivers, 1900-1970 and The Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, which she co-edited with Professor Stephen Norwood (2008).

Valentina Polukhina  is professor Emeritus of Russian Literature Keele University, England, is the author of several major studies of Brodsky: Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (CUP, 1989), Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries, vol. I (St Martin’s Press, 1992); a Russian version Brodskii glazami sovremennikov (vol. I, 1997, 2006) and A Dictionary of Brodsky’s Tropes (Tartu University Press, 1995). She is editor of a collection of Brodsky’s interviews - " Large Book of Interviews (Bol’shaya kniga intervyu) (2000, 2005, 2007); with Lev Loseff, of Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (1990) and Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (1999, 2002), with A. Stepanov and I. Fomenko, of Brodsky’s Poetics ("Poetika Brodskogo", Tver, 2003), with A. Korchinsky – Joseph Brodsky: A strategy of reading ("Iosif Brodkii: Strategiya chteniya", Moscow, 2005). Among her articles we can find essays on Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, Mandelshtam, Shcherbina, Gorbanevskaya, etc. She had edited bilingual collections of Olga Sedakova (1994), Oleg Prokofiev (1995), Dmitry Prigov (1995), Evgeny Rein (2001). Recently a second volume Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries was republished in St Petersburg (SPb, Zvezda, 2006).

Shimon Redlich  (PhD New York University) served as Professor of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University until his retirement in 2003. For many years, he headed the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies at BGU. Redlich has published many books and articles on the History of the Jews in the Soviet Union and on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, including War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR and Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945.

Tatiana Retivov 

Menachem Revivi   received his BA in psychology and sociology from Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his master’s degree in educational psychology from New York University.
For the past twenty-five years, Mr. Revivi has been a leader in Israeli and Jewish Communal affairs and is recognized for his expertise in the areas of Jewish education and Israel-Diaspora relations.

Gregg Rickman  (PhD, University of Miami) was the first U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, serving from 2006-2009.  He has traveled to twenty-eight nations on behalf of the victims of anti-Semitism and is the author of two books on Holocaust-era restitution.

Sara Libby Robinson  received her PhD in Camparative History from Brandeis University.  Her other publications include “Novel Anti-Semitisms: Vampiric Reflections of the Jew in Britain, 1875-1914,” which appeared in Jewish Studies in Violence: A Collection of Essays (University Press of America, 2006).

Ira  Robinson   is Professor of Judaic studies in the Department of Religion of Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. He is president of the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies. His latest book is: Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896-1930, (2007).

Nils Roemer 

(PhD Columbia University) is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His recent publications include “The City of Worms in Modern Jewish Traveling Cultures of Remembrance,” 2005 and Jewish Scholarship and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Germany (Wisconsin University Press, 2005).

Naftali Rothenberg  is a senior research fellow and Jewish Culture and Identity chair at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute who also serves as the town Rabbi of Har Adar, Israel. He has authored and edited ten books.

Nissan  Rubin   (Ph.D. Bar-Ilan University, 1977) is Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University.

His published books include: Research Methods in Social Science - Strategy, Design and Measurement. Tel-Aviv: Dekel, 1978 (with Ernest Krausz and Steven H. Miller); The Beginning of Life: Rites of Birth, Circumcision and Redemption of the First-Born in the Talmud and Midrash. Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 1995; The End of Life: Rites of Burial and Mourning in the Talmud and Midrash. Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha- Meuchad, 1988; The Joy of Life: Rites of Betrothal and Marriage in the Talmud and Midrash. Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 2004.

Dominic Rubin   (Ph.D. in Linguistics, London University) is a lecturer in Philosophy, Biblical Hebrew, Old Testament at St.Philaret’s Orthodox Christian Institute and the Moscow Higher School of Economics.

Avi Sagi  (Ph.D. Bar-Ilan University, 1988) is a Professor at Bar-Ilan University and Senior Research Fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. His recent books include Circles of Jewish Identity (with Zvi Zohar), Tel Aviv, 2000; `Elu va Elu` A Study on the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse, Tel Aviv, 1996

Dov Schwartz  is The Natali and Isidor Friedman Chair on “Teaching the Writings of Joseph Dov Soloveitchik,” Bar Ilan University. He is the author of Religion or Halakhah? The Philosophy of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, 2007; Central Problems of Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 2005; Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 2005; and others.

Eliezer  Schweid   is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University. He has published 40 books in general and specific areas of Jewish thought of all periods, and has commented frequently on the relevance of the legacy of Jewish thought to contemporary issues of Jewish and universal human concern. He is the recipient of the distinguished Israel Prize and two honorary doctorates.

Miryam Segal 

Thomas  Seifrid   (Ph.D. Cornell University, 1984) is a Professor of Slavic Studies, University of Southern California. Author of Andrei Platonov. Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860-1930 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

David Shatz  (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of Philosophy at Yeshiva University. He has authored, edited, co-edited twelve books, dealing with both Jewish and general philosophy. The books include Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Jewish Spirituality; Judaism, Science and Moral Responsibility; Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry; and three anthologies in philosophy of the religion. His work in general philosophy focuses on the theory of knowledge, free will, and the philosophy of religion, while his work in Jewish philosophy addresses a variety of areas, most represented in this volume. He is editor of The Torah u-Madda  Journal, a publication devoted to the interaction between Jewish and general culture, and editor of a  book series, thus far ten volumes, that produces previously unpublished manuscripts of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. He earned his Ph.D with distinction in general philosophy from Columbia University and ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

Moshe Shokeid  (Ph.D. 1968, University of Manchester, UK) is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University. His published books include Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New York, A Gay Synagogue in New York, An Israeli’s Voyage: Tel-Aviv, New York and Between (Hebrew).

Norman Simms  is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and English at University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He is the author of A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works, 2004; Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, 2004; Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature, 2007.

Oliver Smith  (Ph.D. University College London, 2009) is a lecturer in Russian at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on Russian intellectual tradition as it developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century. His recent publications include "The Ecology of History: Russian Thought on the Future of the World", which appeared in Ecological Awareness: Exploring Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics, LIT-Verlag, Studies in Religion and the Environment, 2009 and "Is Humanity King to Creation? The Thought of Vladimir Solov'ev in the Light of Ecological Crisis" published in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2008.

Henry Srebrnik  (Ph.D., University of Birmingham, England) is Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. His most recent books include Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924-1951 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) and London Jews and British Communism, 1935-1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995) He also served on the editorial team for De Facto States: The Quest For Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2004) with Tozun Bahcheli and Barry Bartmann.

H. Norman Strickman  (Ph.D. Dropsie University, 1970) is a rabbi at Marine Park Jewish Center and a Professor of Judaic Studies at Touro College, New York.

Shulamit Valler  (PhD, Jewish Theological Seminary) is a professor of Talmud and Chair of the Jewish History department at the University of Haifa.  Her numerous publications include Women and Womanhood in the Babylonian Talmud (1999) and Massekhet Sukkah – a Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud (2009).

Frederick H. White   is Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah Valley University. In 2006, he published Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (MQUP). It focuses on the literary portraits of Leonid Andreev by eight of his contemporaries, which formed Kniga o Leonide Andreeve [A Book about Leonid Andreev] (Berlin: 1922). This research led to an examination of Andreev’s own first person narratives of illness, investigated within the cultural context of “degeneration” as it was understood in the Russian fin de siecle. Resulting articles from this research have been published in Voprosy literatury [Questions of Literature], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [The New Literary Observer], Russkaia literatura [Russian Literature], Canadian Slavonic Papers, Slavic and East European Journal, New Zealand Slavonic Journal and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. Dr. White has recently completed a second book manuscript, Neurasthenia: Constructions of Madness in the Life and Narratives of Leonid Andreev.

Marion Wyse  is a multi-University of Toronto graduate, during which time Tyndale published her novel The Prophet and the Prostitute. Her ThD (1998) investigated the history of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue. She taught six years in China's Xiamen University and three in Moscow affiliated with Touro College New York. CrossCurrents published her "Fa Lung Gong and Religious Freedom" in Spring 2000.

Hadas Yaron   (Ph.D. Cambridge University, 2006) is a lecturer at the School of Society and Government at the Academic College Tel Aviv Yafo.

Noam Yuran  is a professor of Film and Television in Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University.

Viktor  Zhivov  is a Professor at UC Berkeley and Institut russkogo iazyka, Akademiia nauk, Moscow. He received his Ph.D. at Moscow University (Linguistics). Viktor Zhivov's research interests include the history of the Russian language and Slavic literary languages, East Slavic and Byzantine cultural history, Old and 18th century Russian literature. Books: Ocherki istoricheskoi morfologii russkogo iazyka XVII - XVIII veka. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2004; Razyskaniia v oblasti istorii i predystorii russkoi kul’tury. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2002; Jazyk I kul'tura v Rossii XVIII veka. Moscow: Shkola "Iazyki russkoi kul'tury", 1996; Kul'turnye konflikty v istorii russkogo literaturnogo iaszyka XVII - nachala XIX veka. Moscow: Institute of the Russian Language, 1990; l russo. A cura di N. Marcialis e A. Parenti. Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1995 [written jointly with L. Kasatkin and L. Krysin]; Tsar i Bog. Semiotyczne aspekty sakralizacji monarchy w Rosji. Przelozy i wstepem opatrzyl H. Paprocki. Panstwowy Instytyt Wydawniczy. Warszawa, 1992 [written jointly with Boris Uspenskij]; Ocherki po sintagmaticheskoi fonologii. Moscow University Press, 1980.