Visiting Faculty 2011-12

Israel Bartal is the Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History and the former dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A world-renowned scholar of the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry, Jewish nationalism, and the Jews of Palestine in the pre-Zionist era, Bartal has written numerous publications, including The Jews of Eastern Europe: 1772–1881 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, 2006) and Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2007). At Rutgers for the 2011–2012 academic year, Bartal will participate in the Bildner Center’s public programming and teach “History of Zionism.”

Anna B. Manchin earned her Ph.D. in Modern European History in 2008 from Brown University with a dissertation entitled “Fables of Modernity: Entertainment Films and the Social Imaginary in Interwar Hungary.” From 2008 through 2009, she held the Ray D. Wolfe Post Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Jewish Studies Center. Her forthcoming publications include: “Imagining Modern Hungary through Film: Debates on National Identity, Modernity and Cinema in early 20^th century Hungary,” in Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: European Perspectives on Film Cultures and Cinema-going, edited by Richard Maltby, et al. (Routledge, 2011), and “Jewish Humor and the Hollywood Narrative in Interwar Hungarian Comedies,” in Storytelling in World Cinemas, edited by Lina Khatib (Wallflower Press, 2011). At Rutgers in the fall, she will teach the courses “Holocaust Media” and “Jews and the Movies.”

The Department of Jewish Studies successfully recruited Sara J. Milstein, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow funded through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The New Faculty Fellows program appoints recent Ph.D.s in the humanities to two-year positions at universities and colleges across the United States where their particular research and teaching expertise augment departmental offerings. The fellowship includes teaching three courses and integration and exchange with the scholarly community at Rutgers. Milstein earned her doctorate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies in 2010 from New York University with a dissertation entitled “Reworking Ancient Texts: Revision through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature.” Her publications include: The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (E.J. Brill, Cuneiform Monographs Series, 2010), coauthored with Daniel Fleming, and “From Rambam to Richard Wright: Job, the Delayed Angel, and the Conception of Modern Midrashim” in Why Hidest Thy Face: Job in Traditions and Literature, Mishael Caspi, ed. (D. & F Scott Publishing, Inc., 2002). In the fall, she will teach “Women in the Bible,” and in the spring, “Jewish Society and Culture I,” and “Beginnings: A Literary Reading of Genesis.”

See Past Visiting Faculty