Students
Beshouy Botros – Ph.D. student, History
Beshouy Botros’s dissertation examines the emergence of trans medicine between Egypt and the Maghreb. The third and fourth chapters situate two prominent Jewish physician-scientists within broader histories of science and the body. The first is the Russian French endocrinologist and surgeon Serge Voronoff, who worked in Egypt and Algeria from the 1890s through the 1920s and innovated interspecies testicular transplants and other techniques for rejuvenation. The second is the German sexologist and surgeon Ludwig Levy Lenz. Lenz performed some of the first gender-affirming genital surgeries at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin before seeking refuge in Cairo in 1936, where he continued to practice until the mid 1960s. Voronoff lost his two brothers to the Shoah, and Lenz sued the German government for restitution from his new home in Cairo while navigating the complex realities of being a Jewish doctor during the height of Gamal abd el Nasser’s Arab nationalist project. This project dilates on these physician-scientists’ place within the cosmopolitan urban fabrics they occupied and the political transformations they witnessed in the inter and postwar years in order to bring into relief their negotiations of personal loss and professional exceptionalism. Panning out to broader intellectual currents, these chapters complicate the perceived relationship between psychoanalysis, sexology and Judaism by considering how these schools of thought took shape in North Africa and played a role in the making of some of the world’s earliest gender clinics.
Orit Gugenheim Katz - Ph.D. student, Spanish and Portuguese
My current research project investigates the signifying, othering function of Jewishness in Gabriel García Márquez’s work as part of my broader dissertation project studying Jewish characters within the Latin American Boom literary canon. In the case of García Márquez, Jewishness features most prominently in his invocation of the mythical trope, the Wandering Jew (“judío errante”). The author depicts this character as a monstrous and fantastic portent of epidemics, both in his seminal Cien años de soledad and in his short story, “Un día después del sábado.” Based on critical analyses of the historical and literary genealogies of the Wandering Jew, I posit that García Márquez mobilizes this figure—and Jewishness more broadly—as a rhetorical signifier of mythical difference, fantastic exoticism, and theological danger. This depiction speaks to a broader perspective of Jews within the contemporaneous Latin American literary imagination.
Sam Levin – Ph.D. student, American Studies
This project unearths the organizational program and ideological vision of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). This loose but influential alliance of aspiring fascist revolutionaries from throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa, was founded in England in 1962. Based on preliminary research, I plan to explore how a fractured global fascist movement led by the WUNS reconstituted itself by way of globally integrated antisemitic media cultures in the aftermath of the second World War. Earlier far-right organizers promoted discrete, disciplined national political organizations made up of committed adherents. By contrast, WUNS promoted decentralized networks of publishing houses, record labels, tabloids, and radio broadcasters, whom they spurred to generate oceans of antisemitic media content. Under the guidance of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, French Aryan mystic Savitri Devi, and British National Socialist Movement leader Colin Jordan, the WUNS gathered global fascist remnants into a postwar underground movement and bound them together through an earth-spanning media ecosystem. WUNS imagined a cross-class movement with low stakes of entry: WUNS emphasized gradual political change through an accumulation of small encounters with their media output. They promoted progressive popular softening to their violent program of genocidal violence as the foundation for the rebirth of global fascism. While WUNS itself was relatively short lived, its organizing vision helped spawn a vast network of far-right publishers, radio stations, record labels, and, later, internet message boards, all devoted to WUNS’ organizing model of global fascist revolution by way of decentralized media cultures.
Orly Oglivy’ 27
This research seeks to bridge the gap between current research and the realities of student life on American college campuses by analyzing how students at Yale University have been impacted by antisemitism since October 7th. In the wake of that event, much of the public debate and academic research has focused on questions of institutional governance, free speech, and the role of universities in times of political crises but has given little attention to the lived experiences of students navigating campus life following October 7th. By concentrating on student reactions and attitudes, the study will provide an objective, grounded, and accurate account of the climate on Yale’s campus during a turbulent and divisive time.
Gabriel Rom – Ph.D. student, History
My project reconsiders the place of Mosaic Law and Jewish historical continuity in European political and religious thought between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. I identify an overlooked counter-tradition that treated Jewish adherence to Mosaic Law as a political virtue worthy of emulation and protection rather than a sign of religious corruption or political backwardness. While Christian Hebraists from the Reformation through the Romantic Era drew extensively on Hebrew sources, they largely sustained a sharp distinction between the admired polity of ancient Israel and the alleged obsolescence of contemporary Judaism. Against this dominant pattern, I reconstruct what I term unconventional Hebraism, a lineage beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s creative—and virtually unknown—reinterpretation of conventional Hebraist sources and extending through Polish Romantics in exile and early proto-Zionist thinkers, all of whom understood Mosaic law and Jewish historical continuity as resources for political survival under conditions of national dispersion and statelessness.
Faculty
Alice Kaplan is Sterling Professor of French and is a specialist of 20th-century France. Her teaching and research have focused on the Second World War, the Liberation, and the Algerian War, and on the writers Céline, Proust, and Camus. Kaplan is a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur. She was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History for her book The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach and the Henry Adams Prize for The Interpreter. Kaplan’s current project is a history of the preparation of the Nuremberg war crimes trials by her father, American prosecutor Sidney J. Kaplan (1909-1962).