Avner Shavit

2020 Silverberg Distinguished Scholar in Residence

Avner Shavit holds a PhD from the New Sorbonne University – Paris III. He has presented his works in the universities of Cambridge, Poznan and Vienna, among others. He is also one of the most prominent film critics in Israel and has been covering the local and international scene for the last two decades, in which he has covered major film festivals and published interviews with leading filmmakers.

SPRING 2021 COURSES

CJST 250 - Eyes Wide Shut: The Eternal Presence of the Absent Arab in Israeli Cinema

CJST 252 - The Five Rachels: Jewish Women in Contemporary American Culture

    

Evan Goldstein

Visiting Faculty

Evan studies the aesthetics and politics of difference in modern Jewish culture. He's currently working on his PhD at Yale, writing about the queer paths of Jewish identity in twentieth-century literature (Some of his favorites: Marcel Proust, Anna Margolin, Cynthia Ozick). Evan is interested in how Jewish writers confront normative ideals of sexuality and race in their attempt to articulate a sense of what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. Before Yale, he studied theology at Boston College and Union Theological Seminary, and he currently lives in Boston with his partner and three perfect tuxedo cats.

SPRING 2021 COURSES

CJST 222 - Identity and Jewish Literature: Sexuality, Race, and Gender

Emilie Amar-Zifkin

Visiting Faculty

Emilie Amar-Zifkin is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University, with a focus in medieval Jewish history. Her dissertation explores issues of Jewish-Christian interaction by analyzing the observance and observation of public religion in medieval France and Germany. Emilie’s work, which looks in part at questions of space and spectatorship in liturgical processions and religious theatre, is informed by her training in stage management, theology, and Hebrew Bible. She is interested in the ways that Biblical narrative has been represented theatrically in both Jewish and Christian contexts, and in the impact that this has had across history on inter-religious relations and Jewish identity formation.

SPRING 2021 COURSES

RELI 201 - Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)