Current Students
Jewish Studies Cluster Students
Rebecca Turner
rebeccaturner2029@u.northwestern.edu
Rebecca Turner is a second-year PhD student in Theatre and Drama (IPTD). Her research focuses on Yiddish women dramatists with the goal to document, understand, and uplift their art. This includes work from marginalized genres such as children’s theatre and shund [trash] musicals as well as “high art” and political dramas. She holds a BA in English (Drama and Theatre) and Jewish Studies from McGill University.
Gabriel Ben-Jacob
gabrielbenjacob2028@u.northwestern.edu
Gabriel Ben-Jacob is a third-year PhD student in the History Department studying nineteenth-century American Jewish history. He is broadly interested in American Judaism, Jewish identity, the Reform movement, and Zionism. His research focuses on the rise of Jewish nationalism and the relationship between Jewish and Christian religious thought. Gabriel holds a BA in History from the University of Pennsylvania.
Sarah Marks Mininsohn
sarahmininsohn@u.northwestern.edu
Sarah Marks Mininsohn is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Theatre with a focus Jewish Studies and Critical Dance Studies. She researches histories of Jewish Italian migration and ghettoization through choreographic methods. This research was supported by a 2022-23 Fulbright Artist Grant, and she has presented her findings at Columbia College Chicago, University of Bologna, and Dance Studies Association. She holds an MFA in Dance from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she received a Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellowship. She holds a BA in Dance and Sociology from Wesleyan University.
Brooklyn Hortenstine
bhortenstine@u.northwestern.edu
Brooklyn Hortenstine is a Ph.D. student in the History Department. She holds a BA in History from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and a masters in Comparative History from Central European University in Vienna, Austria, where she was involved with the Jewish Studies program. Brooklyn is interested in the history of people with disabilities and Holocaust studies. She is currently researching the roles and survival tactics of disabled people under Nazism, as well as interactions between the Jewish community and the disabled at the time.
Danylo Leshchyshyn
DanyloLeshchyshyn2029@u.northwestern.edu
Danylo Leshchyshyn is a History PhD student focusing on modern Ukrainian and East European history. He is particularly interested in the history of relations between various ethnicities, religious groups, and nationalist movements in the region. Danylo has presented papers on the development of narratives of apostolic succession in the Constantinopolitan, Ukrainian, and Russian Orthodox Churches from the Byzantine Empire to the Russo-Ukrainian War, on the Galician Jewish population in the West Ukrainian People's Republic (1918-1919), on the conflicting narratives surrounding the 4th Rebbe of Belz's survival of the Shoah, and the relationship between the command structures of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the 14th Waffen-SS "Galicia" Division during the Second World War. He has a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.
Noah Marcus
noahmarcus2027@u.northwestern.edu
Noah Marcus is a first-year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD) program. He earned both his BA in Theatre and his MA in Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy from the University of Ottawa where he wrote his thesis on the performance of Jewish rituals in real life and their performance on the theatrical stage in The Dybbuk: Or Between Two Worlds. His research interests include Jewish theatre, Jewish rituals, and the performance of identity. He is interested in not only how Jewish identity is created and performed on the stage, but also how such theatrical performances of Jewishness interact with existing Jewish identities and/or create a new sense of Jewishness at both the individual and community level. In addition to the Jewish Studies Cluster, Noah is affiliated with the Critical Studies in Theatre and Performance Cluster.
Molly Schiffer
mollyschiffer2027@u.northwestern.edu
Molly Schiffer is a first-year PhD student in political science studying the relationship between Jewish-American political identity and American political development. In the past, she has completed work on the Jewish Labor Bund’s diasporic movement to lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the impact of the diaspora on Jewish-American political coalescence. Looking forward, she hopes to complete a project on the advocacy of contemporary left-wing Jewish organizations, and their normative appeals to American Jews on the basis of identity.
Paul Feller
paulfellergumucio2024@u.northwestern.edu
Paul Feller-Simmons is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at Northwestern University, where he is a member of the Medieval Studies Cluster and a Presidential Fellow. His research interrogates early modern musical exchanges across religious boundaries, examining how sound facilitated Jewish community formation and identity negotiation. His forthcoming article, “Sounding the Nação: Aural Conversion and Acoustic Community Formation at the Amsterdam Sephardic Synagogue” investigates how Italianate musical practices were adopted by the Amsterdam Sephardic community, arguing that these performances were not only aesthetic choices but tools for social cohesion. In addition to his research, Paul serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-coordinates the Jewish Studies Graduate Cluster at Northwestern.
Arne Holverscheid
arneholverscheid2026@u.northwestern.edu
Arne Holverscheid is a first-year PhD student in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University. He is interested in political behavior and methodology, with a focus on political accountability, voting behavior and corruption. Arne also has an active interest in Israeli politics and, more generally, in comparative perspectives within political science. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Munich as well as an MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics. Before graduate school, he worked in financial crime prosecution and management consulting.
Kalia Vogelman-Natan
KaliaVogelman-natan2024@u.northwestern.edu
Kalia Vogelman-Natan is a third-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program, working in the Center on Media and Human Development with Dr. Ellen Wartella. Her studies focus on the role of media in the lives of children and their parents. Kalia is particularly interested in the intersection of children, religion, and media, as well as the impact of children’s religious media on families, communities, and institutions. She holds a BA in International Relations with a minor in English Literature & Linguistics, and an MA in Communication from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Savoy Curry
SavoyCurry2025@u.northwestern.edu
Savoy Curry is a second-year PhD student in the History Department. Her studies focus on gender and sexuality during the medieval period. She is particularly interested in the relationships between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women, and their connections to broader religious movements in Western Europe throughout the 10th-15th centuries. Prior to her studies at Northwestern, Savoy earned an Honors BA in History and Medieval Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY).
Liza Bernstein
lizasb2026@u.northwestern.edu
Liza Bernstein finished her first year of coursework while also spending the year focusing on the fourth chapter of the Talmud tractate Kiddushin. Bernstein has focused her research in this chapter on questions of lineage, masculinity, and hierarchical relationships in the Talmud. She hopes to continue this project as she begins her second year.
Emma Davis
EmmaDavis2025@u.northwestern.edu
Emma Davis is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science. She is interested in modern Jewish political thought, international relations theory, and post-colonial thought. She received an MSt in Jewish Studies from Oxford University and BA in Political Science from Vassar College.
Anastasiya Novatorskaya
Anastasiyanovatorskaya2026@u.northwestern.edu
Anastasiya Novatorskaya studies modern Eastern European history with a focus on early twentieth-century Ukrainian and Polish nationalism. She earned a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.
Mahmure Idil Ozkan
MahmureOzkan2023@u.northwestern.edu
Idil Ozhan is a linguistic anthropology doctoral student at Northwestern University. Her dissertation project investigates the 2015 citizenship offer of Spain to Sephardic Jews, exploring language ideologies, citizenship, transnational migration, and the understandings of homeland and belonging among Turkish Sephardic Jews. Having a BA in sociology from Bogazici University, and an MA in Cultural Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, her MA thesis dealt with the affect and temporal politics of language loss. Idil worked as TA at the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University (2014-17). As co-founder of YATOC (The Study Group on Jewish Communities) in Istanbul Bilgi University, she co-organized a number of roundtables and academic workshops on Jewish Studies in Turkey.
Anastasiia Simferovska
AnastasiiaSimferovska2023@u.northwestern.edu
Anastasiia Simferovska is a PhD student at the NU Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She wrote her MA thesis on Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) focusing on the ways Babel used Judaic sacred and profane time to build his chronotope . Anastasiia is also a PhD candidate in Art History at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Ukraine. She wrote her art history dissertation on Jewish, Polish, Armenian, and Ukrainian portraits in the turn-of-the- century Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg), a major Austrian and Polish multi-ethnic East European city of the time. In her scholarly endeavors, Anastasiia focuses on the intersection of the visual and the verbal in 1900-1945 Eastern Europe, particularly on the multi-ethnic territories of the former Habsburg Galicia. Her interests also include Jewish art during the Holocaust, and the transformation of artists' identities in the 20 th centuryTKUMA Institute for Jewish Studies (Dnipro, Ukraine, Fall, 2018).
Omri Tubi
omritubi2015@u.northwestern.edu
Omri Tubi is a doctoral candidate at the sociology department. His research focuses on the relationship between public health campaigns and state-formation. Omri's dissertation examines the contribution of American Jewish public health organizations working in Palestine and Israel and maintained by American Jewish bodies to Israeli state formation. Specifically, he focuses on issues of elite relations and models of institutional development. Omri holds a BA in sociology and anthropology and history from Bar Ilan University and an MA in sociology and anthropology from Tel Aviv University. He was a 2020-2021 recipient of a Global Impacts fellowship from Northwestern's Buffett Institute and is currently the recipient of the 2021-2022 Crown Graduate Fellowship. Omri's work appeared in the journal Theory and Society and won awards from the American Sociological Association.
Ariel Weiner
arkweiner@gmail.com
Ariel Weiner is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies (CLS) with a home department in