…and are warmly welcomed 🙂
Please join us in welcoming three new affiliated faculty members to BCSR. Robert Braun (Sociology), Ethan Katz (History), and Ronit Y. Stahl (History) will join our interdisciplinary community this fall.
Robert Braun, Assistant Professor of Sociology, arrives at Berkeley from Northwestern University, after completing his PhD at Cornell in 2017. He has recently completed a book, Protectors of Pluralism: The Collective Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, that examines the protection of Jews by minority Christian groups in the Netherlands and Belgium during the Second World War. Braun’s work uses geographical information systems and archival research to analyze social and cultural behavior in and around contexts as diverse as local market economies, children’s stories, and social movement networks.
Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, joins Berkeley from the University of Cincinnati. He is a historian of modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with specialties in modern Jewish history and the history of modern France and its empire. He currently co-directs (with Elisha Ancselovits and Sergey Dolgopolski) an international effort to examine and reorient contemporary Jewish Studies. This project, “Devotion and Relativity, Text and Context: New Frontiers of Jewish Literacy,” will launch in October 2018 with a two-day international, interdisciplinary workshop in New York City at the Center for Jewish History and Yeshivat Maharat. Katz’s current book project, provisionally entitled Freeing the Empire: The Jewish Uprising That Helped the Allies Win the War, explores the role of a largely Jewish uprising in Algiers from 1940 to 1943 in the ultimate success of Operation Torch. His previous publications include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (co-editor, with Ari Joskowicz; UPenn Press, 2015), and Colonialism and the Jews (co-editor, with Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel; Indiana University Press, 2017).
Ronit Y. Stahl, Assistant Professor of History, comes to Berkeley from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a fellow in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine. A historian of modern America, her work examines pluralism in the United States by analyzing the interaction of religion, politics, and law in institutional contexts. Stahl’s first book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the ways the U.S. military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism over the twentieth century. Her current book project, tentatively titled Troubling Conscience: Religious Freedom and Health Care in America, examines religious hospitals and the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience.
Please join us in welcoming Robert, Ethan, and Ronit to the BCSR community!