Prof. Aranoff teaches courses on Jewish society and culture in the medieval and early-modern European context. Her interests include rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. She is particularly interested in linguistic speculation as a means by which Jewish scholars articulated cultural affinities and boundaries in ancient, medieval and modern times. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 in the department of history at Columbia University with a dissertation titled, In Pursuit of the Holy Tongue: Jewish Conceptions of Hebrew in the Sixteenth Century.

Talmud, cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, including issues of gender and sexuality, the Jews as a colonized people and Diaspora theory, Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity.
Author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1996). His most recent books are Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999) and Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004). Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago, 2009), and The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (forthcoming in 2012).

His academic focus is on the cultural and intellectural history of modern Jewry, with emphasis on the Jews of German-speaking Europe. He is interested in the history of Jewish anthropology, the intersection of medicine and Jewish identity and the role that sceince has played in the modernization of the Jews.
Author of Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1998), and Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1994).

Research interests in Hellenistic Judaism, Jews in the Greco-Roman world, Greek history, Roman history. Recent publications include Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998); Diaspora: Jews Amidst the Greeks and Romans (2002); (ed.) Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (2005); (ed.) Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean (2011); Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (2011).

Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Ph.D. (2005, Boston College) is Associate Professor of Church History at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopal Church) and a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. His primary areas of research are martyrdom in Jewish and Christian traditions, the history of Jewish-Christian relations from the fourth to twelfth centuries, contemporary Christian theologies of Judaism, and comparative theology. He is the author of Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and he is currently working on a Christian commentary on Mishnah Avot for the series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts published by Peeters Press.

Christopher Ocker, Ph.D. Princeton Theological Seminary 1991.  He works on the history of religion in late medieval and early modern Europe, particularly Christianity in the German-speaking lands, including interactions and conflicts of Jews and Christians.  He has published Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life (1993), Biblical Poetics between Humanism and Reformation (2002), Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany (2006).  He was coordinating editor, with Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace, of Politics and Reformations (2 vols., 2007).