2017 Alumni

Yosef RosenYosef Rosen

B.A., Yeshiva University M.A in Jewish Thought, Hebrew University Ph.D. Candidate in Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union

Before joining the JDP, Rosen attended numerous traditional and innovative yeshivot in Israel. His research focuses both on the history of Midrash and Medieval Kabbalah. He hopes to write his dissertation on poetic and politico-theological aspects of Zoharic literature as situated within a history of late Midrash and Christian hermeneutical and political figurations. At Berkeley, he has taught courses in advanced Talmud, and he is involved in local Jewish adult education.

Hanna SeltzerHanna Seltzer

Seltzer focuses on Hebrew and Yiddish literature, specifically on the works of Yehoshua Knaz, Ya’akov Shabtai, S. Yizhar, Dvora Baron, Yossel Birstein and Ya’akov Glatshtein in the framework of theories of narratology and the Chronotope by Bakhtin. She also studies Israeli film, and is interested in examining the ways in which literary and cinematic texts complicate the conventional national Jewish narrative.

Sarah Frances LevinSarah Frances Levin

Sarah Levin received her PhD  in Jewish Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Folklore from UC Berkeley in 2017. She is currently working on a book manuscript developed from her dissertation, Narrative Remembrance: Close Encounters between Muslims and Jews in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. This project examines 20th-century Jewish-Muslim relations through 21st-century memories (from Muslims in Morocco and Jews who had immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s) of Berber oral traditions, such as anecdotes, jokes, songs, and poetry duels. These traditions were once integral to the daily lives of Atlas Mountain villagers and offer a unique framework for addressing issues of boundaries and difference, while simultaneously elucidating the shared cultural experiences of Jews and Muslims.

Levin is also completing a book titled Jews among Berbers: The Photographs of Elias Harrus 1940s-1950s with Daniel Schroeter, based on the international exhibitions (California, England, France, Israel, Morocco, Netherlands; from 1999 to the present) that she curated featuring Harrus’s photographs of Moroccan Jews in the Atlas Mountains and Saharan oases.

In spring 2019 Sarah was a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania), where the year’s theme was “Jewish Life in Modern Islamic Contexts.” Levin teaches a fall semester course on Jewish folktales at UC Berkeley.

Eyal BassanEyal Bassan

Bassan is interested in Jewish literatures (biblical, Hebrew, and Yiddish) and in contemporary literary theory. His dissertation focuses on the concept of the non-conflictual. In particular, he explores the paradoxes of non-conflictual moments throughout the highly conflictual history of modern Hebrew literature. Contra the prevalent theoretical tendency to take the model of struggle as a fundamental paradigm, he asks what is at stake conceptually and politically in texts that position themselves beyond the binary of conflict and aim to weaken its import.

His publications include “The Thousand Plateaus of Uri Nissan Gnessin,” in Ot: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory (2012); and “Affirmative Weakening: Y. H. Brenner and the Weak Rethinking of the Politics of Hebrew Literature,” forthcoming in Rethinking History.