Faculty

Ron Hassner

Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies

Ron Hassner is the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He is also the faculty director of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and is the editor of the Cornell University Press book series “Religion and Conflict.” Prof. Hassner studies the role of ideas, practices, and symbols in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence.

Ethan Katz

Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies; Faculty Director, Center for Jewish Studies

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Center for Jewish Studies. 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. To date, his scholarship has focused in four principal areas: the history of Jewish-Muslim relations and the nature of belonging and exclusion in modern France and the Francophone world; the history of Jews in colonial societies; Holocaust Studies; and the relationship between the secular and religion in modern Jewish life....

Henrike C. Lange

Associate Professor, Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture

Henrike Lange is a historian of art, architecture, and literature in the medieval and early modern worlds of Europe — especially in Italy and across the Mediterranean — and the long nineteenth century. Across her disciplines, she has long engaged with the works and legacies of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Richard Krautheimer, and Friedrich Hollaender.

Lange’s work in history and historiography is informed by the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, exile and migration from Germany,...

Philipp Lenhard

Associate Professor of History and German
Philipp Lenhard is DAAD Visiting Associate Professor of History and German at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on modern German and Jewish history, comparative European history, and Intellectual history, especially the Frankfurt School. Lenhard studied Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Anglo-American History at the University of Cologne and received his PhD in Jewish History and Culture from the University of Munich. From 2014 to 2022, he was Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich. His dissertation was awarded...

Sarah Levin

Lecturer

Sarah Levin is a Lecturer in Jewish Studies. Levin’s research interests focus on Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East and Jewish-Muslim relations, particularly in cultural encounters and exchanges. 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, Poetic Dueling, Storytelling, and Joking: Moroccan Atlas Mountain Jews and Muslims Remember Each Other. This project examines 20th-century Jewish-Muslim relations through 21st-century memories (recorded from...

Duncan MacRae

Associate Professor

Duncan MacRae is an Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. A Roman historian, he specializes in the history of religion in the Roman world, including the history of the Jews under Roman rule. He has written on 1 Maccabees, Josephus and early (tannaitic) Rabbinic literature, as well as on Roman perspectives on Jewish history. The ways that each side – Jewish and Roman – negotiated and experienced imperial power and violence is the key theme of this work. He has also written on early Christian antisemitic reception of Josephus. He anticipates future work on...

Roni Masel

Assistant Professor
Comparative Literature

Roni Masel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature specializing in Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. Other research and teaching interests also include modern Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe, the history of reading and history of the book, and queer and postcolonial theory. Masel is currently completing a book manuscript titled Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, which explores Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe from the perspective of reading and...

Susan Maslan

Associate Professor of French

Susan Maslan is an Associate Professor of French at UC Berkeley. Her work is situated at the crossroads of literary, political, and social history. She writes and teaches about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theater, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and human rights. In a book tentatively entitled Judaism and Israelites in Early Modern French Literature, she pursues her interests in the relation between French literature and the Hebrew Bible in figures as varied as Racine, Rousseau, and...

James I. Porter

The Irving Stone Chair in Literature; Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Classics
James Porter began teaching at the University of Michigan in Classics and Comparative Literature (1986-2007), and then at UC Irvine, Classics and Comparative Literature (2007-2015), where he served as Director of Critical Theory from 2014-2015. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton and Bristol University (UK) and has also taught at UCLA.

Porter’s teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An...

Masua Sagiv

Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies

Masua Sagiv is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley and a Scholar in Residence of the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law,...