This fall, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies will host a prestigious group of scholars who will gather around the theme “Secularization/Sacralization,” and will be led by our faculty member Scott Spector.

The 2015–16 Frankel fellows and their fields of research are:

Jeffrey Abt, Wayne State University

“Religious Ceremonials / Museum Artifacts: Rethinking Jewish Ritual Objects”

Efrat Bloom, University of Michigan
“Walter Benjamin’s Secular Prayer”

Marc Caplan, New York University
“The Weight of an Epoch: Yiddish Modernism and German Modernity in the Weimar Era”

Jessica Dubow, University of Sheffield
“Thinking Outside the City Walls: Philosophy, Geography, and the Radicalism of Judaic Thought”

Kirsten Fermaglich, Michigan State University

“A Rosenberg by Any Other Name”

Shaul Kelner, Vanderbilt University
“Strategic Sacralization in American Jewish Politics: The Contradictions of Cultural Mobilization in the American Soviet Jewry Movement”

Miriamne Krummel, University of Dayton
“The Medieval Postcolonial Jew: In and Out of Time”

Michael Lowy, National Center for Scientific Research

“Secularization/Sacralization in Jewish-German Culture: Kafka, Benjamin, Bloch, Fromm”

Ariel Mayse, Harvard University
“Expanding the Boundaries of Holiness: Conceptions of the Sacred in Modern Hasidic Spirituality”

Eva Mroczek, Indiana University
“The Other David: Between the Tanach and the Palmach”

Scott Spector, University of Michigan
“The ‘Secularization Question’: Germans, Jews, and the Historical Understanding of Modernity”

Guy Stroumsa, Hebrew University and University of Oxford
“The Secularized Study of the Abrahamic Religions in the Nineteenth Century”

Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan
“Resurrecting the Jew: Philosemitism, Pluralism, and Secularism in Contemporary Poland”