Leora Batnitzky
Leora Batnitzky joined the faculty of Princeton’s Department of Religion in 1997. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. In 2002 she received Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of “Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered” (Princeton, 2000), “Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation” (Cambridge, 2006), and “How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought” (Princeton, 2011). She is currently completing a book, “Ecclesiastes: A Biography,” forthcoming in Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. She is also working on two other books, the first a comparative study of conversion controversies in Israel and India, tentatively titled “What is Religious Freedom? The Case of Conversion in Israel and India,” and the second on the Jewish apostate and Catholic saint Edith Stein, tentatively titled “The Continued Relevance of Edith Stein for Jewish and Christian Self-Understanding.”
Yonatan Y. Brafman
Yonatan Y. Brafman is assistant professor of Modern Judaism in the Department of Religion, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, as well as a member of the Program in Judaic Studies at Tufts University.
He is a scholar of modern Jewish thought and a philosopher of religion. His research focuses on the intersection of Jewish thought, Jewish law, and contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy. He also studies the implications of religious ritual for critical social theory and praxis.
His current research project, tentatively titled, “The Order of Jewish Laws: Text, Object, System,” assesses the conditions and consequences of understanding Jewish texts, norms, and practices as constituting a discrete object — Jewish law — that could be separated from other discourses and areas of life, and subsequently systematized.
He is the author of “Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity” (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is the editor, with Suzanne Last Stone, of “Jewish Law: New Perspectives” (De Gruyter, 2024) and, with Leora Batnitzky, of “Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on State, Religion, and Morality” (Brandeis, 2018). He has published articles in several journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Jewish Studies Quarterly, and Diné Israel, Studies in Halakhah and Jewish Law.
Previously, he was assistant professor of Jewish thought and ethics and the director of the Handel Center for Ethics and Justice at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has held fellowships at the Hebert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2022-23, in the Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University (2017-18; 2014-15), the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at New York University Law School (2012-13), and the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University (2008-2010). He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Jewish Thought from the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where he also received his B.A., M.A., and M.Phil.
Natalie Dohrmann
Natalie Dohrmann is the associate director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where she is faculty in the Jewish Studies Program and teaches in the departments of Religious Studies, Classical Studies, and History. She has published widely on rabbinic legal and literary culture in the Roman East. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Selected publications: “Roman War, Rabbinic Law, and Provincial Sovereigntism,” in “Unrest in the Roman Empire: A Discursive History,” ed. L. Eberle and M. Lavan (Campus Verlag, 2024); “Worlds of Jewish Law: Premodern Legal Cultures in the Making,” ed. with M. Herman, and M. Perry (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); “Legal Engagement: The Reception of Roman Tribunals and Law by Jews and Other Provincials of the Roman Empire,” ed. with K. Berthelot and C. Nemo-Pekelman (École Française de Rome, 2021); “Ad similitudinem arbitrorum: On the Perils of Commensurability and Comparison in Roman and Rabbinic Law,” in “Legal Engagement” (2021); “Can ‘Law’ Be Private? The Mixed Message of Rabbinic Oral Law,” in “Public and Private in Ancient Mediterranean Law and Religion,” ed. C. Ando and J. Rüpke (De Gruyter, 2015).
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg is assistant professor of early modern Jewish cultural and intellectual history at NYU’s department of Hebrew and Judaic studies.
As of the 2025 spring semester, she will be teaching at Tel Aviv university’s Law faculty and Jewish philosophy and Talmud department.
Tamara’s research is focused on the history of halakha (or Jewish religious law) and its development in the 15th through 17th centuries.
She is especially interested in questions of knowledge organization and technology, in particular how legal writing and thinking were changed by the encounter with the printing press. Her work also examines issues of legal authority and genre, including the different possibilities and pitfalls of working with legal codes versus responsa.
Tamara’s articles have appeared in multiple journals, including the Journal for the History of Ideas, Critical Inquiry, AJS Review and Diné Israel.
Her first book, “Remaking a Culture,” about the transformation of Jewish religious culture in 16th-century Europe, is currently under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press for their series on the history of knowledge.
Prior to teaching at NYU, Tamara was a junior fellow at Harvard’s society of fellows.
David C. Flatto
David C. Flatto is a professor of law and Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his B.A. and Ordination from Yeshiva University, his J.D. from Columbia University Law School, and his Ph.D. with distinction from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He previously was a professor of law and religion at Penn State University, a visiting professor and lecturer at University of Pennsylvania Law School, New York University Law School and Yeshiva University, a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and a visiting researcher at Yale Law School. His wide-ranging research interests include Jewish law and philosophy, constitutional law and theory, and comparative jurisprudence. His works have appeared in numerous scholarly publications including Harvard Theological Review, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities and the Journal of Law and Religion. He wrote “The Crown and the Courts: Separation of Powers in the Early Imagination” (Harvard University Press, 2020), and co-edited a book titled “Law as Religion, Religion as Law” (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Steven D. Fraade
Until his retirement in 2022, Steven D. Fraade taught for 43 years courses on rabbinic literature, the history of Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
He regularly offered seminars on midrashic, mishnaic, and talmudic texts, and topics in ancient Jewish history. His research interests include the history of Judaism (in its varieties) in Second Temple and early rabbinic times; biblical translation and exegesis in ancient Judaism and Christianity; the history and rhetoric of ancient Jewish law; the Dead Sea Scrolls; literary rhetorical analysis of tannaitic and amoraic rabbinic texts; attitudes towards ascetic piety in early Judaism; and multilingualism in ancient Jewish culture.
He is the author of “Enosh and His Generation: Pre-Israelite Hero and History in Postbiblical Interpretation” (1984) and “From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy” (1991). The latter volume won the 1992 National Jewish Book Award for the Best Book of Jewish Scholarship. Steven Fraade is co-editor of “Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls” (2006). More recently, he published “Legal Fictions: Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages” (2011), as well as a new annotated translation of and commentary on the Damascus Document for Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls (2021). Most recently, he has authored “Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism: Before and After Babel,” published by Cambridge University Press (2023). He earned the degree of A.B. from Brown University (1970) and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1980). Steven Fraade was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. During 1988–89 and in 1993 and 2015 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. He was Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University in 2015. He is also the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research and an honorary member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem). He is a former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Yale and previously served as its director of graduate studies and director of undergraduate studies. For nine years he chaired the university’s Language Study Committee and for 11 years chaired its Program in Judaic Studies.
Christine Hayes
Christine Hayes (B.A. Harvard University, M.A. and Ph.D UC Berkeley) is Sterling Professor Emerita of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica, Yale University with a research specialty in Talmudic-midrashic studies and the history and literature of Judaism in late antiquity. Her books include: “Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds” (winner of the 1997 Salo Baron prize); “Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities” (a 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist); and “What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives” (winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, the 2016 Award for the best book in Theology and Religious Studies from the American Publishers Association, and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award). Edited volumes include: “The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law” (2017); “Classic Essays in Rabbinic Culture and History” (2018), “Literature of the Sages: A Revisioning” (2023), and, with Jay Harris, “What is the Talmud?” (forthcoming 2025). Hayes has authored two introductory volumes (“Introduction to the Bible” and “The Emergence of Judaism”) as well as numerous journal articles. In addition to a faculty position at Princeton University (1993-96), Hayes has held visiting faculty positions at Tel Aviv University Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Reichman University Law School, and Harvard University Law School, as well as fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Maimonides Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg. In 2023, she received an honorary doctorate in Theology from Lund University, Sweden. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, a Senior Research Fellow with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and has served as Vice President and President of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Ayelet Hoffmann Libson
Ayelet Hoffmann Libson is a scholar of rabbinic Judaism and a professor of Talmud at Bar Ilan University. She specializes in rabbinic law, the relationship between law and religion, and the history of Jewish law. Previously she taught Talmud and Jewish Law on the faculty of Reichman University and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is the author of “Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud” (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and the winner of the 2023 Fattal Prize for excellence in legal research.
Nitsan Plitman
Nitsan Plitman is currently an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, researching the overlapping characteristics of Halakha and contemporary civil Israeli law. She holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. in Jewish Thought from Ben-Gurion University, and an LL.B. and B.A. in Law and Jewish Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Previously, Nitsan was a litigator for the Israeli parliament (Knesset), appearing before the Supreme Court on constitutional and administrative matters.
Benjamin Porat
Benjamin Porat is a professor of law and the director of the Matz Institute for Research in Jewish Law, at the Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a Gruss Professor of Talmudic Law at Penn Law School. He completed his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University (LL.D. summa cum laude). After completing his doctorate in 2010, he was a Halbert Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Porat focuses on the areas of theory of Jewish law, contract law, and distributive justice. Porat is the editor of “Shenaton ha’Mishpat ha’Ivri” and a co-editor of the Jewish Law Annual. His works have appeared in numerous publications including University of Toronto Law Journal, American Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. Recently he published his new book, titled “Justice for the Poor: The Principles of Welfare Regulations from Biblical Law to Rabbinic Literature1” (Hebrew). Porat teaches variety of topics in Jewish Law, including contracts, theory of private law, jurisprudence, welfare regulations, and methods of research.
Chaim Saiman
Chaim Saiman is a scholar of Jewish law, insurance law and private law and published “Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law” with Princeton University Press. Saiman has served as the Gruss Visiting Professor of Talmudic Law at both Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a visiting fellow at Princeton University and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Bar-Ilan, Hebrew University, IDC and Pepperdine University faculties of law. Saiman sits as a rabbinical court judge (dayyan) with the Beth Din of America and serves as an expert witness in insurance law and Jewish law in federal court.
Saiman received his B.S. from Georgia State University and his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. He also studied for a number of years at Yeshivat Har-Etzion (Gush) and Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh in Israel. Prior to joining the faculty at Villanova, he was an Olin Fellow at Harvard Law School a Golieb Fellow at NYU Law School, a law clerk to Judge Michael McConnell on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked as a corporate associate with the firm Cleary Gottlieb in New York. At Villanova, Saiman teaches contracts, insurance law, insurance coverage disputes, Jewish law and arbitration.
Zvi Septimus
Zvi Septimus has extensive scholarly publications on the Talmud and his forthcoming book is titled “The Readers Talmud: Performance, Authorship, Semiotics, and the Book,” which explores the relationship between Law and Literature in Rabbinic Judaism’s foundational text. His current research on Jewish legal history focuses on legislation relating to sexual unions outside of the context of permanent marriage. Septimus received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California, Berkley and has previously taught at Yale Law School, Shanghai International Studies University, NYU Shanghai, Harvard Law School, Cornell University, and the University of Toronto.
Suzanne Last Stone
Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Yeshiva University, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization and the Israel Supreme Court Translation Project at Cardozo Law School. Stone writes on the intersection of Jewish law and American legal theory. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, and Hebrew University Law. Stone is the co-editor-in-chief of Diné Israel, a Journal of Jewish Law, co-edited with Tel Aviv Law School. Her work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic. In Fall 2010, she delivered the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale University.
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer specializes in the Talmud and other Rabbinic Literature. His 2005 Columbia University doctoral dissertation titled “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud” was awarded the Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies in 2007.
Wimpfheimer’s work focuses on the Babylonian Talmud as a work of law and literature. His book “Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories2” implicates a new methodology of reading Talmudic law thickly by incorporating oft-ignored cultural concerns within its understanding of the law. The result of such an expansion is a textured description of Jewish law and an illuminating window onto rabbinic Judaism in Babylonia.
Wimpfheimer’s “The Talmud: A Biography3” was published by Princeton University Press in 2018 and received the National Jewish Book Award (Jewish Education and Identity Award in Memory of Dorothy Kripke) from the Jewish Book Council. “The Talmud: A Biography” embraces the conceit of the biography to tell the story of the Talmud's life from its pre-origins to the full extent of its reception down to the present.
Shlomo Zuckier
Shlomo Zuckier is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After receiving his Ph.D. (with distinction) in Religious Studies at Yale University, Shlomo was a Flegg Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University’s Jewish Studies Department and a Research Fellow in Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. His “Theologies of Sacrifice and Atonement in Ancient Judaism” is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and his “Halakhah: Normativity and Its Discontents” is under contract with the Key Words in Jewish Studies series (Rutgers University Press).