She is the author of two books:

Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)

Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

and has edited a number of books, most recently

Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras and Katelyn Mesler (eds.), Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

Her current projects include a social history of medieval Jewish marriage that is part of a larger project that seeks to outlines the contours of daily life in the Jewish communities of northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. 

Elisheva completed her studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A., magna cum laude, 1993; M.A., summa cum laude, 1995;  Ph.D, summa cum laude, 2001) and spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania (1999-2001) and then returned to Israel. She came to the Hebrew University in 2013 after teaching in the Department of Jewish History and the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University for 12 years (Lecturer, 2002; tenured Senior Lecturer, 2008).

Elisheva is a member of Israel's Young Academy. She was awarded an ERC grant for her current research project Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe and is a recent recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award for 2016.

In 2014 he co-founded the Bikurim Youth Village for the Arts in Eshkol, which provides world-class artistic training for gifted, under-served high school students from throughout Israel.

Selected Publications:

Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1923-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Mahane meshutaf? Kooperatsiia b'hityashvut ha-yehudit ha-haklait be-Rusya u-beolam, 1890-1941. Jerusalem: Magnes Press & Yad Tebenkin Press, 2008.

Editor (with David Gaunt, Natan Meir, Israel Bartal), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Editor (with Eugene Avrutin and Robert Weinberg), Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

“Putting Agricultural History to Work: Global Action Today from a Communal Past.” Featured article in: Agricultural History 94, no. 4 (2020): 512-544.

“A Response to R. Douglas Hurt, Ben Nobbs-Thiessen and Nahum Karlinsky.” Agricultural History 94, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 562-567.

“Israeli Reactions in a Soviet Moment: Reflections on the 1970 Leningrad Affair.” Kennan Cable #58. September 2020. 

“A Light unto the Nations? A Stalled Vision for the Future of the Humanities.” AJS Perspectives. Fall 2020, pp. 56-58.

“Transnational Intervention and its Limits: The Case of Interwar Poland.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2018): 265-286.

“Between Myths, Memories, History and Politics: Creating Content for Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.” The Public Historian 40, no. 4 (2018): 91-106.

“Philanthropy, Diplomacy and Jewish Internationalism.” In: The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume VIII: The Modern Period, c. 1815 – c. 2000. Edited by Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

“Jewish Threads in the Fabric of International History.” In: International History in Theory and Practice. Edited by Barbara Haider-Wilson, William Godsey, Wolfgang Mueller, pp. 477-500. Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017.

“Dueling Visions of Rebirth: Interwar Palestine versus Soviet Russia,” Journal of Jewish Identities 9, no. 2 (July 2016): 139-157.

“Rethinking Boundaries in the Jewish Diaspora from the FSU.” In: The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel and Germany. Edited by Zvi Gitelman, pp. 77-88. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

“Faith Meets Politics and Resources: Reassessing Modern Transnational Jewish Activism.” In: Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History. Edited by Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, pp. 216-237. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

“Liberal Answers to the ‘Jewish Question’: Then and Now.” In: Church and Society in Modern Russia. Edited by Elise Wirtschafter and Manfred Hildermeier, pp. 133-156. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015

“East European Jewish Migration: Inside and Outside,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, no. 3 (December 2014): 154-170.

"A Durable Harvest: Reevaluating the Russia-Israel Axis in the Jewish World." In: Bounded Mind and Spirit: Russia and Israel, 1880-2010. Edited by Brian Horowitz and Shai Ginsburg, pp. 109-129. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2013.

“Activism as Engine: Jewish Internationalism, 1880s-1980s.” In: Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, pp. 269-291. Edited by Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

“Crimea 2008: A Lesson about Uses and Misuses of History,” East European Jewish Affairs 39, no. 1 (April 2009): 101-105.

“‘New’ Jews of the Agricultural Kind: A Case of Soviet Interwar Propaganda,” Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 424-50.

“An Unlikely Triangle: Philanthropists, Commissars, and American Statesmanship Meet in Soviet Crimea, 1922-37.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 3 (2003): 353-376.

“Farmers, Philanthropists, and Soviet Authority: Rural Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1923-1941.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 849-885.

MA and PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Wrote his doctoral dissertation on the historical significance of the Third Book of Maccabees, under the supervision of Professor Daniel Schwartz, and specializes in the history of Diaspora Jewry during the Second Temple, Mishna and the Talmud, especially Hellenistic Jewish Diaspora. In addition, also explores rabbinic literature in its historical contexts.

His current research project together with Professor Tal Ilan (Free University of Berlin) is preparing the fourth volume of a collection of Jewish papyri (Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum). This collection reveals and shows everyday life of the Jews in Egypt, during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, and enable us to understand different aspects of the history of the Jews in this important diaspora community.

Among his publications:

'The Letter of Aristeas: A New Exodus Story? ', Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 36 (2005), pp. 1-20

‘Exile and Self-Identity in the Qumran Sect and in Hellenistic Judaism’, E. Chazon & B. Halpern-Amaru (eds.), New Perspectives on Old Texts: Proceedings of the 10^th International Symposium of the Orion Center for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 9-11 January, 2005, Brill: Leiden 2010, pp. 3-21

‘Where Does the Shekhinah Dwell? Between Dead Sea Sect, Diaspora Judaism and Rabbinic Literature’, A. Lange, E. Tov, M. Weigold (eds.), The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context: Integrating the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Study of Ancient Texts, Languages, and Cultures, vol. 1, (SVT 140/1), Brill: Leiden & Boston , 2011, pp. 399-412

‘Sanctity and the Attitude towards the Temple in Hellenistic Judaism’, D.R. Schwartz & Zeev Weiss (eds.), Was 70 C.E. a Watershed in Jewish History? On Jews and Judaism before and after the Destruction of the Second Temple, (AJEC 78), Brill: Leiden 2012, pp. 155-179

‘Between mĕšûbâ and môšābâ: On the Status of Diaspora Jews in the Period of Redemption According to the Septuagint and Hellenistic Judaism’, Melvin K.H. Peters (ed.), XIV Congress of the IOSCS, Helsinki, 2010 (SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies, 59), Atlanta 2013, pp. 127-142

'Bigthan and Teresh and the Reason Gentiles Hate Jews', Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012), pp. 318-356

‘The High Priesthood and Onias’ Temple: The Historical Meaning of a Rabbinic Story’,Zion 78 (2013), pp. 439-469 [Hebrew]

Prof. Rebhun is the Vice-Dean for Teaching of the Faculty of Humanities; and also serves as chair of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry.

In the past his was the head of the Honors program "Revivim"; and director of the Cherrick Center for the study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel.

His research interests include intellectual and political history of Zionism and modern Jewish nationalism, with an emphasis on its Central and East European contexts; history of Austro-Hungarian Jewries, including the effects of emancipation discourse, modernization projects, ethnic and national struggles, and social and cultural conflicts on Jewish life and the Jewish perceptions of Jewish-Gentile relations; Soviet Jewish history and the study of post-Soviet migration.

His book Between Prague and Jerusalem: Prague Zionists and the Origins of the Idea of Binational State in Palestine (published in Hebrew by Shazar Center & Leo Baeck, 2010), won the Hecht Prize for the Best Book in Israel Studies for 2011. A German version of this book has been published in 2013 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen. His scholarly publications appeared in a number of leading journals in the Jewish Studies, including Zion, AJS Review, Jewish Social Studies, Jewish History, The Jewish Quarterly Review, as well as in The Russian Review, a leading journal in the Eastern European Studies.

Prof. Shumsky’s last book, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), has been awarded an “Honorable Mention” (2nd place winner) of the Annual Shapiro Prize for the best book in Israel Studies awarded by the Association for Israel Studies (2019); and an “Honorable Mention” of the Ab Imperio Award for the best study in new imperial history and history of diversity in Northern Eurasia sponsored by Ab Imperio quarterly (2019).

Prof. Shumsky teaches broadly in European Jewish history from early modern to contemporary times, including courses in history of the origins and phenomenology of modern Jewish nationalisms; the Zionist ideology; the formation of modern Jewish culture in the Bohemian lands; emancipation, acculturation and identity in the Central and Eastern Europe; ethnicity, identity and conflict in Israeli society.

Prof. Shumsky was a Mandel Fellow at Scholion, the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University (now Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies). He stayed as a guest scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Leipzig, and University of Munich. Since 2008 Prof. Shumsky won three ISF grants.

Prof. Weiss began her studies at Hamburg University in Germany, where she specialized in German-Jewish history. In her doctoral dissertation, written at Tel Aviv University, she investigated the reciprocal relations between German Jewry and Polish Jewry following the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. In the late 1990s she taught at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and between 2000 and 2007 served as head of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at Haifa University.

Alongside her work in Israel she has spent time over the past decade as a visiting scholar at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, the Social Science Research Center Berlin, and the Europe Institute at Stanford University.

Her research operates in three arenas: German and Central European history, Jewish history, and Israeli history. It engages questions of citizenship, migration and sovereignty, as well as cultural heritage and transfer of knowledge, in comparative and spatial perspectives. Prof. Weiss works have won her the Hanna Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2012 and the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines in 2015.

Selected publications:

Ulrich Bielefeld & Yfaat Weiss, "…als Gelegenheitsgast, ohne jedes Engagement…". Jean Améry, München: Fink, 2014.

Amir Eshel & Yfaat Weiss (eds.), Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge: Zum Werk Barbara Honigmanns, München: Fink, 2013.

Yfaat Weiss, Lea Goldberg, Lehrjahre in Deutschland 1930-1933, Toldot – Essays zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010.

 Mahmoud Yazbak & Yfaat Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948. Narratives of a Mixed City, Hague: Republic of Letters, 2012.

Yfaat Weiss, A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s lost Heritage, New York: Colombia University Press, 2011.

Daniel Levy & Yfaat Weiss, (eds.), Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, New York: Berghahn, 2002.

Yfaat Weiss, Staatsbürgerschaft und Ethnizität. Deutsche und polnische Juden am Vorabend des Holocaust, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. München: Oldenbourg, 2000.