Teaching fellow in the section of Biblical Period of the Department of Jewish History (since 2010)

Golda Meir fellow (2005)

Fellow in the 'Researchers of Jerusalem' program of Yad Ben Zvi Institute (2012-2013)

Selected publications

The Book of Kings 

The story of Hezekiah's Prayer (2 Kings 19) and Jeremiah's Polemic Concerning the Inviolability of Jerusalem, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 39.3 (2015), pp. 281-297

Two Clearings of Goats (I Kings 20: 27): An Interpretation Supported by an Akkadian Parallel, Journal of Biblical Literature 133/2 (2014), 247-249

Jehuites, Ahabites, and Omrides: Blood Kinship and Bloodshed, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (forthcoming)

Assyrian royal inscriptions

Genres Meet: Assurbanipal's Prayer in the Inscription L₄ and the Bilingual Communal  Lamentations, in Time and History in the Ancient Near East - Proceedings of the 56th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Barcelona, July 26-30, 2010, eds. Lluis Feliu, et al. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), pp. 611-623

Religion, Politics, and War: Gestures toward Babylonia in the Imgur-Enlil Inscription of Shalmaneser III of Assyria, ORIENT: Report of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 49 (2014), pp. 3-18

Esarhaddon's Prayer in the Inscription AsBbA as related to the mīs pî Ritual, Journal of Cuneiform Studies (forthcoming)

Reporting the Content of Divine Positive Response (annu kēnu) in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, in “Now it happened in those days”: Studies in Biblical, Assyrian, and other Ancient Near Eastern Historiography presented to Mordechai Cogan on his 75th Birthday, eds. S. Aḥituv, A. Baruchi-Unna, I. Ephʾal, T. Forti, and J.H. Tigay (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, forthcoming)

Local traditions

The Story of the Zeal of Phinehas and Congregational Weeping at Bethel, Vetus Testamentum 65 (2015), pp. 505-515

City of Justice: Jerusalem as Embodiment of Justice in the Prophecy of Isaiah son of Amoz, in, Study of Jerusalem through the Ages, eds. Y. Ben Arieh et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2015), pp. 9-18 (Hebrew)

This is your God(s): Plural Forms Referring to the Noun Elohim and the Israelite Cultic Declaration, Shnaton. An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 25 (2016), pp. 141-152 (forthcoming; Hebrew)

Historical geography

Benjaminite Cities in Micah 1 in Light of a New Emendation, Judea and Samaria Research Studies 18 (2009), pp. 43-51 (Hebrew)

Geography of Biblical Land of Israel, in Jewish Study Bible², eds. A. Berlin

and M. Z. Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 2119-2124

She is the author of three monographs and over a dozen edited books, among them:

Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) Winner of 2005 Koret Award for best book in Jewish History, of the 2008 AJS Jordan Schnitzer award for the best book in Gender Studies and a finalist of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) finalist of the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (in print, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Winner of 2022 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies

And most recently:

Elisheva Baumgarten (ed.), Money Matters, Medieval Encounters 27, 4-5 (2021).

Tzafrir Barzilay, Eyal Levinson and Elisheva Baumgarten (eds.), Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe. A Source Book (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University Press, 2022).

Katrin Kogman-Appel, Elisheva Baumgarten, Elisabeth Hollender and Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (eds.), Perception and Awareness: Artefacts and Imageries in Medieval European Jewish Cultures (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023).

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 (2001-2013).

Elisheva was awarded an ERC grant for her research project Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe (2016-2022), is a recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award for 2016 and was recently awarded an ISF Breakthrough Research Grant for her project Contending with Crises: The Jews of Fourteenth Century Europe (2022-2027).

She currently serves as the academic head of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Appointment in my office (room 6140): Wed. 12:15-13:00, and upon request (02-5355059).

Before appointment as President of the University in 2009, Prof. Ben-Sasson served as a Member of the Knesset and as Chairman of its Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.

Prof. Ben-Sasson is a researcher in the Department of History of the Jewish People in the Faculty of Humanities.  As a historian of Jewish heritage in the Islamic world, he wrote books and articles on a variety of topics, including the Jewish communities in Muslim countries, relations between religion and economy, as well as law and spirituality as authoritative sources in the Eastern society of the Middle-Ages.  He also specializes in research on the Maimonides, social and intellectual history, the literature of the Responsa and the works of the period of the Gaonim, research of the Genizah, as well as the works and leadership of R’ Saadia Gaon.

While in the past he served as editor and a member of the editorial board in a broad range of research publications, Prof. Ben-Sasson served as President of the World Union for Jewish Studies, as Vice President of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and as Chairman of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the study of Jewish Communities in the East, as also as a member of the Council of Yad-Vashem.  In 2016 he was elected as a member of the European Academy of Science and Arts.

A list of Prizes:

1978-1979       Research Grant of the Ministry for Education and Culture;

                        Center for Integration of the Heritage of Oriental Jewry

1980                The Hebrew Univ., Research Fellows' Prize

1980-1981       Moritz and Scharlota Warburg Prize

1982-1983       Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (Doctoral Scholarship)

1983-1984       Rothschild Fellowship

1985-1988       Alon Fund of the Israeli Council for Higher Education

1996/7             Feher Prize for Jewish History, and

1996/7             The Ben-Zvi Prize for the Study of Jewish Heritage.

2010                Honorary doctoral degree from The Jewish Theological Seminary

Link to YouTube:

The YouTube channel of the University has an abundance of speeches by Prof. Ben-Sasson from a profusion of events:  Board of Governors, scholarship award ceremonies and conferences

https://www.youtube.com/user/HebrewUniversity

 “The Jewish Intellectual Revolution of the Tenth Century”, a lecture by Prof. Ben-Sasson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW6j-86ipTw 

Contact details: The Office of the President is located in the Administration Building on the Mount Scopus Campus, second floor, room 07. Reception, by appointment.

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.

Prof. Frenkel studies Jewish medieval history under Islam, her works being mainly based on the reach documentation found in the Cairo Geniza. Her articles and books concern social and cultural aspects of Jewish life in the medieval world of Islam, such as: charity and giving, pilgrimage, travels, material culture, literacy and book culture. She is also the editor of a text book on cultural encounters between Judaism and Islam in the Middle- Ages.

 Amos Goldberg’s research focuses primarily on the cultural and literary history of Jews during the Holocaust, the study of trauma, the historiography of the Holocaust and of modern Genocides, and on Holocaust and Genocide memories in the global age. 

His book Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017) won the Egit prize for Holocaust research and literature and was listed as an outstanding academic title for 2018 by Choice, the periodical of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Amos’s current research focuses on two major topics: 1) the cultural history of the Warsaw Ghetto—including rumor culture, coffee houses, the ghetto jester, and more; and 2) Holocaust memories in global and local contexts and particularly of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .

His books and articles have been published in English, Hebrew, Polish, French, German, Italian, Czeck, Japanese and Arabic.

He is a research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, serves on the scientific committee of the Van Leer Institute Press.

 From 2007 to 2013 Amos was co-editor of the bilingual journal Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust (Taylor and Francis).

He served as a visiting scholar at Cornell University; a visiting lecturer at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; a senior research fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute in the CUNY Graduate Center; as the 2018-2019 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in- Residence Fellow at the Mandel Center at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and as the 2023 Gabriele Rosenthal senior fellow at the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (IGdJ) in Hamburg.  

In the years 2018-2021 he participates in the research group on “Empathy in the Social Sciences, the Humanities and in Culture” at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Center at the Hebrew University.

Goldberg was awarded a research grant from the Israel Science Foundation, and has won numerous prizes and grants.

Selected Publications

Amos Goldberg, And you Shall Remember: Five Critical Readings in Holocaust Memory, Tel Aviv: Resling 2024 (Hebrew, forthcoming)

Amos Goldberg, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

Bashir Bashir, and Amos Goldberg (eds.), The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma  and History, New York: Columbia University Press. 2018. (was translated to Italian and Japanese and its introduction to Arabic)

Amos Goldberg, “Rumor Culture among Warsaw Jews under Nazi Occupation: A World of Catastrophe Reenchantedand”, Jewish Social Studies, 21(3) Spring Summer 2016, pp, 91-125.