Meet the Faculty
The content of this page is subject to change and will be updated periodically.
Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is affiliate faculty in the Programs in European Studies, Jewish Studies, and Woman and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research have been focused on twentieth century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006) and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters:Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She has published numerous essays on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual studies and Contemporary Art. She has been awarded year long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies and the Florida Blue Key Distinguished Faculty Award. She is currently completing a new book on the international essay film.
Avraham Balaban was born in Israel (Kibbutz Hulda), where he finished his PhD in Modern Hebrew literature (Tel Aviv University). He published seven scholarly books on prominent twentieth century Israeli authors (among them: Nathan Alterman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua) as well as on current postmodernists trends in Hebrew fiction. He is a prolific critic (more than 200 book reviews in leading literary supplement in both Israel and the US) and poet. His three books of poetry and his novel (a memoir) received raving reviews and several literary prizes. For his second book of poems he received the Prime Minister Award for creativity (1982), and then was invited to Harvard as a Visiting Scholar (1983). He taught for 5 years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and since 1989 he teaches modern Hebrew literature at the University of Florida. From 1996 to 2002 he chaired the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures. His memoir, Mourning a Father Lost: A Kibbutz Childhood remembered, was published in 2000 (English edition: 2004), and since then has become a pivotal text about kibbutz life. In recent years it has been taught in Israel in creative writing courses and in courses dealing with the representations of the kibbutz in literature.
Peter Bergmann is an Associate Professor in the Derptment of History at UF. He received his Ph.D. (1983), M.A. and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to the University of Florida, he was a member of the history department at the University of Connecticut. Peter Bergmann is the author of Nietzsche: The Last Antipolitical German, Indiana University Press, 1987. He co-edited East Europe Reads Nietzsche with Alice Freifeld and Bernice Rosenthal (1998), and The Antecedents of Nazism: Weimar. The Political Papers of Walter Landauer, with Hugh Clark and Julius Elias (2000). Among his recent articles is American Exceptionalism and the German Sonderweg in Tandem, International History Review 23:3 (September 2001), 505-534. He is working on a manuscript entitled The Americanization of German Defeat, 1620-1989.
Peter Bergmann is a member of the Center for European Studies faculty and is an affiliate member of the Jewish Studies Center. His most recent courses include nineteenth and twentieth century Intellectual and Cultural History, Modernism, Nationalism and the Idea of Europe, and War and Society.
Nina Caputo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to the University of Florida, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, and Assistant Professor at Florida International University.
She is completing revisions on her book, At the Threshold of Redemption: Time and Community in Medieval Jewish Catalonia , and she is the author of In the Beginning....Typology, History, and the Unfolding Meaning of Creation in Nahmanides's Exegesis, Jewish Social Studies (Spring 1999); To Kill the Thorns in the Vineyard: A Medieval Rabbi's Argument for Diversity within Unity, in Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire, (cole Franaise de Rome, 2000); and "Prophecy and Redemption: Messianic Expectation in Nahmanides' Sefer ha-Ge'ulah," in Time and Eternity in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). She has recently taught Apocalypse and Millennium: Exploring a Theme in Western Culture, Writing the Jewish Middle Ages, and a two semester survey of medieval and early modern Jewish History. Her most recent courses include Writing the Jewish Middle Ages and Jewish History: 1492 through the Eve of the Enlightenment.
Joshua Comenetz is assistant professor of Geography. As an affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies, he teaches a course in the geography of the Jewish population and conducts research into mapping the distribution of Jews in the US and other countries.
Comenetz's interests include cartography, geographic information systems, and the analysis of data quality. Current research projects include the development of new techniques for demographic cartography, analysis and mapping of the reliability of and quality problems associated with spatial data, and the study of segregation and migration by means of cartography. Comenetz has also investigated the history of cartography in Europe and Israel as a Harvard University Sheldon fellow and serves as a cartographic advisor to the Institute on Race and Poverty in Minneapolis.
Malka Dagan lived most of her life in Israel and graduated from Oranim, which is a part of the University of Haifa, with a BA in Education. After graduation, she returned to her Kibbutz, where she started her journey as a second language instructor, teaching Hebrew to new immigrants.
In December 1985, Mrs Dagan and her family moved to Gainesville, where her husband worked on his Ph.D. while she joined AALL as a visiting professor teachiing 2nd Year Hebrew. For many years she worked as the administrator at Hillel Jewish Student's Center before rejoining AALL in 2003 as a Hebrew instructor. Malka Dagan is the Religious School Director at Congregation B'nai Israel.
Mrs. Dagan worked with Dr. Hanna Katz on developing a workbook that supplements the class material for HBR 1120 and HBR 1121. She loves teaching and is very committed to the development and growth of the Hebrew program at UF.
Sharon DiFino is an associate professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Florida in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies. She holds her MA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Germanic languages and literatures with a special concentration in 18th century German literature. She was a recipient of DAAD awards and studied as an exchange student at the Universitaet Freiburg, Germany.
She has been a visiting professor at Wellesley College (spring 1988) and most recently (fall 2005) at the Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she taught a course on "Germanic Women in Literature, Music and Politics" in the Institute of Linguistics, cross-listed with Gender-Women's Studies" and "Western Language and Culture Studies" and conducted research in Amsterdam at both the Jewish Historical Museum Media Center as well as at the IIAV (International Archive for Information on the documentation of women's suffrage and history).
DiFino's international experiences include summer teaching in Innsbruck, Austria (1989), teaching and co-directing the UF Summer Program in Mannheim, Germany (1994) and directing and lecturing in the Summer program in Utrecht, the Netherlands since summer 1997.
She has authored publications in second language acquisition as well as literature and culture studies. She published a book on Intellectual Development of German Women in Selected Periodicals from 1725-1784. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
She is currently engaged in a book project "Before Anne Frank: Jewish Women Writers in Germany and the Netherlands from the 18th Century to WWII" in which the focus is on significant Jewish women's literary salons in Berlin as well as relevant Dutch Jewish political activists in the late 19th and early 20th century in Amsterdam.
Alice Freifeld, an Associate Professor in the Department of History at UF, received her PhD (1992), M.A. and B.A. from University of California, Berkeley. She joined the University of Florida in 1994 after teaching at Wheaton College, University of New Hampshire-Durham, University of Connecticut-Storrs, University of Nebraska, and Transylvania University, Lexington, KY. Professor Freifeld has published Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (2000) which won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize in 2001. She also coedited East Europe Reads Nietzsche with Peter Bergmann and Bernice Rosenthal (1998). She has published numerous articles and is currently working on a manuscript entitled Displaced Hungarian Jewry, 1945-48.
Professor Freifeld's most recent courses include: Displaced Persons, Jewry in Eastern Europe, Hapsburg Monarchy, 20th-Century Eastern Europe, and 19th-Century Europe.
Geoffrey Giles, associate professor of History, was born and educated in England. His research interests in German history include the history of education, the social history of alcohol, and the history of sexuality, as well as the Holocaust. His current research examines the role of university-educated personnel in the Holocaust and the little-known forced labor camp at Treblinka.
In 1994, under the auspices of the Holocaust Educational Foundation, Professor Giles led his first Eastern European Seminar for college professors who teach the Holocaust. In 1999, Giles was one of eight fellows at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's first Summer Research Workshop for Scholars, which spent two weeks investigating and discussing SS racial policies in occupied Europe.
Harvey Goldberg is a visiting professor of Israel Studies and North Africa in the Center, and also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology. Now emeritus, he held the Sarah Allen Shaine Chair in Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research has focused on the social and cultural history of Jewish groups in North Africa, and on the development of ethnic and religious identities in Israel. He also has explored the links between Jewish Studies and the discipline of anthropology. During previous Sabbatical years he taught at the University of California - Berkeley, Brown University, and the University of the Bosporus in Istanbul. Among his books are Jewish Life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives (1990), and Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life (2003), and he has edited Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era (1996), and The Life of Judaism (2001).
Andrew Gordon is associate professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts. He specializes in Contemporary American Fiction, Jewish-American Fiction, and Science Fiction. His publications include An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer and with Peter L. Rudnytsky Psychoanalyses/Feminisms. He has published numerous essays on fiction of Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick and has also written many articles on other contemporary American authors and on American film.
He has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Barcelona and the University of Valencia, Spain; the University of Oporto, Portugal; and the University of Nis, Yugoslavia; and he has taught at the University of Alcala, Spain; the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisbon, Portugal; Janus Pannonius University, Pecs, Hungary; and the Linguistic University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Mitchell B. Hart is associate professor of modern Jewish history. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1994, his M.A. in Jewish History from UCLA in 1986, and his B.A. in Jewish Studies from UCLA in 1984. Before coming to the University of Florida in 2003, he taught at Florida International University in Miami. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies in Oxford, England. His book, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity, was published by Stanford University in 2000. He is currently at work on a number of book-length projects, including a series of essays on Jews, medicine and race, and a history of the fate of Jewish knowledge in Nazi Germany.
Galia Hatav is associate professor of Theoretical and Hebrew Linguistics. She teaches classical, Biblical and modern Hebrew in the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures.
Hatav's main area of specialization in biblical Hebrew from the perspective of theoretical linguistics. Her specific interest is temporality in language, i.e., the devices languages use to express time relations between events and states. As biblical Hebrew uses mainly its verb system for this purpose, Hatav's research concentrates on it. She investigates other periods of the Hebrew language, namely Mishnaic and Modern Israeli Hebrew. Hatav has written and spoken about the verb system in biblical Hebrew as well as about issues in theoretical linguistics.
Leah Hochman is assistant professor in the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. She graduated from Pitzer College (B.A) and Boston University (MA/PhD), with a specialty in religion and literature. Her current project deals with the concepts of the ugly and ugliness in 18th and 19th century European thought and their relationship to social policy making in the late Enlightenment. In addition to courses on modern Judaism, modern Jewish thought, and Enlightenment thought, she teaches Introduction to Judaism and the senior seminar in Jewish studies. During summer session, she also teaches an intensive seminar on the social, political, religious and historical relations between Germans and Jews which includes a two-week trip to Germany. The course "Bridge of Understanding: Germans and Jews" runs in cooperation with Bridge of Understanding, an organization sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Sheldon R. Isenberg, associate professor, took his B.A. at Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. He teaches and writes on Jewish mysticism, comparative mysticism, aging and Judaism, and Jewish thought. He has published numerous scholarly articles and reviews. He serves as associate director of the UF Center for Spirituality and Health.
Seth Jerchower is the Head of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. He specializes in areas of historic bibliography as well as linguistics, currently in the area of Romance studies and Jewish Languages. He has recently submitted the draft of his Ph.D. dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, entitled A Judeo-Italian Translation of the Hebrew Bible: Critical Edition of MS Parma 3068. His graduate studies also include a Laurea degree in Biblical Philology from the Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy. His most recent article, "Johann Heinrich Hottinger and the Systematic Organization of Jewish Literature", co-authored with Heidi Lerner of Stanford University, will appear in Vol. 13 of Judaica Librarianship.
Robert Kawashima holds a joint appointment in the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Religion. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty of the University of Florida, he was a faculty fellow at UC Berkeley and a Dorot Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in New York University's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. His work is broadly comparative, focusing on the Hebrew Bible in relation to both the ancient Mediterranean world and the literary and intellectual history of the West; other research interests include literary theory, linguistics, epic, and the novel. He has published on various aspects of ancient Israelite language, literature, law and religion, as well as on Homer and literary theory. His first book, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Indiana University Press, 2004), was a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award (category: Autobiography, Biography and Literary Studies). He is currently at work on a second book, The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge, an analysis of IsraelŐs religious traditions informed by FoucaultŐs investigations into the history of systems of thought. He is also co-editing (with Ann Banfield) a volume of historically significant essays on literary style and poetics, with the tentative title, Represented Speech, Style Indirect Libre, Erlebte Rede.
Gwynn Kessler received her Ph.D. in Rabbinics, with a specialization in Midrash from the Jewish Theological Seminary (May 2001). She is revising her dissertation, The God Of Small Things: The Fetus and Its Development in Palestinian Aggadic Literature, for publication. Her current research uses feminist and queer theories to interpret (and critique) rabbinic constructions of gender and the body. In addition to teaching courses on rabbinic literature, gender and the Hebrew Bible, and Introduction to Judaism, she teaches a course on GLBTQ Jews and Judaism and a course on biblical and rabbinic constructions of God's gender.
Eric Kligerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic studies. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in the spring of 2001. Kligerman spent several years studying in Germany at the University of Freiburg on a Fulbright Fellowship. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century German literature, philosophy and visual arts, and he is especially interested in German-Jewish literature and Holocaust studies. Kligerman is currently looking at how poetic invocations of trauma in the works of Paul Celan have been translated into the space of visual media, especially the architecture of museums and memorials in Berlin.
Jack Kugelmass is the Melton Legislative Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Anthropology. He was formerly Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Professor in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University in Tempe, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Folklore Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a B.A. from McGill University, an M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. Among other books he is the editor of Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship (Illinois University Press, 2006), Key Texts in American Jewish Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2003), author of The Miracle of Intervale Avenue: The Story of a Jewish Congregation in the South Bronx (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-author of From A Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Indiana University Press, 1998). He writes on the public culture of American Jews and has begun work on a book called Sifting the Ruins: Yiddish Travelogues to Post-War Poland. He was the editor for two terms City & Society the journal of the Society for Urban, National, Transnational and Global Anthropology. Kugelmass has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lady Davis Foundation, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Todd Hasak-Lowy holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His book manuscript, which studies the role of Hebrew fiction in the emergence and crystallization of Zionism, is currently under consideration with a major university press. Todd has published on Hebrew literature in journals such as Prooftexts and Hebrew Studies. In general, Todd's teaching and research interests are located at the meeting of history and literature. In addition to his academic work, Todd writes fiction. His first collection, The Task of This Translator, was published by Harcourt in 2005. A new story of his, "Eros and the Jews for 800", will be published in an upcoming issue of Guilt & Pleasure.
James Mueller is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1986 with a concentration in Early Judaism and Early Christianity.
His work focuses primarily on the development of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the interaction between Judaism and Christianity in the first several centuries of the Common Era. He has authored The Five Fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel: A Critical Study (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), and co-edited The Oxford Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 1992). He is currently writing a commentary on a medieval apocalypse known as the "Vision of Ezra" to be published by Walter de Gruyter, and is general editor for The Dictionary of Early Judaism to be published by Wm. B. Eerdmans and E.J. Brill.
Gerald F. Murray is Associate Professor of Anthropology. He has been an Associate Professor on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts-Boston, a visiting Assistant Professor at Teachers College/Columbia University, a visiting lecturer in the Deptartment of Anthropology at Yale, and a Research Associate at HarvardŐs Center for Population Studies.
Within the Anthropology of Religion, his research interests include the origins and evolution of monotheism, the split between Judaism and Christianity in the Roman Empire, and the comparative analysis of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin scriptural texts and translations. As a specialist in the Anthropology of the Caribbean, he has examined the origins of the Jewish diaspora to Latin America and the intergenerational impact of life in a Catholic environment on Jewish religious practice and identity.
Judith W. Page, who joined the faculty in the fall of 2000, holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, a MA from the University of New Mexico, a BA from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and studied for a year at the University of Birmingham in England.
Before coming to UF, Professor Page taught most recently at Millsaps College, where she received awards for her teaching and served in several administrative positions, including Chair of the English Department, founding coordinator of the WomenŐs Studies Concentration, and Associate Dean of Arts and Letters.
Her book Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in Romantic Literature and Culture was published by Palgrave in 2004. She is the author of Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (University of California Press), which was named an outstanding academic book for 1995. She is also the author of numerous articles and reviews in such journals as Philological Quarterly, Criticism, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Modern Philology, SEL, Victorian Literature and Culture, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, The Blake Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle. She has published articles on pedagogy in the MLA "Approaches to Teaching" series.
The recipient of several NEH awards, Professor Page has continued her work on Wordsworth and his circle, and has published a chapter entitled "Wordsworth and Domesticity" in the Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (2003). She was awarded a Skirball Fellowship to spend the Spring 2003 semester in England at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Her current research project is on women and landscape, 1750-1850.
Professor Page teaches general courses in Romanticism and British women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She offers seminars on Wordsworth and his circle, Jane Austen in the context of Romanticism, and Milton and Romantic women writers. In addition, she has developed special topics courses in conjunction with UFŐs Center for Jewish Studies on Romanticism and Judaism and on Jews and Judaism in Victorian Literature and Culture.
Simon Rabinovitch is the Alexander Grass Post-Doctoral Associate for the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History. He received a B.A. from McGill University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. (2007) from Brandeis University. He is currently working on a manuscript for publication entitled Alternative to Zion: The Jewish Autonomist Movement in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, which traces the development of the idea of non-territorial autonomy for Russian Jewry between the turn of the twentieth century and the creation of the Soviet Union. His published and forthcoming articles examine Jewish nationalist thought, folkloristics, and ethnography. Courses he currently offers include the History of Modern Jewish Political Movements and the History of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Howard Rothman is a Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and a founding member of the University of Florida's Institute for the Advanced Study of the Communication Processes. His research activities have involved studies of the acoustic aspects of alaryngeal speech, dynamic aspects of deaf speech, voice identification, underwater communication and the singing voice. During a sabbatical year in Israel, he studied the acoustic aspects of voice production in Cantors.
In addition to his academic and research interests, Dr. Rothman teaches a classical music appreciation class in his home and for twelve years hosted a classical music radio program on FM radio in Gainesville. In 1993, he produced and hosted "Songs of a People," an 8 week radio series that surveyed Jewish music.
These interests have led him to offer a course on "The History of Jewish Music." This course begins by discussing the nature of music and how it has developed in Western cultures. Then it examines the breadth of Jewish music as it has developed over the centuries beginning in Biblical times. Since Jews have lived all over the world, their music reflects the influence of many cultures. The course examines secular, folk and liturgical Jewish music.
Leo Sandgren wrote his doctoral dissertation entitled "We have no King but Caesar: Jewish Legitimation of Roman Rule from Judas Maccabeus to Judah Ha-Nasi (165 BCE - 235 CE)," dealing with the Jewish acceptance of Roman rule while retaining the theocratic nature of Judaism during Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism. His recent book, The Shadow of God: Stories from Early Judaism (2003), covers six centuries of Jewish history, from the Babylonian exile to the destruction of the Second Temple, in fifteen stores each centered on a historical event. Currently he is revising his dissertation for publication, and working on a companion volume to The Shadow of God covering the Ancient Near East and the history of ancient Israel.
Tamir Sorek is an assistant professor in the Center of Jewish studies and the Department of Sociology at UF, where he teaches courses about Israeli society, sociology of sport, and ethnic conflicts. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002, taught at the University of Maryland, Bar Ilan University, and Cornell University, and joined UF in 2006. His research centers on the construction of ethnic and national identities, especially in the juncture culture and politics. In his book Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclave (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Sorek illustrates how a seemingly innocent arena like sports is in effect a powerful political sphere, which has implications for ethnic, religious, civic and national identification, and even political behavior. In his current project he investigates the relation between social memory and national identities among Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.
Professor Maureen Turim received her BA (1973), MA (1975), and PhD (1978) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, degrees which included studies in France at the L'Universite d'Aix-Marseille (1971-72), and L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes and Paris III (1973-74). She taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1977 until joining the UF faculty in 1991.
Professor Turim is author of Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press), Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge), and The Films of Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley: University of California Press). She has published over fifty essays in anthologies and journals on a wide range of theoretical, historical and aesthetic issues in cinema and video, art, cutural studies, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature. Several of these essays have appeared in translation in French and German. She has also written catalogue essays for museum exhibitions.
Her current book project, entitled Desire and its Ends: The Driving Forces of Recent Cinema, Literature, and Art, will look at the different ways desire structures narratives and images in various cultural traditions, and the way our very notion of desire may be shaped by these representations.
Kenneth Wald is a distinguished professor of Political Science. He has been a Fulbright Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting faculty member at the University of Haifa.
Professor Wald's research interests include the politics of American and Israeli Jews and the role of religion in Israeli political life. He has also written and spoken about religious issues and church and state questions in American politics. Wald has lectured on religion in American political life at the Chatauqua Institution in upstate New York and in Israel, China, and the United Kingdom.
Patricia Woods is an assistant professor in political science and Jewish studies at UF. She has her degree from the Middle East program at the University of Washington. She teaches courses in comparative politics, comparative law and society, Israel and Middle East Politics. Her research centers on intellectual, political, and communal links between state and social actors. Professor Woods is particularly interested in the impact of these links on judicial politics and judicial power.