Faculty and Researchers

Carl S. Ehrlich

Carl S. Ehrlich (Ph.D. Harvard ’91) is Professor of Hebrew Bible and former director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. Among his areas of interest are synchronic, diachronic, and contextual approaches to the biblical text and Israelite civilization.

His most recent publications include the (co-)edited collections From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature (2009) and Purity, Holiness, and Identity in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Memory of Susan Haber (2013).

Current projects include a cultural history of Moses and a commentary on Chronicles.

Marc Herman

Marc Herman is an assistant professor at York University in the Department of Humanities. His research focuses on the interactions of Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the overlapping sacred histories of Jews and Muslims. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and is finishing a monograph titled After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Islamic World.Marc Herman will be an assistant professor at York University beginning in 2022. His research focuses on the interactions of Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the overlapping sacred histories of Jews and Muslims. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah and is currently writing a monograph titled Imagining Revelation: Medieval Jewish Presentations of the Oral Torah in an Islamic Key.

Sara Horowitz

Sara R. Horowitzis Professor of comparative literature and Jewish Studies. She teaches courses on literary responses to the Holocaust, gender and Jewish studies, Israeli cinema, and Jewish memory. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book.  

She is co-editor of H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy,  which was awarded the 2016 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in Jewish Thought and Culture,  co-editor of Encounter with Appelfeld, and founding co-editor of the journal Kerem. Her research focuses on Holocaust literature, women survivors, Jewish American fiction and and Israeli cinema.

Currently, she is completing a book entitled Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory, and co-editing a collection of essays on the image of Paris in post-war Jewish literary memory.  She has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and on the Executive Committee for Jewish Literature of the Modern Language Association.  

She sits on the Academic Advisory Committee for the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prof. Horowitz is the coordinator of the Graduate Diploma program.

David Koffman (Associate Director)

David S. Koffman is the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry and an Associate Professor in the Department of History. His undergraduate courses include "Worry & Wonder: Jewish Politics, Culture & Religion in Canada", "A Convenient Hatred: Antisemitism Before, During and After the Holocaust", "God/USA: Religion in America Since 1491", "Making Money," and "History of Me: The Genealogy Seminar."  He is the author of The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (Rutgers University Press, 2019), winner of an Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and the editor of, and a contributor to No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging (University of Toronto Press, 2021). He has published work in journals including the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Journal of Jewish Education, Canadian Jewish Studies, American Jewish History, Contemporary Jewry, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Ahouva Shulman

Ahouva Shulman is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. She holds a B.A. in Hebrew Language from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.A. and PhD in Hebrew Language from the University of Toronto. Her areas of teaching include modern and biblical Hebrew.

Prof. Shulman is conducting research in Biblical Hebrew grammar.

Kalman Weiser (Centre Director)

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and the Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. A native of NYC (BA,Yale; MA and PhD, Columbia), he is the author of several studies about Jewish nationalism and Jews’ relationship to language, especially in eastern Europe. His study Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland won the 2012 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. He is also a contributor to and co-editor of Czernowitz at 100: the First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (2010); a revised and expanded edition of Solomon Birnbaum's seminal work Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar (2016); and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (2021). In 2018, he was the co-organizer of Teaching about Antisemitism in the 21^st Century, an intensive summer institute for advanced graduate students and junior faculty that is scheduled to be renewed in 2023.He has recently completed the manuscript for a book about Nazi scholars of Yiddish and their relationships with Jewish colleagues before, during and after World War II. Presently, he is conducting work on the history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in post-war America.

Prof. Weiser regularly teaches courses about modern Jewish and general eastern European history, antisemitism, Yiddish, and Jewish languages. He has lectured widely in the US, Europe, Japan, and Israel.

Laura Wiseman

Laura Wiseman, PhD Hebrew Language and Literature, Collaborative Doctorate Jewish Studies, is a member of the Faculty of Education, Department of Humanities LAPS, and Faculty of Graduate Studies. As Koschitzky Family Chair in Jewish Teacher Education, she works with students of the Jewish Teacher Education Program preparing to teach Jewish Studies in formal, informal and experiential education settings. Her research focuses on the significance of intertextual reverberations in Hebrew language and literature: prose and poetry, life writing and écriture féminine. Her work takes into account classical Hebrew sources as well as medieval and modern belles lettres. Her present research is on the sacred and the sensual in contemporary Hebrew love poetry by Sivan Har-Shefi.

Wiseman is currently president of Canadian Society for Jewish Studies and vice president of Midwest Jewish Studies Association.

Recent works

Wiseman, Laura. (forthcoming 2022). “Love Urgently, Wistfully, Playfully, Sacredly (Parts One and Two).” From Knowledge to Interpretive Transmission: Critical (Canadian) Readings of Jewish History and Thought. Daniel Maoz and Esti Mayer, eds. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Wiseman, Laura. 2021. “Word on the Street in the State Book Satires of S.Y. Agnon.” Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel. Shalom Carmy and Jeffrey Saks, eds. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. 151-165. 

Wiseman, Laura. 2021. “Lament Poetry: Voices of Protest.” Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City: Protesting as Public Pedagogy. S. Nombuso Dlamini and Angela Steinen, eds. Routledge/Taylor and Francis. 114-133.