Welcome
As a scholar of Jewish history and of early modern religious and cultural history, I teach a broad variety of courses in Jewish history, early modern European history, and religious and cultural history of the pre-modern era. In my research I specialize in Jewish-Christian relations.
My book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post Reformation Era, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, integrates Jews into religious history of the post-Reformation Catholic Church in Poland and challenges the perception that the Catholic Church triumphed in Poland by demonstrating the superficiality of the re-Catholicization of the ruling elites, whose economic interests trumped their religious loyalties.
My current book project, "From Bread to Blood, From Sin to Crime: Sacrilege and Jews after the Reformation" tells a story of "the sacred" and "the sacrilege," violation of the sacred, and their central place in the contest for power between church and state. It is a book about the manipulation of the meaning embodied in sacred space and sacred symbols to affirm religious boundaries and legitimize Catholic authority in post-Reformation Poland. At the center of it all was the Eucharist, a consecrated wafer offered to the faithful in Catholic communion. For Catholics the Eucharist, or "the host," was God. For Protestants it was "bread," symbol of various degrees of Christ. In Poland, the contest over the sacredness of the Eucharist became manifest in lay courts' adjudication of crimes against property and symbols, especially those linked to the Eucharistic wafers. Mishandling of sacred symbols and objects transformed sin into crime that received harsh sentences, including burning at the stake. "From Bread to Blood, From Sin to Crime" casts a new light on the most infamous case of sacrilege, the accusations against Jews for stealing and desecrating the host. The book is now under contract with Harvard University Press.
My work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Koret Foundation, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, I was a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard University. In the academic year 2007-2008, I was an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.
I direct the Early Modern Workshop project, an online resource for scholars and students of early modern history and Jewish studies (at http://www.earlymodern.org), which was supported by the Mellon Foundation, Library of Congress, University of Maryland, and Yeshiva University, and in 2009 also the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York.
In 2008, I joined the editorial board of the AJS Review; and in 2009, the editorial board of the Sixteenth Century Journal.