Faculty Affiliates

Faculty affiliates from the various schools of Yeshiva University work with the Center for Israel Studies to create programming and on conference, curricular and publication projects.

Our current faculty affiliates are:

Aaron Koller (Bible)
Dr. Aaron Koller studied Semitics, Bible and ancient Near Eastern cultures at the University of Pennsylvania, Yeshiva University's Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and the Brooklyn Museum. He has been an assistant professor at Yeshiva University since 2008. Koller is interested in life as it was lived in ancient times and finds that studying the languages of ancient times provide windows into all sorts of issues. He is interested especially in Near Eastern cultures from the late Bronze Age through rabbinic literature. Aaron received a multiyear research fellowship at Hebrew University, working under Moshe Bar-Asher (president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language). He began graduate school as a Wexner Graduate Fellow and completed it with a dissertation passed with distinction. Koller has written papers on the Aramaic dialects and texts in the world of the Dead Sea Scrolls and others on aspects of every day life in ancient Israel, including feasting and fighting. He is currently working on words for drinking vessels and images of feasts and on the cultural politics of Jewish society in the Persian Empire.

Carl Feit (Biology)
Dr. Carl Feit is a noted cancer research scientist and ordained rabbi who holds the Dr. Joseph and Rachel Ades Chair in Health Sciences at Yeshiva College. Feit has chaired the biology department of Yeshiva College since 1985. Prior to coming to Yeshiva UNiversity, he was a research scientist at the immunodiagnosis laboratory at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. He serves on the editorial board of Cancer Investigation and is also a Talmudic scholar who has lectured and taught Talmud classes for many years. He is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion. Feit has a BA from Yeshiva College and earned his PhD at Rutgers University.

Daniel Tsadik (Jewish History)
Dr. Daniel Tsadik is an assistant professor at Yeshiva University and a visiting assistant professor at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism. A Fulbright scholar, Tsadik obtained his PhD in 2002 from the Yale University History Department specializing in the areas of Iranian and Middle Eastern history as well as in history of the Jews under Islam. His research focuses on the modern history of Iran, Shi'ah Islam and Iran's religious minorities. Subsequent to his studies at Yale, Tsadik has been teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and elsewhere. He received fellowships from various places, including Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center for the research of Islam and the Middle East, the Hebrew University's Golda Meir Fellowship Trust and Warburg Fellowship of the Institute for Judaic Studies, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin's Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. Tsadik has authored a book, Between Foreigners and Shiis: Nineteenth-Century Iran and its Jewish Minority (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Recently, he collaborated with the Center for Israel Studies in hosting an international conference on Iran-Israel relations. The proceedings of the conference will be published in a volume edited by Tsadik.

Evan Resnick (Political Science)
Dr. Evan Resnick is a specialist in international relations theory, international security studies and American foreign policy. His doctoral dissertation, "Ties That Bind or Ties That Blind? Assessing Engagement as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy," was completed in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Robert Jervis and Dr. David Baldwin at Columbia University. His published work has appeared in a number of journals, including International Security and Journal of International Affairs. He is presently working on a book manuscript that examines the phenomenon of "alliances of convenience" in international politics and explains America's remarkably poor track record in bargaining with its allies of convenience during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. In addition, he is in the process of drafting two academic papers, one which argues that wartime alliances between democracies will tend to be more cohesive than those between dictatorships, and another that investigates the simultaneously facilitative and obstructive roles that private business interests play in U.S. efforts to pursue "constructive engagement" policies toward its adversaries. Some of the courses that Resnick has taught at Yeshiva College include Introduction to International Politics, American Foreign Policy, Seminar on Terrorism and Low-Intensity Conflict and Seminar on War, Security, and National Defense.

Joseph Angel (Jewish History)
Dr. Joseph Angel is assistant professor of Bible at Yeshiva College, where he lectures in Hebrew Bible and classical Jewish history. His research focuses on the literary heritage of the Jews of the late Second Temple period and the significant role this corpus plays in the reconstruction of classical Judaism. In particular, his work examines how the religious and legal perspectives preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls reconfigure biblical tradition and shed light on the nature of the Qumran community and contemporary groups, as well as the development of both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. His first book, Otherworldly and Eschatological Priesthood in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brill, 2010), explores the imaginative depictions of angelic and messianic priestly figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls as a reflection of the religious worldview of the Qumran community and related segments of Second Temple society. His other publications include articles on ancient Jewish magic, the Second Temple of Jerusalem, Qumran liturgy and religious experience, as well as commentaries on Second Temple period texts such as the Damascus Document and "New Jerusalem." Angel holds a BA in Jewish studies from the University of Washington (2001) and a PhD in Second Temple period history from New York University (2008).

Josh Karlip (Jewish History)
Dr. Joshua Karlip specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries East European Jewry. He teaches both survey courses in Modern and Medieval Jewish History as well as advanced seminars in his area of expertise. Karlip studies the cultural and intellectual history of East European Jewry in all its dimensions: traditional religious culture as well as secular intellectual and political movements. His dissertation concentrated on the intellectual and political odyssey of three Yiddishist intellectuals and activists from 1905 to the eve of the Holocaust. Karlip published two articles that examined these thinkers' reactions to the outbreak of World War Two: "At the Crossroads between War and Genocide: A Reassessment of Jewish Ideology in 1940," Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 11, No 2 (Winter 2005) and "In the Age of Haman: Shimon Dubnow and His Students on the Eve of the Second World War," Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook IV, 2005. Another research interest of Karlip's is Lithuanian rabbinic culture, a topic about which he offers seminars at both Yeshiva College and Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. In May 2008, Yeshiva College students elected Karlip Professor of the Year.

Norman Adler (Psychology)
Dr. Norman Adler is University Professor of Psychology. He also serves as special assistant for curriculum development and research initiatives to the provost. He is a biological psychologist interested in the interface between biology and behavior.  He is currently working on the relationship between biological origins and human religious belief and practices. He was awarded the Dana Foundation Prize for Pioneering Achievement in Higher Education for his creation and directorship of the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania, a program that has served as a model for the fields of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology as undergraduate majors in many of the major American universities today. He was the recipient of two Guggenheim Awards, the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, the Sigma Xi National Lectureship and a Fellowship to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2002, the annual Norman Adler Lecture Series in the Biological Basis of Behavior was established in his honor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rachel Mesch (French)
Dr. Rachel Mesch received her BA from Yale College (1993), her MA from Columbia University (1995) and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2000). Before joining the YU faculty in 2007, she was a lecturer at Barnard College and a visiting assistant professor at Columbia. A specialist in nineteenth-century French literature, Mesch's main areas of research and teaching include naturalism and decadence, women writers, gender studies, the French Enlightenment,and the Belle Epoque. She has published articles on women writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is the author of The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Vanderbilt U. Press, 2006). She also co-edited State of the Union: Marriage in Nineteenth-Century France, a special volume of Dix-Neuf, the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviemistes. She is currently at work on a book-length project about efforts to reconcile femininity and feminism in Belle Epoque France.

Ruth Bevan (Political Science)
Senior professor of the Department of Political Science, Dr. Ruth Bevan holds the David W. Petegorsky chair of Political Science. Specializing in European politics and modern political theory, she teaches courses focusing on the European Union, globalization and Western political theory as well as the Fundamentals course for beginners. Her honors courses have included seminars on Classical Political Theory, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Postmodernity and Hannah Arendt. She is presently chair of the social science cluster at the College and a member of the Honors Committee and Curriculum Committee. She is faculty adviser of the Joseph Dunner Political Science Society and of the departmental journal, The Clarion. Professionally, Bevan is a member of the American Political Science Association, the International Political Science Association, the European Studies Association, the Council for European Studies and the International Studies Association. She regularly gives papers or chairs panels at conferences of these associations.

Yaakov Elman (Jewish History)
Dr. Yaakov Elman is professor of Judaic studies at Yeshiva University and an associate of Harvard's Center of Jewish Studies. He is author or editor of eight books and dozens of articles on rabbinic intellectual history from the Second Temple period to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe. For the past decade, he has been investigating the Middle Persian background of the Babylonian Talmud in collaboration with Professor Oktor Skjaervo of Harvard University. Three sages have been of particular interest: the fourth-century Amora, Rava, Nahmanides, and the 19th-century hasidic thinker Reb Zadok haKohen of Lublin.