The vexed relationship between Halakhah and the laws of war

How did Jews experience life in the Union and Confederate armies?

Jewish international lawyers and their efforts to end the Vietnam War

YouTube video by Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Jewish international lawyers and their efforts to end the Vietnam War

Steven Weitzman reflects on War and Peace in Jewish Thought and History

YouTube video by Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

כתביו המוקדמים של אברהם חן (1877-1957) טבועים בחותם האלימות המדממת של תחילת המאה העשרים. בתקופה שבה עלה קרנן של זהויות קיבוציות דרש חן לעמוד על דמו של היחיד הנרמס בעקביהן. מול תעתועי הרטוריקה הפוליטית...

The Haredi and military conscription in Israel

The Haredi and military conscription in Israel

How did American Jews living in the South respond to the U.S. Civil War?

The EEOC lawsuit and the legal fight over Jewish life at Penn

Ethan Schwartz is an assistant professor at Villanova University. He studies the Hebrew Bible in both the context of the ancient Near Eastern setting in which it emerged and the Second Temple period i...

For millennia, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers have been wrestling with the question: When is a war just? Contemporary events point to a collective rethinking of the legitimacy and limitations ...

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a scholar specializing in the social and economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the modern period with a focus on women and gender, migration, and transnationalism. She ...

JQR 116.3 is now available, online and in print

Yuval Fraenkel is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in the literary analysis of rabbinic narratives. During his Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2024–2026),...

The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) redefined Jews’ experiences in the American republic. Jews fought and died on both sides and articulated various views about abolitionism, slavery, and secession. How an...

René Bloch is a professor of Jewish studies at the Institute of Jewish Studies and the Institute of Classics at the University of Bern in Switzerland. His work focuses primarily on Hellenistic Judaism...

February 16, 2017 | Rebecca Kobrin, Columbia University Presented by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania in partnership with The Gershman Y, Philadelphia Katz Center Public Program Series: "Political Ramifications," Spring 2017 Video made possible by support from the Josephine Cohen Foundation

2026–2027 Fellowship ThemeWar and Peace in Jewish Thought and HistoryWar has been a part of Jewish experience since its very beginnings, and so too has the aspiration for peace. The Katz Center devote...

The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies is a post-doctoral research institute within the University of Pennsylvania devoted to the study of Jewish cultures and texts as an integral part...

Society of American Archivists

Prof. Susannah Heschel explores the breakthroughs that transformed Jewish life and the barriers women and nonbinary scholars still face.

Katz Center fellow Yosefa Raz aims her subtle and devastating eye on the ways the Bible weaves through the present

Jeremiah Lockwood is not only a scholar of the female cantorial geniuses of the 20th century—he is a virtuoso performer of this repertoire himself

YouTube video by Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies