Hello

Currently, I am a PhD student in the Near-Eastern and Judaic Studies Department and a Schusterman Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. My current focus is on American military relations and the weapons industry as it relates to business and economics with Israel from the  Zionist era (1880's) to the present.  My advisors are Jonathan Sarna, Alex Kaye, and Yehuda Mirsky.

I studied at Washington University in St. Louis and received an MA in Jewish Studies & Hebrew. I focused on Eastern European Jewry, shtetl life, and Jewish secular and religious literature. Literary artists I fell in love with: Franz Kafka, Gershom Sholem, Bialik, Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, Martin Buber, Yosef Yerushalmi, S. Ansky, & Etgar Keret.

I also studied at Saint Louis University and received an MTS (Master's of Theology) with a focus on the intertextuality of women in the Hebrew Bible and Midrash (Jewish literature).

I am usually somewhere in the middle of four books for school, two or three books on my nightstand for fun, and a book or two on Audible.

I have adopted an attitude I found in Johannes Reuchlin, a Catholic-Hebraist who dared to rescue Jewish sacred texts from a burn edict issued in 16th- century Europe. Reuchlin proclaimed, "...books are as dear to [me] as [my] children."

Because I think he was pretty amazing, I'll finish Reuchlin's story. Reuchlin succeeded in rescuing the books before the German crown, Maximillian I, but his testimony and legal presentation cost him dearly. For the next ten years of his life, he battled a fiery literary affair in court with scholars Johannes Pfefferkorn and Martin Luther. In the end, those whose books were about to be delivered to the flames... they never forgot the rescue of their "paper children."

Today one of my favorite books is: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.