Speaker Biographies
Oren Ableman is a curator-researcher at the Dead Sea Scrolls unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority. As part of his work there he is entrusted with the publication of previously unidentified Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, as well as some recently excavated fragments. He has also recently completed a PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The title of his dissertation was: Responses to the Roman Conquest of Judea (63 BCE) in the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Historical-Literary Discussion in the Roman Context of the Sectarian Texts from Qumran.
Yonatan Adler is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Ariel University in Israel. He specializes in the origins of Judaism as a system of ritual practices, and in the evolution of these practices over the long-term. His research in recent years has focused on ritual purity observance evidenced in the archaeological remains of chalk vessels and immersion pools, the dietary laws, and ancient tefillin from Qumran and elsewhere in the Judean Desert.
Joseph L. Angel is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. He has published numerous studies on Second Temple Judaism, including Otherworldly and Eschatological Priesthood in the Dead Sea Scrolls. His new edition of the Qumran manuscripts known as the Songs of the Sage (4Q510-511) will soon be published in Brill’s Dead Sea Scrolls Editions series.
Gideon Avni is the Head of the Archaeology Division in the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and a Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His academic interests focus on various aspects of Classical, Late Antique, Early Islamic and Medieval archaeology, cultural and religious transformations, the diffusion of technologies and movement of people in the Near East and beyond. His recent books are The Byzantine – Islamic Transition in Palestine, an Archaeological Approach (Oxford University Press, 2014), and A New Old City – Jerusalem in the Late Roman Period (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 105).
Jonathan Ben-Dov is Associate Professor at the Department of Bible, Tel Aviv University. He is co-director of the Scripta Qumranica Electronica Project and is involved in re-editions of several Dead Sea Scrolls.
Moshe J. Bernstein is Professor of Bible and Jewish History at Yeshiva University, where he holds the David A. and Fannie M. Denenberg Chair in Biblical Studies. He has published extensively on Jewish biblical interpretation in antiquity, especially in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he still hopes that more of the Genesis Apocryphon will turn up somewhere. When he is not working on Aramaic Dead Sea scrolls, he devotes his research to other Jewish Aramaic texts, such as the targumim, the Jewish translations of the Bible into Aramaic, and to Jewish Aramaic liturgical poetry of late antiquity.
George Brooke is the Rylands Professor Emeritus of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, England. He is currently the senior editor of Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, published by Brill. He recently co-edited with Charlotte Hempel the T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most comprehensive up to date one-volume introduction to the Scrolls.
Esther G. Chazon is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Director of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls & Associated Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is on the steering committee of the International Organization for Qumran Studies and the editorial board of Dead Sea Discoveries; has served as co-chair of the Qumran Section of the Society of Biblical Literature and was a member of the Dead Sea Scrolls Editorial Team
Chaim Cohen is an archaeologist in the IAA, and todey he is serving as the chief arcaeologist of Binyamin district. In the past four years, Chaim was one of the leadin archaeologists in the Judean Desert Archaeological Project, and a co-dirrector of the Murabba't cave excavation.
Ilit Cohen Ofri is the director of the IAA Conservation laboratory. She earned her PhD in Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, on ‘degradation of charcoal in the archaeological record,’ with a postdoctoral fellowship in chemistry on charcoal degradation and an additional post-doctoral fellowship in biochemistry on alternative energy (using the principles of photosynthesis to produce artificial energy). Before beginning her position at the IAA, Ilit was the head of the Spectrometry and Chemical Analysis Unit at the Weizmann Institute. Her position at the IAA DSS unit focuses on expanding analytical research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a particular emphasis on scroll conservation research.
John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale University, and honorary professor at the University of Pretoria. He received his Ph. D. from Harvard (1972). His most recent books are The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (University of California, 2017) and What Are Biblical Values? (Yale, 2019). He serves as general editor of the Anchor Yale Bible and Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. He has been president of the Catholic Biblical Association and of the Society of Biblical Literature, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from University College Dublin and the University of Zurich, and has received the Burkitt medal for biblical scholarship from the British Academy.
Hila Dayfani is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible at the University of Oxford. Hila is also a member of the Israeli team of the Scripta Qumranica Electronica project. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation in the Bible Department at Bar-Ilan University and published papers in Textus, ZAW, and Revue de Qumran. Her research interests include textual traditions of the Pentateuch, the Dead Sea scrolls, and scribal culture in the Second Temple Period.
Devorah Dimant is a professor emerita at the university of Haifa, Israel. Published widely about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.
Daniel K. Falk is Chaiken Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor and Head of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Parabiblical Texts: Strategies for Extending the Scriptures in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is Co-General Editor of Prayer in the Ancient World (Brill) and Dead Sea Scrolls Editions (Brill).
Ariel Feldman is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Brite Divinity School and Texas Christian University. He published several books and articles, all of which deal with the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is particularly interested in all matters related to the early Jewish interpretation of the texts that came to be known as the Hebrew Bible.
Liane Feldman is an Assistant Professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her research spans Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism and addresses priestly literature, the literary representation of sacrifice, and the imagined construction of sacred space, with an added interest in translation and translation theory (both ancient and modern). She is the author of the award-winning book The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source (Mohr Siebeck 2020). She is currently in the final stages of completing an edition and new translation of the pentateuchal priestly source (University of California Press, expected 2023), and beginning work on a book about the diverse literary representations of sacrifice in Persian and Hellenistic Jewish Literature.
Marcello Fidanzio is a Professor at Faculty of Theology of Lugano (FTL) and Director of the Istituto di Cultura e Archeologia delle Terre Bibliche (ISCAB-FTL); chercheur associé École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem and Director of the Qumran Caves Publication Project (EBAF and ISCAB FTL).
Steven D. Fraade is the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale, in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies. His next book will be a new translation of and commentary to the Damascus Document, as part of the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls, projected publication in December.
Asaf Gayer is a postdoc fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working on the Isaiah scrolls from Qumran cave 4. His dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Ben-Dov, explores the literary motif of measuring and weighing in Qumranic wisdom tradition and in other second Temple Jewish literature. Asaf’s work is characterized by the use of digital tools and techniques along with traditional philological work, illuminating the material aspects and the literary structure of a composition, unveiling its motifs and traditions and its interrelations with surrounding literary cultures.
Andrew D. Gross is Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America. He is presently finishing a new edition of the Temple Scroll from Qumran with Prof. Lawrence H. Schiffman.
Angela Kim Harkins (Ph.D. 2003, U. Notre Dame) is an Associate Professor at Boston College. Harkins is the author of Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (de Gruyter, 2012, paperback 2018), more than three dozen articles and essays, and the co-editor of five edited volumes. Harkins was a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at the University of Birmingham in England (2014-2015) and previously held a Fulbright award for research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (1997-1998).
Alex P. Jassen is Chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Ethel and Irvin Edelman Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Mediating the Divine: Prophecy and Revelation in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and co-editor of Scripture, Violence, and Textual Practice in Early Judaism and Christianity (Brill, 2010) and the Journal of Ancient Judaism.
Eitan Klein is an Israeli Archaeologist working in the Israel Antiquities Authority as a Deputy Director of the Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit and as a lecturer for History and Archaeology at the Land of Israel Studies in Ashkelon Academic College. Dr. Klein has published dozens of articles in numerous journals and books about the archaeology and the historical-geography of the land of Israel during the classical periods. In the last four years he has serves as a co-director of the Judean Desert Caves Archaeological Project.
Reinhard Kratz is professor for Old Testament at the Theological Faculty of the University of Göttingen (Germany). His main fields of research are the history of literature and theology of the biblical and parabiblical scriptures, Ancient Near Eastern and biblical prophecy, Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods.
Michael Langlois holds a PhD and Habilitation in Historical and Philological Sciences from the Sorbonne. He teaches as tenured Associate Professor at the University of Strasbourg and is an IUF and HCAS fellow.
Timothy H. Lim is the Professor of Hebrew Bible & Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh. He is the general editor of The Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls (OUP), and he recently published The Earliest Commentary on the Prophecy of Habakkuk. He is the author of The Dead Sea Scrolls. A Very Short Introduction 2nd ed. (OUP, 2017), which has been translated into several languages.
Jodi Magness is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of eleven books, including Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton University Press, 2019), and The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Eerdmans, revised edition 2021), both of which won awards. Since 2011 Professor Magness has directed excavations at Huqoq in Israel’s Galilee.
Emily Master is currently the Executive Director of the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a connector of people and projects in Israel operated by the Israel Antiquities Authority. To the role, she brings many years of international arts and cultural management experience in marketing, communications, fundraising, operations, program evaluation, and strategic planning. She has been involved in archaeological work in Israel through the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon and Tel Shimron Excavations.
Dennis Mizzi is a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Judaism at the University of Malta. He is the assistant director of the Huqoq Excavation Project and the Einot Amitai Archaeological Project and a network partner in the Leverhulme International Network Project for the Study of Dispersed Qumran Caves Artefacts and Archival Sources. Currently, he is completing a comprehensive, multi-volume monograph on the archaeology of Qumran in which he analyses in detail all aspects of the site, including its chronology, architecture, and material assemblages, the surrounding caves and adjacent cemeteries, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls as archaeological artefacts.
Eva Mroczek teaches in the Religious Studies Department and directs the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. She is the author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (2016), has published on apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and premodern conceptions of scripture, and is completing a book about manuscript discovery narratives as a genre of religious literature.
Vered Noam is professor of Talmud at the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include rabbinic and Second Temple period literature, in particular Qumran halakha and its tannaitic parallels. Her publications include Josephus and the Rabbis (with Tal Ilan) (Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2017) and Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Eyal Regev is a Professor of Jewish studies in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and archaeology and the director of the Helena and Paul Schulmann School for Basic Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University. His areas of research focus on the social history and archaeology of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. His books include The Sadducees and their Halakhah, Sectarianism in Qumran, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity and The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred.
Lawrence H. Schiffman is the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and Director of the Global Institute for Advanced Research in Jewish Studies. He has served as the Chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and Ethel and Irvin A. Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. He has authored numerous books and articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism in Late Antiquity, the history of Jewish law, and Talmudic literature.
Alison Schofield an Associate Professor at the University of Denver (DU) and DU-Iliff School of Theology Joint Doctoral Program. She specializes in Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls and serves as co-editor of The Dead Sea Scrolls Editions and Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah series (Brill). Currently as an NEH fellow, she is completing a new edition (translation and commentary) of The Community Rule and of other fragments from Cave 1, now found in Jerusalem and Amman.
Eileen Schuller is a Professor Emerita at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada where she taught in the Department of Religious Studies in 1990. Her specialty has been in Prayers and Hymns in the Dead Sea Scrolls, especially the editions of the Hodayot manuscripts from cave 1 and cave 4.
Pnina Shor is the Former head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Unit at the IAA. She retired from the IAA last year, worked as an archaeologist and for the IAA throughout her archaeological career, first as a field archaeologist and then in various management roles.
Guy D. Stiebel is a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University and the Head of the archaeological expedition to the World Heritage site: Masada. Stiebel has published extensively on military archaeology and history, the interface between text and matter and the archaeology of Jerusalem. The new discoveries, most notably the horticulture and viniculture of King Herod, were recognized by the Third Shanghai Archaeological Forum, being awarded one of the ten World discoveries in Archaeology. Stiebel was recently nominated by Israel’s Minister of Culture as the Chair of the Israel Archaeological Council.
Emanuel Tov is the J.L. Magnes Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he has taught since 1974 and from which he retired in 2009. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in biblical studies from the Hebrew University in 1973. He was the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.
James M. Tucker earned his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has two primary areas of research interest. The first area focuses on comparative legal studies in the Second Temple era leading into classical Rabbinic and early Christian eras. As for the second area, James has a keen interest in matters related to material and scribal cultures in Late Antiquity. He is currently a researcher with the Lying Pen of the Scribes project, where he continues to pioneer and to develop digital methods to study the Dead Sea Scrolls. In addition, James is currently revising his doctoral thesis, From Ink Traces to Ideology: Material, Text, and Composition of Qumran Community Rules, for publication.
Elisa Uusimäki works as an Associate Professor in Hebrew Bible at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has published on topics such as wisdom and ethics, reception history, and Hellenism. Currently, she is the PI of the project “An Intersectional Analysis of Ancient Jewish Travel Narratives”, funded by the European Research Council.
Joe Uziel is the new head of the DSS unit at the Israel Antiquities Department. Prior to his current position, Joe was a research archaeologist at the IAA, working on the excavations in Jerusalem's holy basin -the Western Wall Tunnels and the City of David, for nine years, and publishing numerous scholarly articles on the subject of ancient Jerusalem.
James VanderKam taught at North Carolina State University for 15 years and the University of Notre Dame for 25 before retiring in 2016. His interests include the Dead Sea Scrolls and other literature of the Second Temple period, and he is the author of the two-volume Hermeneia commentary on the Book of Jubilees.
Sidnie White Crawford is Willa Cather Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism emerita at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is an internationally recognized scholar in the areas of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Her latest book is Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2019), the winner of the Frank Moore Cross Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research.
Molly Zahn is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research interests center on exploring the variety of ways early Jewish literature was composed, transmitted, interpreted, and authorized. Her new book, Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism, will appear this summer.
And a special thanks to our Graduate Student Moderators from the NYU Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies!
Patrick Angiolillo is a doctoral student studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple period Jewish literature (including Hebrew Bible and New Testament). His current research examines ancient Jewish prayer and religious practices in their larger social-religious contexts. Patrick earned his MAR from Yale Divinity School and his AB magna cum laude from Boston College. He is also a staff member and the Educational Coordinator for the Huqoq Excavation Project in the Galilee region of Israel.
Aure Ben-Zvi Goldblum’s interests span the entire Bible but she is particularly interested in late Biblical texts, Apocrypha, Psedepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She is currently focusing on aspects of authority and power, both in texts and people, in the Ancient Near East. She is also interested in language pedagogy and exploiting digital tools for making research more accessible.
Spencer Elliott is a doctoral student in the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies. Before coming to NYU, he earned two MA degrees, one from Trinity Western University, and the other from Jerusalem University College. His current assortment of interests includes the book of Psalms, public and private expressions of Israelite religion, historical geography, and the Septuagint.
