- Contributors
Matthew Baigell is Professor Emeritus of art history at Rutgers University. He has written, edited, and co-edited over twenty books on American, Jewish American, and contemporary Russian art. His recent books include American Artists, Jewish Images (2006) and Jewish Art in America: An Introduction (2007). His Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art, 1880–1940 will be published in 2014.
Ranen Omer-Sherman was a founding member of a desert kibbutz and is currently Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Miami. His essays on Israeli and Jewish writers have appeared in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Modern Jewish Studies, Modern Literature, MELUS, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modernism/Modernity, Prooftexts, Religion & Literature, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. His books include Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature (2002); Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert (2006); and two coedited volumes, The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (2008) and Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2013).
Alan L. Berger is the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies and directs the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz at Florida Atlantic University. Among his ten books are Children of Job: American Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust; Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, co-edited with his wife Naomi Berger (B’nai Zion National Media Award); Jewish/ Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock, co-authored with David Patterson; and Trialogue and Terror: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam After 9/11 (Editor). Berger received a Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, from Luther College.
Asher Z. Milbauer is Professor of English, the director of graduate studies in literature, and the director of the Exile Studies Program at Florida International University. He is the author of Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer and the coeditor (with Donald G. Watson) of Reading Philip Roth. In a number of his essays, “Eastern Europe in American-Jewish Writing,” “Rescue Mission: Vasily Grossman and the Holocaust,” and “Teaching to Remember” among them, he explores issues associated with Jewish immigrant journeys, the Holocaust, and second-generation concerns. [End Page 220] His experiential-scholarly essay, “In Search of a Doorpost: Meditations on Exile and Literature,” won the Sarah Russo Prize for an Essay on Exile. He has twice received the Excellence in Teaching Award at Florida International University.
Jordana de Bloeme, whose paper in this issue is the winner of the graduate student award at the 2011 Midwest Jewish Studies Conference, is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Humanities and Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. She is completing her dissertation, entitled Creating Yiddishist Youth: The Vilna Educational Society and the Turn to Youth in Interwar Vilna. Her research interests include modern Eastern European Jewish history, Yiddish studies, and nationalism of minority and stateless cultures.
Michael Shapiro spent the bulk of his career at the University of Illinois, where he taught courses in Shakespeare and early modern drama and literature in the Department of English, and was co-founder and director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, for which he taught courses in modern Jewish literature. He was also a visiting professor at Cornell, Reading (UK) and Tamkang (Taiwan) Universities and is currently a visiting professor at Loyola (Chicago). He is the author of Children of the Revels, (1976) and Gender in Play (1992), as well as numerous articles, notes, reviews, and conference papers. He is currently working on revisions and adaptations of The Merchant of Venice and is co-editing a collection of essays on Jewish artistic and legalistic responses to that play.
Robin Russin is Associate Professor of screenwriting at the University of California, Riverside, where he serves as Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, and teaches classes in dramatic writing, film history, noir, and Shakespeare. His research interests focus around narrative strategies and story design in dramatic writing. A former Rhodes Scholar, he received his A. B. in Fine Arts from Harvard, and graduate degrees in English Literature, Sculpture and Screenwriting from Oxford University, Rhode Island School of Design, and...