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2019 Board Election Results

We are proud to introduce our new Board members and Executive Committee will take office at the Board of Directors meeting at the Annual Conference. Thank you to the 289 members who voted in the first AJS online elections!

Executive Board

President: Noam Pianko (University of Washington) is the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies. Pianko’s research interests include modern Jewish history, Zionism, and American Judaism, and his book, Peoplehood: An American Innovation, won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book prize.

Secretary/Treasurer: Ken Koltun-Fromm (Haverford College) is the Robert and Constance MacCrate Professor of Social Responsibility and Professor of Religion. He is also the Director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities. He is the author of four books, including Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America and Imagining Jewish Authenticity: Vision and Text in American Jewish Thought.

VP-Membership: Jeffrey Shoulson (University of Connecticut) is the Vice Provost for Academic Operations at the University of Connecticut. His scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in the medieval and early-modern periods, especially the ways in which Jews and Judaism are represented within Christian writings and Christianity influences or is thematized in Jewish writings. His book Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity was awarded the American Academy of Jewish Research’s Salon Baron Prize.

VP-Program: Robin Judd (Ohio State University) has served on the faculty of the History Department. She also serves as an associate member of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, the Women’s/Gender Studies Department, and the Center for the Study of Religion. She is the author of Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German–Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933.

VP-Publications: Laura Leibman (Reed College) is a professor of English and Humanities. Her book Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and was selected as one of Choice journal’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. She has written numerous articles on early American life and material culture.

Directors to the Board for a three-year term that would run December 2019-December 2022

David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author or editor of eleven books in Jewish cultural and intellectual history and has won the National Jewish Book Award three times.

Gabriel Finder is a professor in the German Department at the University of Virginia whose research fields are the Holocaust, Jewish life in Europe after the Holocaust, and Holocaust-related trials. He is head of AJS's Holocaust Studies Division and is completing a seven-year tenure as director of UVA's Jewish Studies Program. HIs most recent publication, coauthored with Alexander Prusin, is Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (Toronto, 2018).

Willa Johnson is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi. She has devoted her research and academic career to writing about and teaching students, colleagues, and community members in the Deep South about the significance of Jewish history for all. This work has included collaborative efforts funded by and in collaboration with AJS-LHJSP and the USHMM among others.

Shira Kohn is a member of the Upper School History Department at The Dalton School. She, along with Hasia Diner and Rachel Kranson, co-edited A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America (Rutgers University Press, 2010) and in 2018, published "Turning German Jews into Jewish Greeks: Philanthropy and Acculturation in the Jewish Greek System's Student Refugee Programs, 1936-1940," in American Jewish History. She is currently working on a monograph about Jewish college sororities and their responses to civil rights in Cold War America.

Eva Mroczek is associate professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at UC Davis. A scholar of Ancient Judaism and Book History, she was the finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize in 2018 for her first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, and is in residence at the Huntington Library on an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for 2019-2020. She has spent her entire education and career at public universities.

Lisa Silverman is associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and contributing editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book for Central European Jewish history and culture. Her books include Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford UP, 2012) and Holocaust Representations in History: an Introduction, co-authored with Daniel H. Magilow (Bloomsbury, 2015 & 2019). Her research focuses on the cultural history of Jews and antisemitism in modern Austria and Germany.