Institute Staff
Prof. Amos Morris - Reich
Director
Amos Morris – Reich works on the intersection of Jewish history and the history of science with special emphasis on the German context. His first book The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science (Routledge, 2007) focused on the emergence of notions of assimilation in cultural anthropology and formal sociology in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century and their effect on the understanding of the future course of Jews as a minority in modern society. His second book Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2016) employed historical epistemology to remap the history of photography as scientific evidence in the study of “race” ranging from physical anthropology to phenomenology. His forthcoming book Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth Century Cases studies five twentieth century cases which intersect the history of photography and Jewish history ranging from folklore through philanthropy to art.
Morris - Reich co-edited (with Dirk Rupnow), Ideas of “Race” in the History of the Humanities (Palgrave, 2017) and (with Margaret Olin), Photography and Imagination (Routledge, 2019). He edited the first collection of essays by Georg Simmel in Hebrew: Georg Simmel: "How is Society Possible?" and Other Essays (Ha-kibutz ha-meuchad, 2012) and the first collection of essays by Sander Gilman in Hebrew: The Jewish Body and Other Protruding Organs: A Selection of Essays by Sander Gilman (Resling, 2015).
With special interest in questions of methodology and epistemology, Morris – Reich has also published widely on the history of antisemitism and racism within the context of the social sciences, biological sciences, and biologically oriented humanities. At the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of the Science and Ideas his teaching and supervision focus on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, the history of antisemitism and racism within science, and the history and philosophy of photography and technology.
Julija Levin
Administrative Director
Julija Levin is an MA student at the Jewish History Department at Tel Aviv University. She has a BA degree in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from University College London, and is a two-time fellow of the Israeli Inter-University Program in Russian and East European Studies, and a recipient of grants from The Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations, and the Leonid Nevzlin Center for Russian and East European Jewry. Julija is writing her MA thesis under the supervision of Dr. Scott Ury, on physical and sexual violence against Jewish women in different social spheres in nineteenth century Vilna.
Balazs Berkovits
Researcher
Trained as a philosopher and a sociologist, Balazs Berkovits has published on topics related to the sociology of education, social theory, the epistemology of the social sciences, and the philosophy of Michel Foucault.
Berkovits is currently working on a study of the reemergence of the “Jewish problem” in contemporary works of philosophical, social and political criticism, and on a project called “Conspiracy theories and social criticism”. His publications on these topics include: “Adorno On Activist Social Science” (forthcoming), “Israel as a White Colonial Settler State in Activist Social Science” in Alvin Rosenfeld (ed.) Contending with Antisemitism, Indiana University Press, 2021. (in press), “Social Criticism and the 'Jewish Problem'” in Alvin Rosenfeld (ed.) Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization, Indiana University Press, 2019, and ”Critical Whiteness Studies and the Jewish Problem”, Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie, Vol. 5, Issue 1, Apr. 2018.
Occasionally, he also works as a translator of social scientific and philosophical works and as a journalist, writing on political and social developments in present-day Hungary for Hungarian, Swiss, and French journals.
He is a member of the editorial board of the European magazine K. Jews, Europe and the XXIst century.
