2024-2025 cohort of graduate fellows
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies warmly welcomes the 2024-2025 cohort of graduate fellows in Jewish studies. Fellows receive mentorship from Stroum Center faculty, attend a biweekly course to build scholarly skills and hone their research, and share their work with the broader community through in-person presentations and articles published on the Stroum Center website.
Funding for the annual fellowship program is generously provided by community supporters. Applications for the 2025-2026 cohort will open in spring 2025. Learn more about this year’s cohort of graduate fellows in Jewish studies:
Kara Atkinson, Mickey & Leo Sreebny Memorial Fellow
Kara Atkinson is a second-year M.A. student in Middle East studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Her current research project focuses on co-led Israeli-Palestinian solidarity groups pursuing nonviolent resistance within Israel/Palestine. Her research examines how these groups fit into a broader context of constructive resistance with their efforts to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories, as well as how these groups provide a foundation from which reconciliation efforts may be expanded upon once hostilities cease. Kara received her B.A. in history from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. She also served in the United States Army as an Egyptian Arabic linguist from 2014-2019. Outside of academia, Kara is an avid hiker and enjoys spending time with her two golden retrievers, Penny and Lincoln.
Jake Beckert, Robinovitch Family Fellow
Jake Beckert is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Washington. His research delves into the dynamics of American investment in Mandatory Palestine, scrutinizing the interplay between capitalism, development, and inter-ethnic conflict within the region. Central to his dissertation is an examination of the Palestine Economic Corporation (PEC). Established by American non-Zionists in the 1920s, the PEC was a for-profit entity dedicated to investing in Jewish industries in Palestine, while adhering to a principle of operating on a “strictly business” and “non-political” basis. Jake’s project sheds light on the intricate ways the PEC’s leadership became increasingly involved in the Jewish-Arab conflict, and how they maintained their claims of “apoliticism” despite their increasing entanglements. When he is not doing work, Jake loves climbing in the mountains, and hiking with his pet chihuahua Appa.
Joana Bürger, Ina & Richard Willner Memorial Fellow
Joana Bürger is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on Jewish refugees in the eastern Mediterranean in the interwar period. In her dissertation, Joana studies the emergence of Greece and the Aegean region as a multidirectional transit space for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. She is especially interested in understanding how local Jewish communities assisted the refugees through relief work, Greek government policies towards Jewish refugees, and the perspective of the refugees themselves. Through the study of letters, memoirs and oral history interviews, Joana shines light on how refugees made sense of their experiences. Joana’s work incorporates southeastern Europe as a central geography of the Holocaust and highlights Sephardi Jews as agents of relief work and victims of Nazi persecution.
Ari Forsyth, Max Sarason Fellow
Ari Forsyth is a Ph.D. student in History specializing in race, gender, and Jewish identity in the early twentieth-century United States. A social and cultural historian by training, Ari’s work bridges the fields of United States history, global Jewish history, comparative race and colonialism, disability studies, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Ari’s dissertation investigates Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish American women’s experiences as reformers, social workers, and criminalized subjects in early twentieth-century U.S. cities like New York and Seattle to understand connections between disability, gender normativity, and whiteness. Their teaching and research interests include U.S. imperial formations, Jewish internationalism, women in helping professions, social science and technology, urban policing, racial hierarchies, migration, disability, gender, and sexuality. When they aren’t working, Ari loves watching Star Trek, making zines and linocuts, two-stepping to fast drums, reading Le Guin, and riding public transportation.
Alexandra Ritsatos, Ina & Richard Willner Memorial Fellow
Alexandra Ritsatos is a second-year Ph.D. student in history at the University of Washington. She completed her B.A. in history at Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2023. Her research interests include Sephardic Jewish history, gender in the eastern Sephardic diaspora and modern Greece, and the history of the organized Left in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. For her Ph.D. dissertation, she hopes to explore belonging among marginalized groups, such as Sephardic Jews, refugees from Asia Minor, and Armenians, in the interwar Greek communist left.
Martin H. Schwartz, Mickey & Leo Sreebny Memorial Fellow
Martin H. Schwartz is a student and instructor at the University of Washington, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in German studies and a certificate in cinema and media studies. After receiving his M.A. from the University of Chicago, he served in numerous roles in cultural curation and management, including as program curator at the Goethe-Institut’s Goethe Seattle Pop Up and as a film programmer at Seattle International Film Festival. Martin is a published playwright and an alumnus of the Anti-Defamation League’s Glass Leadership Institute. He currently holds a Hanauer Fellowship for Excellence in Western Civilization. His research addresses cultural antisemitism in postwar German-language theatre, film, and discourse, with emphases on philosemitism, antisemitism in public spheres, and (non-)representation of the Holocaust. Martin is the father of Helen, 7, and loves theater, film, and aimless urban strolls.
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