The Early-Career Faculty of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies Represent Its Bright Future (Part 2)
This article is written by Susan M. Carini, former Emory Executive Director of Communication (retired)
This article, which represents the second and final part of the series spotlighting Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies’ junior faculty, profiles Professors Craig Perry and Kate Rosenblatt. You can find part one, which features Professors Geoff Levin and Tamar Menashe, HERE.
Craig Perry 14G
Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
“History and English classes were where I first felt at home learning to think and write critically,” says Craig Perry, who — after earning a BA and master of arts in teaching at Duke University — taught social studies in Bethesda, Maryland; the American School of Casablanca; and then at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles.
It was the latter position that sparked his passion for Jewish history. “To that point,” Perry notes, “I had never studied Jewish history.” That quickly changed when he was asked to teach a new course that integrated premodern Jewish and world history. So, when Perry moved to Atlanta for his wife’s work in 2007, he decided to make his own career change. After a year of auditing Emory’s courses in Hebrew and Jewish history, he applied to the university’s graduate program in history and earned his PhD in 2014.
As a graduate student, Perry continued the coursework and language training in Hebrew and Arabic that prepared him to do original research in the documents of the Cairo Geniza — a cache of roughly 400,000 pages of manuscripts that accumulated in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, between the 11th and late-19th centuries. At that time his interest in global history led him to a course in the history of Atlantic slavery with David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Emeritus. When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, Perry chose to write a history of slavery set in the Jewish community of medieval Egypt as a way to connect his main research and teaching interests.
From 2016-2019, Perry was a faculty member in the Judaic Studies department at University of Cincinnati, where he taught across the Jewish studies curriculum. Perry had plans to put down roots in Cincinnati until he heard that Emory had created a position for someone with expertise in Jews of the Islamic World.
He asked himself: “How many positions in the world are there in this very specific field, let alone in a place that already felt like home? I also realized that if I wanted to keep growing as a scholar, I needed to be at a place like Emory, where I would be pushed and where I would have robust support for my research, including access to the distinguished faculty here whose interests and expertise overlap with my own.”
A teacher comfortable with student-driven inquiry
Perry teaches a survey of Jewish history as well as courses on slavery, Jewish-Muslim relations and the civilizations of the premodern Middle East.
Another course of his that has generated a lot of student enthusiasm is Everyday Life in Medieval Egypt, in which the class has the opportunity to do hands-on activities related to medieval technology, such as hand-making paper, and visiting the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech.
One aspect of that class involved working with the curator of the lab at Emory’s Herbarium. “We studied medieval medicine, which is plant-based, and realized that a number of the materials and processes used in Emory’s phytochemistry lab resembled what we found in medical recipes from the Middle Ages,” Perry says. Some of these Jewish studies students have gone on to do research in the Herbarium and its lab. Others are pursuing postgraduate degrees in nutrition science and in the medical school.
In the survey of Jewish history, taught at Emory as a one-semester course, it is inevitable that many topics must be left out. This is why Perry teaches students about what historians call meta-narratives, or the overarching themes that historians use to fashion coherent stories from, in this case, three thousand years of history. An example of one such meta-narrative is often referred to as an acculturationist model: How did Jewish culture develop in tension and dialogue with cultures where Jews lived, given that Jewish communities were not usually hegemonic majorities?
“The expertise my students need most from me is not in medieval Jewish history. Rather, this subject is the edifying training ground where they practice communication, analyzing evidence, problem-solving, and learning how to fashion their own worldviews on these bases,” he notes. Always, Perry asks students to apply those tools critically to his own courses. What meta-narratives does Perry himself privilege in how he teaches Jewish history? What are other possible meta-narratives that students could construct with evidence that they have studied in class? How does any given meta-narrative both reveal and obscure certain kinds of knowledge?
Bringing the enslaved to life
Perry’s deep interest in the Cairo Geniza continues. The people of its pages are Arabic-speaking Jews, including the sage Moses Maimonides and his son Abraham, who interacted constantly with Christians and Muslims. “I am telling stories of everyday lives that illuminate bigger topics: gender, marriage, individual agency and the social position of Jews in an Islamic society. I am constantly tacking between granular details and larger subjects,” Perry says.
He acknowledges that scholars like him are “just getting out of the shadow of a pioneering expert, S. D. Goitein, who studied the Geniza for 40 years and published a six-volume opus on it. Goitein looked at thousands of documents, but in the Geniza there are tens of thousands of documents.” Geniza research is an international endeavor. As a member of the Advisory Board for the Geniza Lab at Princeton University, Perry collaborates with a global network of scholars who use digital tools like Zoom and Slack to decipher newly discovered documents and to share knowledge.
Perry’s scholarly life was also transformed by his experience co-editing the “The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, A.D. 500–A.D. 1420” (2021) along with Eltis. His next book, “Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History,” will be published in January 2026 by Princeton University Press.
The book tells a story that cuts across different scales of analysis — from the global scale of the slave trade to the practice of slavery in Jewish households and, finally, to the lives of individual slaves and freed people. Some freed slaves accepted conversion to Judaism and became the parents of Jewish children. These freed people and their offspring point to another hidden history — one of formerly enslaved African and Indian Jews at the center of medieval Jewish culture. Perry says: “It is a real challenge to write the history of enslaved people since they did not generally leave behind their own records. It’s gratifying to use Jewish subjects and sources to make them more visible and to use innovative techniques to imagine what their life experiences were like. It is also a painful history and one that I try to approach with empathy.”
A recipient of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize in Medieval Studies, Perry will spend February through July 2025 at the American Academy in Rome. There, he will begin a new project, writing about medieval African societies and their connections with the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. “I’m grateful for the recognition my research is receiving,” Perry explains. In this case, accepting the Rome Prize meant declining a fellowship from the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey to work on the topic.
“How can I use Jewish sources to tell histories that illuminate both global histories and the experiences of Jewish communities in a connected Middle Ages? It wasn’t just with the arrival of the Portuguese that Africa entered world history. Centuries before that, Africans interacted with Europeans and others on their own terms. It happens that a Jewish archive, the Cairo Geniza, preserved rare documentary sources that illustrate how African kingdoms and peoples were agents of global commerce across the Sahara. In modern-day Sudan, they connected the India trade to Cairo and then on to the greater Mediterranean. Evidence of these interactions are even found here in Rome! This is the seed of what will become my next book,” he says.
A vision for the future of TIJS
According to Perry, “The Tam Institute is an institutional resource in the best sense of the term. It provides support, community and visibility for the students and faculty who make Emory a world-class home for Jewish studies. Tam was founded by people who shared and enacted a vision for a strong and vital Jewish studies presence at Emory. For all that, I constantly ask myself: How are we here now called upon to be the best stewards of this resource for the future?”
Kate Rosenblatt
Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, Department of Religion and Tam Institute for Jewish Studies
While earning a BA in history from Columbia University in the early 2000s, Kate Rosenblatt witnessed conflicts over Zionism that roiled the campus and eventually wrote a senior thesis on Jewish clergy and the Vietnam antiwar movement.
“What I experienced there made me aware of how deeply contested Jewish politics actually are and eager to better understand that past as well as how ideas about the Jewish past get integrated into the present,” she notes.
Emory has long stood out to Rosenblatt, as she applied to the university for graduate school in 2008-2009. Though she ultimately chose University of Michigan, she remembers: “I was impressed by the depth of the intellectual community here and how seriously committed Emory was to Jewish studies.” At Michigan, she got involved with local, grassroots labor politics, including through the university’s graduate union.
For her dissertation, she became interested in the cooperatives that sprang up in the 1920s when a coalition of Americans — workers, farmers, religious clergy and their laities, labor activists, reformers, state and federal bureaucrats, and others — “recognized that capitalism wasn’t working for them and went looking for a more equitable, gentler capitalism.” That research will constitute her first book, now underway, titled “Cooperative Battlegrounds: Farmers, Workers and the Search for Economic Alternatives.”
Mentoring students and being mentored
“Faculty here are interested in pedagogy,” says Rosenblatt, who co-taught a course with Geoffrey Levin — American Women and Zionism — and is deeply invested in her students. Some of her other courses include American Jewish History, Southern Jewish History and American Jewish Popular Culture.
She runs herself through key questions before every course, including: “How should I show up to a classroom? What kinds of materials do I bring and what sorts of questions should I be asking? How do I ask those questions in ways that my students can hear them?”
“I have a set of politics, and my students do,” Rosenblatt observes. “My goal is not to move them. I want my students to know how to ask questions and find reputable scholarship that speaks to their question. They then should be able to articulate what they learned to other people. Those are the basic skills of being a citizen in a democracy.”
In addition to mentoring her students, Rosenblatt is grateful for the mentors she has found. She credits Eric Goldstein’s “stable, continuous, careful stewardship of Tam. So much of what the institute has become — in terms of faculty and student engagement, intellectual rigor and richness — can be traced to him.”
Miriam Udel, she says, “is a trailblazer. Both in her own pathway through the Jewish communal world and in the academy, she sets an incredibly helpful model. Miriam, like Eric, is committed to the younger generation, consistently demonstrating that we are listened to and valued.”
A specialist in the history of American religion, focused on the Jewish experience
Rosenblatt returned to Emory in 2020, recognizing that “it is kind of astounding that Emory has hired four people in the past five years who broadly do work in Jewish studies. It tells me that the investment the university made in the 1970s is growing and deepening.”
A second book project is in the works, one that arose from research she did during a year as the Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center at University of Pennsylvania.
Her focus is on the limits of dissent in the postwar years for Jewish communists, most of whom were affiliated with the magazine Jewish Life, a communist party organ. Now known as Jewish Currents and no longer affiliated with the communist party, “it is now part of the resurgence of a newly vocal and radical Jewish left,” she says.
Rosenblatt is also exploring the contributions of Eleanor Flexner — a feminist whose book “Century of Struggle” (1959) was cited in Betty Friedan’s landmark study “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). Flexner was ignored by Jewish historians because she was half-Jewish; however, Rosenblatt considers her work “foundational for second-wave feminists in their attempts to reorient the world.”
A vision for the future of TIJS
“We are following in the footsteps of those who have spent decades carefully and seriously building up a program that has real value to the university. It is not just a commitment to Jewish studies but to the study of minorities in America. Having the Tam Institute opens up space to talk about some of the most pressing contemporary issues in the country, including race,” says Rosenblatt.
Published 4/30/25