Curriculum Vitae
Class Websites

Mailing Address:
UCLA Department of History
6265 Bunche Hall
Box 951473
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473
History Faculty Page

Education:
Ph.D., Religion, Princeton University, 2004
Vrij Doctoraal Letteren (M.A. equivalent) in Classics & Religion, University of Amsterdam, 1995
A.B., Classics, Brown University, 1994

Teaching and Research Interests:
I am an Assistant Professor of ancient Mediterranean religions here at UCLA with a split appointment in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Before coming to UCLA in September 2006, I served for two years as an Assistant Professor of early Judaism in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. I completed my PhD in 2004 in the Department of Religion at Princeton University with a dissertation on the historical development of early Jewish mystical literature.

My teaching and research focus on Jewish culture, literature, and society in the ancient Mediterranean world. I have a special interest in the emergence of distinctive Jewish apocalyptic, mystical, magical, and liturgical discourses in this period, and their close and dynamic relationships to the ambient Graeco-Roman and Christian cultures. My interests also encompass a number of other closely related topics, such as: Greek-Jewish literature; the representation of Jews and Judaism in Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources (both "pagan" and Christian); relations between Jews and Christians in late Roman Palestine; martyrdom and religious violence in Late Antiquity; Midrash and Hebrew narrative literature; magical literature and practice in Late Antiquity; and theory and method in the study of religion.

I am currently working on a book that traces the shifting image of Rome in late antique Jewish culture. I am particularly interested in exploring the various strategies employed by Jews to address the emergence of a distinctively Christian discourse of empire over the course of the fourth through seventh centuries.

I will be on leave during the Fall and Winter quarters of 2007-8 at University of Pennsylvania's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, participating in a research group on Jewish society in Late Antiquity: Jewish and Other Imperial Cultures in Late Antiquity: Literary, Social, and Material Histories

Selected Publications

Books
From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 112 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).

Edited Volumes
Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, edited with Annette Yoshiko Reed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters (Select)
“The Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple at Rome and Constantinople: Jewish Counter-Geography in a Christianizing Empire,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming).

“The Study of Heikhalot Literature—Between Religious Experience and Textual Artifact,” Currents in Biblical Research 6 (2007): 135–67.

“The Emergence of Pseudonymous Attribution in Heikhalot Literature: Empirical Evidence from the Jewish ‘Magical’ Corpora,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 14 (2007): 18-38.

“Competing Attitudes toward Rabbi Ishmael’s Priestly Genealogy in Heikhalot Literature,” in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April DeConick (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 127–41.

“A Hebrew Hymn of Praise for a High-priestly Rabbinic Martyr: A Note on the Relationship between the Synagogue Liturgy and Rabbinic Literary Culture,” Zutot 4 (2004): 28–35.

“Angels in the Architecture: Temple Art and the Poetics of Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. Ra‘anan S. Boustan and Annette Yoshiko Reed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 195–212.

“Seven-fold Hymns in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Hekhalot Literature: Formalism, Hierarchy, and the Limits of Human Participation,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls as Background to Post-Biblical Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. James R. Davila, STDJ 46 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 220–47.

“Rabbi Ishmael’s Miraculous Conception: Jewish Redemption History in Anti-Christian Polemic,” in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, TSAJ 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 307–43.

“Negotiating Difference: Genital Mutilation in Roman Slave Law and the History of the Bar Kokhba Revolt,” in The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered, ed. Peter Schäfer, TSAJ 100 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 71–91.

“Eunuchs and Gender Transformation: Philo’s Exegesis of the Joseph Narrative,” in Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond, ed. Shaun Tougher (London: Duckworth, 2002), 103–21.

“The Depiction of the Jews as Typhonians and Josephus’ Strategy of Refutation in Contra Apionem,” (with Jan Willem van Henten) in Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in its Character and Context, ed. Louis H. Feldman and John R. Levison, AGJU 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 271–309.

Book Reviews
Pieter W. van der Horst, Het vroege jodendom van A tot Z: Een kleine encyclopedie over de eerste duizend jaar (ca. 350 v.Chr.–650 n.Chr.) (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2006), in Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 436–38.

Andreas Lehnardt, Qaddish: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes, TSAJ 87 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), in Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 65–69.

Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), in Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 441–46.

Vita Daphna Arbel, Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), in Journal of the American Oriental Society125 (2005): 123–26.

Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), in Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 5 (2003): 379–83.

Essays
“Imperialisms in Jewish History, From Pre- to Post-Modern,” in AJS Perspectives: The Newsletter of the Association for Jewish Studies (Fall 2005): 8–10.

Internet Publications
“The Relics of Rabbi Ishmael in The Story of the Ten Martyrs,” in Jewish Understandings of the Other: An Annotated Sourcebook, Boston College Center for Jewish-Christian Learning (mounted in 2006)

Conferences Organized:
“Sanctified Violence in Ancient Mediterranean Religions: Discourse, Ritual, Community,” University of Minnesota, October 2007

“In Heaven as it is on Earth: Imagined Realms and Earthly Realities,” Princeton University, January 2001