Tikvah Academic Fellowship

Eero Arum is a historian of political thought and Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley (2020-2026). Before beginning his graduate studies, he earned a B.A. with honors in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Chicago (2014–2018), then taught English in Austria through Fulbright Austria’s USTA program (2018–2020). His dissertation research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (2024–2025) and the Institute for Humane Studies (Summer 2025). He has previously held fellowships from the Tikvah Fund and the Hudson Institute.

As an Academic Fellow, Eero will explore the themes of political Hebraism and anti-Judaism in sixteenth- and seventeenth century political thought. One aim of his research is to investigate how anti-Jewish polemics informed the early modern reception of both Jean Bodin and Niccolò Machiavelli. While Bodin was condemned as a crypto-Jewish heretic, Machiavelli was cast as embodying a distinctively “Jewish” style of politics, characterized by secrecy, strategic manipulation, and cunning. Eero will argue that these early modern polemics laid the groundwork for the modern image of the Jew as a bearer of hidden, illegitimate power.

Eamonn Bellin is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University researching the nineteenth century British Empire. He earned his MA in history at Georgetown in 2024 and his BA in international relations and philosophy at George Washington University in 2018. Between 2018 and 2023, Eamonn worked as the academic programs associate at the Alexander Hamilton Society, a foreign policy nonprofit committed to upholding principles of American international leadership. He is a three-time alumnus of AHS and the Public Interest Fellowship’s Security and Strategy Seminar (SSS), and of the Hudson Institute’s Political Studies Program. Eamonn’s writing on contemporary and historical foreign policy has appeared in Law and Liberty, American Purpose, Providence, and other publications.

Eamonn’s project will explore how the Jewish community of St. Eustatius experienced the American Revolution: how they leveraged mercantile connections to support the revolutionary cause, why they suffered disproportionate retribution when British Admiral George Rodney seized the island, how the British Parliament reacted to Rodney’s depredations, and what happened to the dispersed Jewish community afterwards. This project hopes to showcase the doubly neglected history of the Caribbean Jewish community and Jewish experience of the American Revolution.

Dr. Yisroel Benporat serves as the Senior Associate for Faculty Engagement in New York at the Academic Engagement Network. Previously, he taught history at Yeshiva University, Queens College, and City College. He holds a PhD in history from CUNY Graduate Center. His peer-reviewed publications include articles in Journal of Early American History as well as Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought.

Yisroel will work on revising his dissertation for publication in a university press. His book will offer the first full length study of Puritan political Hebraism through a unique regional and chronological approach that traces the transatlantic movement to implement Mosaic law. It will also provide critical and annotated editions of key texts in Puritan political thought that have escaped scholarly attention.

Mathis Bitton is a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Government Department studying political theory. He is broadly interested in philosophy of technology, aesthetics, Jewish thought, and romanticism. His dissertation traces the history of Prometheanism to recover a romantic, enchanted view of technology. His academic writings have been published in the European Journal of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, the Chinese Political Science Review, and Critical Inquiry. Mathis holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale College.

Mathis will write an academic article that reconstructs a theory of Jewish Prometheanism by considering the following question: Of all three Abrahamic faiths, why is Judaism at once the most Promethean — that is, the friendliest to technological innovation — and also the one that puts such a heavy emphasis on the Sabbath, which seems like a deeply anti-Promethean institution? His argument will be that these two sides of the Jewish tradition, far from being in tension, are intimately connected. Judaism is Promethean because it is the faith of the Sabbath. He will primarily draw on two thinkers: Joseph Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Jonathan Green is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, specializing in modern Jewish thought. He has delivered talks at the Association for Jewish Studies, the World Congress of Philosophy, and the Center for Jewish History, and has received multiple research fellowships. He was also honored to receive NYU’s Outstanding Teaching Award. In addition, his article “Spinoza on The Affect of Pity” recently appeared in The Review of Metaphysics (June 2025). For 2025-26, he is a Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History.

Jonathan will publish a paper based on his upcoming talk at the Association of Jewish Studies Conference on “Uncovering Mendelssohn’s Ethical and Political Thought in Megillat Qohelet”. This paper aims to reexamine Mendelssohn’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, arguing that while it is typically treated as a metaphysical text, it is in fact animated by pressing ethical and political concerns. Structured around Mendelssohn’s philosophical dialogue with Maimonides and Rousseau, the project reveals Mendelssohn not simply as a champion of Enlightenment reason, but as a thinker deeply attuned to its internal tensions—especially as they relate to material culture, inequality, and communal life.

Miriam Moster is a sociologist, writer, and consultant whose work explores the intersections of faith, family, and belonging. She holds a PhD in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MFA in creative writing from Hunter College. An alum of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship and the Mellon Humanities Public Fellowship, she has contributed book chapters to volumes published by university presses and written op-eds for mainstream media outlets. She lectures for both academic and public audiences.

Miriam will explore the role culture plays in educational outcomes through a cultural sociological lens. Using a Haredi case study, she will look at the way Jewish memories, narratives, rituals and practices reinforced a culture of education (specifically, of Torah study), and how centuries of work reinforcing this cultural value shaped the Haredi educational and intellectual landscape of today. While her focus is on the Haredi community, the applications are broader and help explain the ways cultural values shape educational outcomes by exploring how these values take root and are reinforced over time.

Isaac Roszler is a scholar of Rabbinic literature, whose research focuses on the development of narratives in the Babylonian Talmud. He recently completed a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Isaac received a B.A. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Isaac intends to publish an article in the Association for Jewish Studies Review entitled “Geniva the Troublemaker (b. Git. 62a and b. Git. 31b).” The article will be a critical analysis of two versions of the same story in the Babylonian Talmud (“Bavli”) that explains why only one contains halakhic material. These stories are examples of the phenomenon of “repeated stories” that occur in the Bavli. Various theories have been posited to explain why this occurs; Isaac will demonstrate that the Babylonian storytellers inserted the new Halakha into the story to give Geniva, a character who the storytellers assumed heard the other rabbis’ conversation, the chance to knowingly engage with the rabbinic voices of this narrative.

Daniel J. Samet is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on US-Israel relations and Middle East policy. He was most recently the George P. Shultz Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and previously served as a foreign policy fellow in the Office of Senator Tom Cotton and as a program assistant at the Atlantic Council. He has also been a fellow at the Rumsfeld Foundation and the Tikvah Fund. Dr. Samet is the author of U.S. Defense Policy toward Israel: A Cold War History (2025), and his commentary has appeared in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Commentary, and National Review. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a BA magna cum laude in history and French and francophone studies from Davidson College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Daniel plans to write a book, tentatively titled The Rise and Fall of U.S.-Israel Relations. The book will be both a history and a policy commentary, emphasizing changes since 1948 in both America and Israel. It will be largely narrative driven, using primary sources like memoirs, diaries, government documents, and newspapers, but all observations will be grounded in facts. It will recount the tremendous growth in the relationship between countries but will also strike a pessimistic note vis a vis the relationship’s future. One of Daniel’s aims is to help bring more balance to scholarship on Israel and U.S.-Israel relations, much of which is stridently anti-Zionist.

Daniel Solomon is a historian of France and the Jews, whose interests range from the origins of the modern community-born amid the spasms of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic reform-to recent woes emerging from mass migration to France from the Muslim world. He is enrolled in concurrent PhD programs at the EHESS and UC-Berkeley to avoid just that sort of epistemic pitfall. He is now preparing a dissertation (within Cal’s History Department and the Jewish Studies designated emphasis program) on three figures of the French Jewish literary and political scene of the early twentieth century: Jean-Richard Bloch, Daniel Halévy, and André Spire.

Daniel will conduct research into the life and career of Henri Franck (1888-1912), Franco-Jewry’s Keats and the author of the magisterial poem, La danse devant l’arche. Franck’s opus heralded a renaissance of French Jewish culture in the interwar period and represented that movement’s bicultural elan. Daniel will offer a soociohistorical reading of Franck’s epic poem.

Zachary Young is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Florida. His dissertation research focuses on innovative theological developments in early 15th century proto-converso circles in Iberia. As part of his future academic career, he hopes to apply the implications of this analysis within the context of the ongoing Jewish-Christian dialogue. Originally from New York City, Zachary completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard.

In his project for this fellowship, Zachary will analyze the source space of Christian liturgical references to Judaism, which are an important locus for the development of Christian perspectives on the Jewish people. In an article recently accepted in Antiphon, he examined the development of the (in)famous “Good Friday prayer” and its changing imagination of the Jewish people. In this project, he hopes to engage the broader source space of contemporary Christian liturgical texts, interrogating the way that they consider the category of Israel.