Research

I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College, where I received high honors in my History major and was awarded the Peter J. Reichard 1966 Memorial Research Award for best history thesis.

My research interests center on ethnic militancy, radical movements, urban history, political history, postwar American Judaism, nationalism, and late 20th century social movements.

Dartmouth college undergraduate honors thesis

"We Are Speaking of Jewish Survival": The Emergence of the Jewish Defense League

2016-2017

The goal of my thesis was to understand why the Jewish Defense League (JDL) emerged in 1968 as a Jewish militant group in Brooklyn, New York. This thesis contributed to the existing scholarship on Jewish extremism by examining the factors that combined to pave the way for the formation and success of the JDL from 1968 to 1972. 

I point to four factors that led to the emergence of the JDL: an individual named Rabbi Meir Kahane, a local conflict between Blacks and Jews in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis of 1968, narratives of Jewish weakness and strength, and the fight to allow freedom of immigration for Soviet Jewry. Above all, the JDL believed that America in 1968 was a time of crisis for American Jews and they saw their group as filling a dire need in the American Jewish community: going at any length necessary to fight for Jewish survival.

Awards

• High Honors in the History major

• Peter J. Reichard 1966 Memorial Research Award 2017 - Best history Thesis

• Charles T. Wood History Prize 2017 - Best history thesis dealing with a topic of inter-regional or comparative history.

• Gary Plotnick ’62 Memorial Prize 2017 - Best essay or research paper, Jewish Studies

• 2017 Undergraduate Thesis Library Research Award - demonstrates exemplary use of the library's resources

• Religion Department Faculty Award 2017 - outstanding work in the religion department

• Rockefeller Senior Honors Thesis Grant 2016 - awarded to do research

Dartmouth Vietnam Project

2015-2016

I trained in oral history to conduct oral history interviews with members of the Dartmouth community who served in the Vietnam War or who were active in the anti-war movement on campus.

As the culmination of my year-long involvement in the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, I wrote a paper, Questioning Responsibility in the Vietnam War Era. I recognize that extrapolating individual stories into a wider view of organized religion and faith during the Vietnam War era is not without problems, but I contextualized the stories of the men I spoke to in order to explore how American values and good citizenship were understood in the late 1960s, and the greater struggle for the “soul” of America.

See more about the project:  https://www.dartmouth.edu/~dvp/

Listen to (and read) my interviews here

other academic awards

• Phi Beta Kappa, top tenth of class

• Magna Cum Laude, top 15% of graduating class

• Rufus Choate Scholar, for the academic years of 2015-2017. This honor is given to students in the top 5% of their class

• Albert I. Dickerson Writing Prize 2014 - awarded annually to a student who writes an outstanding expository essay in a first-year writing class