Our People

Deidre Butler is Director of the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor specializing in Jewish Studies in the Religion program at Carleton University where she is spearheading several initiatives to advance, integrate and disseminate antisemitism scholarship. Butler teaches in the areas of modern Judaism, gender, sexuality and religion, and religious and philosophical responses to the Holocaust. Butler’s research operates at the intersections of religion, ethics and feminist thought. Her current research project, in collaboration with Professor Betina Appel Kuzmarov (Law and Legal Studies), Troubling Orthopraxy: A Study of Jewish Divorce in Canada is an interdisciplinary ethnographic project that investigates the phenomenon of Jewish religious divorce in Canada. She is lead researcher on the recently launched "Hear Our Voices: Survivors speak of trauma and hate" bilingual online educational resource project which centres oral histories to teach about the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Megan Hollinger is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research examines social and community-based strategies for combating antisemitism to determine which strategies and programs are effective or not, and which can be broadened for wider social and policy action. Megan is interested in understanding non-legal strategies that target antisemitism's root causes to create positive change for Canada‘s Jews. Megan also serves as the Treasurer and Membership Chair for the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, and was a contributor, editor, and research assistant for the Hear Our Voices Holocaust project at the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University. She is a part-time Professor at University of Ottawa and Carleton University and a Student Caucus member of the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project, housed at the University of Ottawa. Additionally, Megan is a graduate of the ISGAP Oxford Summer Institute for the Development of Curriculum in Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies and a member of the ISGAP-Woolf Institute Research Collective.

Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Last year he was appointed the 2021-2022 Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His interests focus on the Holocaust in Poland and, more specifically, on the relations between Jews and Poles during the war. Professor Grabowski’s book: Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End] (a two-volume study of the fate of the Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland). Night Without End has been published in 2022 in English by Indiana University Press. Grabowski’s most recent book “On Duty. The Role of the Polish “Blue” Police in the Holocaust” (“Na Posterunku. Udział Polskiej Policji Granatowej i kryminalnej w Zagładzie Żydów”, Czarne Publishing House), has been published in Poland, in March 2020.

Dr. Stuart Kamenetsky is Professor, teaching stream in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). He served for many years as the Director of the Undergraduate Program as well as the Chair of UTM’s Academic Appeals Subcommittee of Academic Affairs. He teaches locally and internationally on disability issues as well as on childhood social development. He carries out research and publishes on the perception of disability images, student mental health, and disability accommodation in post-secondary education and related areas. Since 2019 he’s been active fighting antisemitism at the University of Toronto. Most notably, he collaborated with colleagues as well as with B’nai Brith Canada to publicly shame the university into action.

Haskel J. Greenfield (Ph.D. 1985, The City University of New York) is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of the Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Lab, and Coordinator of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. He is an anthropological archaeologist whose research focuses on the evolution of early agricultural and complex societies in the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia) from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Aside from his research on butchering technology and the spread of metallurgy, he has also conducted extensive studies of regional subsistence and land-use systems, the Secondary Products Revolution, the origins of transhumant pastoralism, the spatial dynamics of intra-settlement organization, and the spread of new technologies (i.e., quotidian metallurgy) in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages of Europe, the Near East, and Africa. Most recently, he has been studying the organisation of Early Bronze Age urban communities in the Near East. His most recent field-based research program was as co-director of the excavations of the Early Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sâfi/Gath, Israel. He is currently analysing the fauna from Tel Beth Shemesh and conducting isotopic analysis on animal remains to reconstruct provisioning systems and mobility during the Bronze Age of the southern Levant.

Cary Kogan is a full professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada and a licensed clinical psychologist. His research focuses on mental health classification, patient-centred mental health care, and combatting all forms of racism.

Oded Haklai is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University. His research is on ethnic and national conflict, Israeli politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and territorial disputes. His book Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israel was winner of the Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies. He is also the author of over two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and co-editor of 3 books, including Democracy and Conflict Resolution: the Dilemmas of Israel's Peacemaking (With Miriam Elman and Hendrik Spruyt) and Settlers in Contested Lands: Territorial Disputes and Ethnic Conflict (with Neophytos Loizides).

Hernan Tesler-Mabé is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies program at HuronUniversity College at Western University (London, Ontario). His research centers on modern Jewish culture across the Diaspora, with a focus on the intersection of art, culture, and identity. His first monograph – Mahler’s Forgotten Conductor: Heinz Unger and his Search for Jewish Meaning, 1895-1965 – was an exploration of a musician’s negotiation of his German Jewish identity and was awarded the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Best Biography. Dr. Tesler-Mabé is Past President of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

Yael Halevi-Wise teaches English and Hebrew literatures at McGill University in Montreal. She was the Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill from 2018 to 2022. Her most recent book came out in 2020, The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua.

Pamela J. Walker is a Professor of History, Carleton University. She researches gender, religion and culture in Modern Britain. She is actively engaged with the Reacting to the Past Consortium which promotes game-based pedagogies and she was awarded their Brilliancy Prize in 2019. In August 2022, she attended the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy at Oxford University where she received a diploma in Critical Antisemitism Studies. She serves on the board of Carleton University’s Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies.