Editorial Team

Joshua Tapper is a research associate at York University's Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies and a doctoral candidate in Jewish History at Stanford University, where his dissertation explores the impact of perestroika-era reforms on the Jews of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. His scholarship on the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora has appeared in Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes. As a journalist, he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Tablet, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other publications. He serves as executive director of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

Valentina Gaddi is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Université de Montréal and an IRTG-Diversity scholar. Her thesis, based on three years of ethnographic research, explores the construction of gender among Hasidic Jewish women in Montréal. More broadly, her academic interests focus on the place of pious citizens in democratic societies. She is the co-creator of the podcast Ma-Nishtana and the coordinator of the Collectif Judéité(s) at Université de Montréal.

Amos Bitzan, Associate Editor, Book Reviews (English)

Amos Bitzan is a historian of modern Jewish history and Jewish education. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB from Princeton University. From 2015 to 2021, he served as the Frances and Laurence Weinstein Assistant Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the transformation of Jewish education in the modern period, with particular attention to the emergence of academic Jewish scholarship and changing practices of reading and study from the eighteenth century onward. He is completing a book manuscript, How the People of the Book Learned to Read: The Transformation of Jewish Education in the Modern Period, and is developing a new project on the intellectual and social value of humanistic study in Jewish K-12 education. 

In recent years, Bitzan has applied his academic work in Jewish day schools and the nonprofit sector, serving in senior leadership roles in Jewish education in Toronto and Ottawa. He currently works at the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, where his portfolio includes the Federation's investment in community institutions and Jewish life through grant and allocation streams and public-facing educational work about Judaism, the Shoah, and antisemitism.