I have a PhD in History from Stony Brook University with a specialization in the legal history and particularly concerned construction of race and gender in the United States. My scholarship focuses on legal discrimination against Jewish immigrants in US history. I am also a freelance writer, speaker, and political activist and have been published in Teen Vogue, Rewire, The Forward, Deadspin, Raw Story, and more.

I am currently a history professor at Suffolk Community College. I have previously taught at Washington and Lee University, Stony Brook University, Adelphi University, SUNY Old Westbury, Bard Early College Program, CUNY Queens College, and Princeton University.

My academic research is concerned with the construction of race, ethnicity, and gender through the legal system in the United States.

My dissertation, The Murdered Jewess and the Problem of Citizenship in 1876 New York City, uses a murder trial to examine the ways in which an inability to access criminal procedure rights resulted in discriminatory treatment for Pesach Rubenstein, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant tried and convicted for killing his cousin, Sarah Alexander. The murder trial illuminates the difficulties for people outside the law’s assumed white, able-bodied, Christian male citizen to avail themselves of their supposedly guaranteed rights. I examine the legal and cultural status of Jewish immigrants in 1870s America at a time when citizenship was changing and uncertain. Building on Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, American Jewish historiography, and legal citizenship scholarship, this thesis argues that criminal trials, and the surrounding societal and press reaction to them, are an important site of citizenship performance and the discriminatory impact of laws that lack in access guarantees. As I show, press coverage, and the narratives of cultural inclusion it promotes, impact a criminal defendant’s ability to access rights as well as the ability of a murder victim to achieve justice through a trial within a biased society. I also examine the inability of Sarah Alexander and other murdered women to achieve justice based on patriarchal societal concerns and gendered legal assumptions. Finally, I use legal records and newspaper accounts to show how legal discrimination against Jewish immigrants developed based on stereotypes and criminalization of the community, arguing against the accepted understanding of American Jewish exceptionalism.

Watch a lecture I recently gave on the importance of applying Critical Race Theory to the study of antisemitism for the Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award Lecture at Columbia University: “Antisemitism, Critical Race Theory, and the Politics of Anti-Discrimination Scholarship.”

Read a small portion published for the Gotham New York City History Blog: “Ten Thousand Bigamists In New York”: The Criminalization Of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics

Watch a recent panel I was on discussing Critical Race Theory

“Peculiar Jews: The Trial of Pesach Rubenstein and Antisemitism in Late Nineteenth-Century New York” on The Docket (Law and History Review Online Journal)

“The Universal Application of Laws is Never Equal: Antisemitism in U.S. Law” on Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion