2024-2025 Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellows

Every year, the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship provides unrestricted support to two scholars who have completed their doctoral degree but have not yet received tenure at an academic institution. We are proud to introduce the 2024–2025 fellows and their research projects.

Ghila Amati is a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Ma’ayan Center for Jewish Philosophy and Sustainability at Bar-Ilan University. She earned her DPhil in Theology and Religion from the University of Oxford, where her doctoral work focused on Lebensphilosophie in the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook. Her research integrates modern Jewish philosophy, German intellectual history, and contemporary questions of religious freedom, authenticity, vitality and identity.

“I am currently researching Martin Buber’s early engagement with Lebensphilosophie, a German intellectual movement that emphasized the dynamic, creative nature of life. While Buber’s later dialogical philosophy is widely known, I focus on his lesser-studied early writings and their philosophical roots in figures like Bergson, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel. My project examines how Buber reinterpreted Lebensphilosophie through a distinctly Jewish lens—offering a vision of Judaism rooted not in legalism, but in spiritual immediacy, intuition, and vitality. This reinterpretation, I argue, challenges rigid halakhic structures and proposes a model for a living, evolving Judaism. By tracing the continuity between Buber’s early and later thought, I aim to illuminate how these formative influences shaped his mature philosophy and offer a framework for revitalizing Jewish life in the modern age.”

Klara Naszkowska is an independent scholar and adjunct professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her work critically investigates the stories of Jewish women pioneers of psychoanalysis who fled Nazi persecution in Europe for the United States. It prioritizes the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class and wealth, immigration status, age, and ability. Klara resurrects their biographies – largely erased from the mainstream historical narrative – by engaging with archival materials and conducting oral history interviews.

"I am currently researching and writing the biography of Clara Happel (née Pincus, 1889-1945), a German Jewish vital pioneer of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, is a field shaped by a long history of deliberate gender and racial discrimination. Happel entered all-male spaces and, I would argue, dominated them with intellectual brilliance and progressive thinking. She co-founded psychoanalytic circles in Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg. Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, she demanded that the German Psychoanalytic Society boycotts the changes consisting in replacement of the higher-ranking Jewish members with Nazi sympathizers. Her motion was silenced, and she resigned in protest. Psychoanalytic leadership labelled her a “troublemaker” and an “Ultra Jew.” She was refused any help in fleeing Nazi Germany with her children. When she finally reached the New York harbor in 1936, Happel – a single mother – was detained at Ellis Island under the suspicion of becoming a public charge. After her release, following Freud’s mission of bringing the benefits of therapy to everyone, she settled in Detroit, a city with no psychoanalytic institutions, where she served low-income individuals and people of color. For this and other reasons she was targeted by the FBI and arrested under the accusation of being a pro-Nazi spy and a lesbian.

The forgetting of Happel as progressive pioneer and thinker, and reducing her to a “burden,” “spy” and “lesbian”, is reminiscent of a social amnesia and rooted in sociocultural, political, and economic power structures, and systems of oppression. Her Jewish experience, shaped by a combination of privilege, and gendered, racialized, anti-emigrant, and anti-Jewish oppression is prescient, relevant, and in need of reconstruction."