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Hannah Zaves-Greene
PhD Candidate/Adjunct Professor, New York University/The New School
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Hannah Zaves-Greene
PhD Candidate/Adjunct Professor, New York University/The New School
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BIO
Hannah Zaves-Greene is a doctoral candidate in American Jewish history at New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. As of September 2021, she will hold a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently a recipient of both a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award and an AAJR Graduate Research Award, and recently completed her tenure as the Fellow in American Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Her dissertation, Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891-1934, inquires how American Jews engaged with discrimination on the basis of health, disability, and poverty in federal immigration law and its administration. Through centering prominent immigrant advocates like Cecilia Razovsky and Max Kohler, who emphasized and contested constructions of “defect” in policy and its administration, her research investigates American Jewish leaders’ conceptions of American citizenship at the intersection of gender and disability. Hannah’s dissertation analyzes how American Jewish communal leaders responded to public charge’s selection and classification of immigrants into the “desirable” and “undesirable,” and in the process shaped their own political roles and voices.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Hannah Zaves-Greene is a doctoral candidate in American Jewish history at New York University’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, where she specializes in immigration, gender and women’s studies, legal and political history, and disability studies. As of September 2021, she will hold a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently a recipient of both a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award and an AAJR Graduate Research Award, and recently completed her tenure as the Fellow in American Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Her dissertation, Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891-1934, explores how leading American Jewish women and men engaged with discrimination on the basis of health, disability, and gender in federal immigration law and its enforcement. Hannah teaches at the Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research and has taught at Cooper Union. Recently, she published an article on Lillian Wald’s stance on birth control in American Jewish History, and has also published a short essay on disability and Jewish immigration in AJS Perspectives. Her work also appears in The Activist History Review and the public history website The Jewniverse. She has presented, and been invited to present, on her research and associated topics at national and international conferences, such as the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Scholars Conference, the Association of Jewish Studies Annual Conference, the Jews, Money, Myth International Workshop at Birkbeck, University of London, the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, and the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting.
AWARDS
INTERVIEWS
Lectures
“Embodying Liberty: American Jewish Attorneys and the Case for Humanizing Public Charge,” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, May 19, 2021. Video available at hyperlink.
Guest lecture, “American Discourses on the Body,” Cooper Union, October 2020.
Guest lecture, “Treating the Cause: Lillian Wald’s Public Health and Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Movements in the United States,” Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, November 2019.
Guest lecture, “‘On the Other Hand…’: Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman in Turn-of-the-Century Russia,” New York University, October 2018.
Organizer and moderator of “The Affordable Care Act and Social Justice” panel, Caring for Us Indivisible and the Health and Human Rights Association. Co-Sponsors: New York University’s College of Global Public Health and Sarah Lawrence College Health Advocacy. March 30, 2017.
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