UCLA Research Hub on Antisemitism

Dr. Kathryn Huether (2024-2026)

Kathryn Agnes Huether received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a master’s degree in religious studies/Jewish studies from the University of Colorado. She has held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University and Bowdoin College and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. A classically trained violinist (she studied with Angella Ahn of the Ahn Trio) and vocalist, Huether continues to seek out performance opportunities and enjoys folk, klezmer, and blue grass. 

Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery. 

While at UCLA, Huether is researching the roles that sound plays in antisemitic virality on social media, in addition to completing her first book project, Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, about sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory. This dynamic project draws on memory studies and trauma theory, as well as Musicology, to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of the complex political economy of the Holocaust.

Dr. Naomi Taub (2023-2025)

The Leve Center welcomes Dr. Naomi Taub as a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the UCLA Research Hub on Antisemitism. Taub recently received a Ph.D. in English with certificates in Jewish Studies and Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and Society from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Taub’s scholarship juxtaposes post-1948 fiction from the United States, South Africa, Israel, and Britain to demonstrate how contemporary Jewish literature de-and re-constructs identity through a constellation of multi-layered encounters that transcend national boundaries, revealing crucial connections between liberal internationalism, post/coloniality, and transhistorical fantasies of whiteness in the post-WWII Jewish Anglosphere. Taub’s position is supported by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Endowment for Research Innovation housed at the Leve Center.

Name of PI and department: Eleanor Kaufman, Comparative Literature (home), English, and ELTS
Names of other researchers and departments: N/A
Project Title: Early 20th Century Antisemitism in the American Southwest

Name of PI and department: Jaimie Krems, Psychology
Names of other researchers and departments: Daniel Sznycer (Psychology, Oklahoma State University), David Pinsof (Psychology, UCLA)
Project Title: Tests of an Engineering Perspective of Hatred toward Jews

Name of PI and department: Aliza Luft, Sociology
Names of other researchers and departments: N/A
Project Title: Sacred Treason: Race, Religion, and The Holocaust in France

Name of PI and department: Yarin Hagay Nevel, Psychology and Ayesha Syed, Psychology
Name of other researchers and departments: Cecelia Fischer, Undergraduate Student, History, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Arabic)
Project Title: Stress, Anti Semitic Posts, and Linked Fate