Golan Moskowitz

Golan Moskowitz’s research explores how marginalized Jewish artists, writers, and performers creatively process legacies of embodied otherness. It integrates methods from cultural history, literary studies, gender/LGBTQ studies, and visual studies, focusing especially on Jewish American descendants of immigrants and Holocaust survivors, as well as on LGBTQ Jewish creatives. Golan’s current book project is a Jewish American cultural history of the gender-transcendent performance art of drag, from early twentieth-century Yiddish vaudeville through contemporary Emmy-winning reality television. This project earned him a full-year 2024-2025 fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. His first monograph Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) situated the life and work of Jewish American artist Maurice Sendak within discourses of Jewish studies, queer studies, childhood studies, and their intersections. Wild Visionary won Tulane’s university-wide annual faculty research award for best publication, and it was featured as part of “Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet,” an exhibit held at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from June-September 2022. Additionally, Golan has published articles and anthology chapters on gendered and queer approaches to the study of post-Holocaust family and memory, and he serves as Book Review Editor for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He has delivered invited lectures for the American Jewish Historical Society, Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History’s National Educators Institute, the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies, the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, the Pacific School of Religion’s Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion, San Francisco’s Sha’ar Zahav Synagogue, Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, and the New Orleans JCC, among other venues. Golan has also participated in moderated public conversations sponsored by The Sydney Jewish Museum in Australia, the Queer Division of New York City’s Bureau of General Services, the American Academy of Religion’s LGBTIQ Status Committee, and by the University of Connecticut’s Archives and Special Collections as part of an academic symposium held in conjunction with an exhibit of Maurice Sendak’s work in 2022. His offered courses at Tulane include: Holocaust Lit & Film, Jews and American Pop Culture, Sexuality in Jewish Culture, Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, and Introduction to Modern Jewish Civilization. Prior to working at Tulane, Golan held the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto, served as a research and editorial consultant for the Anti-Defamation League, worked as a graduate research assistant at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and was Assistant to the Executive Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. Golan completed his graduate training at Brandeis University, where he earned a PhD in Near Eastern & Judaic Studies and a joint MA in Jewish Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies. Having first majored in Art at Vassar College, he applies visual studies and creative modes of inquiry to his scholarship and teaching. His work has been supported by a number of organizations, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, where Golan was also a Scholar in Residence in Spring 2019.