Shira Klein is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of History and Judaic Studies at New York University.
She is interested in the history of refugee migrations. Her dissertation focuses on Italian Jews who immigrated to the United States and the British Mandate of Palestine following Italy’s 1938 racial laws, as well as on Italian Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives in postwar Italy. She uses the Italian Jewish case to trace how people influence and respond to each other when they hold contrasting concepts of nationalism and religion, gender and family roles, community and ethnicity.
Shira has a BA from Tel Aviv University and an MA from La Sapienza University. She is fluent in English and Hebrew, and has a working knowledge of Italian, Spanish, French, Yiddish, and Arabic.
Shira volunteers in an organization helping asylum-seekers in Israel by assisting in website translations.