Ph.D. Student
Having a background in history, David is integrating research questions from history and STS with complex systems and network science approaches. Key areas of interest include information diffusion, contagions in social networks, and the dynamics of online prejudice.
Graduate Student
Hannah Benchik is a Master of Library Science student specializing in Archives and Records Management and Rare Books and Manuscripts. Her studies focus on books and archives from the Holocaust and WWII-era Germany. Last year, Hannah worked at the Museum of German Books and Writing and the Archive of Exiled Germans, 1933-1945 at the German National Library in Leipzig, Germany. She has also done archival work for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland. This past summer, she was a 2022 Museum Director’s Laureate for the “If Not for Those Ten...” award, given to ten of the most outstanding volunteers, interns, and coordinators at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum out of a pool of nearly 500.
Research Assistant
Grace Bland is currently pursuing an MS in Cybersecurity Risk Management at Indiana University. She joined ISCA as a Program Assistant in August 2022 and has since helped organize the 2023 Datathon Competition and the 2023 Beinner Family Speaker Series. She currently works as a research assistant for Professors Rosenfeld and Jikeli.
Research Assistant
Daniel C. Freitag (Mag. theol.) is a PhD student and research assistant at the “Institute for Ethics and Related Social Sciences” at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Münster (Germany). He studied Protestant Theology in Münster, Jerusalem and Heidelberg. He was also a member of the Graduate School of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster and worked for the interdisciplinary “Centre for Religion and Modernity”. Now Mr. Freitag is a visiting affiliate of IU’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. His dissertation project investigates contemporary manifestations of Christian antisemitism on the social media platform Facebook. Please find his contact details and more information here.
Research Assistant
Rhonda provides data science support after completing graduate research with ISCA. She is a Data Scientist and Project Manager within the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and a member of the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab.
Ph.D. Candidate
Weejeong Jeong is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at Indiana University. She also received M.S. in Applied Statistics, and M.S.Ed. in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. Her research interests include quantitative research in language education, academic literacy development, and language pedagogy for English/Korean as a foreign language. She has joined ISCA since 2020 and has conducted data sampling, cleaning, descriptive, and inferential statistical analysis.
Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
Erna B. Rosenfeld Associate Professor for the Study of Antisemitism
Associate Professor in the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Germanic Studies
Research Assistant
Graduate Student
Kayden Poindexter graduated from Indiana University in 2023 with degrees in Criminal Justice and French, and she is currently pursuing her JD. She has been involved in ISCA's research on antisemitism on social media since 2021, having joined with a background in studying cyber crimes against children. She has now assisted ISCA in analyzing thousands of tweets and has given numerous presentations across IU's campus about antisemitic hate speech on social media.
Undergraduate Student (Potsdam University)
Sophie von Máriássy is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Potsdam University. In the past, she studied at Tel Aviv University as well as working on the project “United in Diversity” at The Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies. In 2020 she was on the winning team of the Datathon/ Hackathon of Indiana University on antisemitism on Twitter. Since fall 2020 she has been working on the Decoding Antisemitism project on English as well as German tweets.
Besides antisemitism on online platforms such as Twitter, her interests lie in the recent history of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry.
Graduate Student
Ayush is from Mumbai, India, and has pursued his Bachelor’s in Engineering majoring in Information Technology. He is currently a Graduate student in Computer Science at IU. Ayush believes in perseverance and is a result-oriented individual. He is always ready to seek new challenges that come his way. Ayush’s interests include traveling, hiking, playing tennis, and cricket.
Graduate Student (University of Oldenburg)
Clara Schilling is currently studying for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Oldenburg. She holds a bachelors's degree in North American Studies and Philosophy from the University of Göttingen. Besides annotating tweets and researching current manifestations of antisemitism as well as psychoanalytic theory, she regularly organizes film screenings at a local cinema.
Project Manager
Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research with a focus on quantitative methods from the University of Bremen, Germany, where she also studied Computer Science. She joined the research team in 2020 and has worked in different areas of the team since then. She started with Tweet annotation, was then responsible for statistical analysis, and now manages the project which still includes data analysis and research data management. Drawing on her methodological background, Katharina's academic research focuses on questions at the intersection of machine learning and antisemitism/hate speech. For her master's thesis, she explored ways to ensure annotation reliability for social data such as online antisemitism and analyzed methodological approaches to classify borderline cases. In 2022, she was invited to Bloomington as a visiting scholar and became familiar with Indiana and the Midwest. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany. In addition to her academic work on the topic, she gives lectures and workshops on antisemitism on social media to teachers, students, and the general public. Read more...
Research Assistant
Jenna Solomon graduated from Indiana University in 2019 where she majored in Jewish Studies with a double minor in Hebrew and Israel Studies. She has been involved in the ISCA's research on antisemitism on social media since 2017 when she participated in a course on contemporary antisemitism that was a part of the US State Department's Diplomacy Lab Initiative. She has since then annotated thousands of tweets and helped organize the ISCA's 2020 summer Datathon/Hackathon. Outside of her research with the ISCA, she also manages the institute's social media pages. When she is not documenting antisemitism on social media, she spends most of her time at the local ice rink in Bloomington as the director of their Skating School and as a private coach.
Graduate Student (Center for the Research of Antisemitism in Berlin)
Victor Tschiskale is a graduate student at the Center for the Research of Antisemitism in Berlin. In addition to his involvement with the Research Lab, he is working on the research project Decoding Antisemitism. His interests lie in the occurrence of Antisemitism in the context of Internet (sub)cultures, as well as finding ways to counter it.
The College of Arts