Meet the 2024 – 2025 Krauthammer Fellows
Krauthammer Fellows are accomplished young professionals pursuing careers in academia, law, journalism, public policy, Jewish education, and more. We are pleased to present the 2024-2025 Krauthammer Fellowship cohort below. To learn more about past Fellowship cohorts, please visit our Featured Alumni page. Select writing projects by Fellows and alumni are also available on our Featured Writing page.
Matthew Austerklein
Matthew Austerklein is a cantor, musician, and scholar exploring the religious meaning of musical forms. He is a PhD Candidate in Jewish Studies at Halle-Wittenberg University, where he is completing a doctoral dissertation on the musical professionalization of Ashkenazi cantors in early modern Europe. Matt is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and has served as a pulpit cantor for over fifteen years. He has lectured for dozens of Jewish institutions in North America and abroad, and is the editor of three books. He writes weekly at Beyond the Music, a new Substack column on Jewish musicology, arts, and culture.
Mackenzie France
Mackenzie France is originally from the North West of the United Kingdom and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2023, receiving a BA in History and Politics. During his undergraduate studies, Mackenzie received an academic exhibition for his work on American history, foreign policy, and the history of political thought. Mackenzie now works as Director of Strategy at the Pinsker Centre, a campus-based foreign policy think tank, which focuses on the Middle East and the state of Israel.
Chaya Sara Oppenheim
Chaya Sara Oppenheim is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College with a BA in English and history. Her research interests include Jewish American literature and cemetery tourism. Chaya Sara serves as an editor for The Lehrhaus and The Shekel, and her writing has appeared in Tablet, Mishpacha, and Tradition, among other outlets.
Mathis Bitton
Mathis Bitton is a PhD student in political theory at Harvard. His academic interests include liberalism and its critics, aesthetics, Chinese thought, and the politics of technology. He has worked on French political campaigns, interned at multiple Washington, D.C. think tanks, and co-founded a cybersecurity start-up. He received his BA in Political Science from Yale College.
Daniel Sonnenfeld
Daniel Sonnenfeld is a PhD student in the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he focuses on modern Islamic movements and the Jewish-Arab conflict. He is also a researcher specializing in Jihadi movements at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Daniel writes and lectures on topics related to the modern Middle East, contemporary Islam, and Israeli society. His work has been published in HaShiloach (Hebrew), The Jerusalem Post, and Public Discourse.
Josh Tolle
Josh Tolle is the Senior Jewish Educator at the Cleveland Hillel Foundation. A graduate of the Columbus Torah Academy and The Ohio State University, he was an Endelman Fellow in Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where he earned his PhD in English. He has studied Yiddish at Tel Aviv University, taught as a postdoctoral scholar at DePauw University, and served as Director of Education at Ohio State Hillel. His writing appears in the Jewish Review of Books, the Tel Aviv Review of Books, MELUS, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and other magazines and scholarly journals. He is a proud Ohioan.
