Menchik Named Jewish Heritage Center’s 2026 Wyner Research Fellow
CURA Director Jeremy Menchik has been named the Jewish Heritage Center’s 2026 Genevieve Geller Wyner Research Fellow, an honor that supports original scholarship rooted in the Center’s rich archival collections. The Fellowship provides an opportunity for Menchik to do research in the Jewish Heritage Center’s archives, which contain Greater Boston/New England-based records of Jewish institutions.
His work during the fellowship will advance a major book project examining the past, present, and future of Jewish internationalism, a political and intellectual tradition that offers an alternative to the conventional binary of Zionism and anti-Zionism. At the conclusion of the Fellowship period, Menchik will deliver the Genevieve Geller Wyner Annual Lecture.
The Wyner fellowship will support Menchik’s growing body of work on Jewish internationalism, a tradition that spans more than a century and encompasses labor, social democratic, and radical diasporic movements committed to global solidarity and collective liberation. Drawing on archival sources such as the Workers Circle and other Boston-based Jewish organizations, as well as interviews with contemporary movement leaders, Menchik aims to recover a neglected history that continues to shape Jewish political life today. Since 2023, he has also served as lead organizer of the annual Conference on the Jewish Left, furthering his commitment to connecting scholarly research with living communities and contemporary debates.
Jeremy Menchik is Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. He is the author of three books: The Missionary Impulse in World Politics: Democracy Promotion at the End of American Liberal Imperialism (forthcoming from Cornell University Press), Protest Cycles and Radicalization in the Digital Age: The Reopen Movement (co-authored with Samuel Bazzi, Clara Martiny, Pujan Paudel, Seth Soderborg, Gianluca Stringhini, Cambridge University Press, 2026) and Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) which was the co-winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Security Studies, and elsewhere, as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Haaretz, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, STAT, and USA Today.