Rebecca Heilweil

Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow

20172018 Forum on Afterlives

Rebecca Heilweil

History, Political Science

CAS, 2018

Rebecca Heilweil is a University Scholar from New York. She is interested in the relationship between contemporary media and history. At Penn, she has been an undergraduate fellow for the College House Research Program, FactCheck.Org, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism. She has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tablet Magazine, USA Today College, FactCheck.Org, and Democracy Journal, and her work has been recognized by the Aspen Institute and Penn's undergraduate political science journal, Sound Politicks, for which she won the best article prize. At Penn, her most recent research has focused on employing text-mining to study free speech coverage in American newspapers. This year, she will be researching Irish-Jewish identity in the 20th century. 

The Search for Solidarity Beyond Bloom: Jewish Advocacy in Ireland, 1933-1958

This paper explores how Irish Jewish leadership traversed the mid-20th century, and how they represented the birth of their two new countries: the State of Israel (1948) and the Republic of Ireland (1949). Specifically, this paper examines how leaders Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog (later Chief Rabbi of Palestine), Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits and the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, integrated the rhetoric and imagery of anti-colonial Irish Republicanism within their Zionist advocacy.