Stadler, Lelia

Lelia Stadler is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Columbia University, where she focuses on modern Jewish and Latin American history. Her dissertation is a social and legal history of Jewish immigration to the transregional space of South America. It examines Jewish immigrants’ encounters with the Argentine state and explores how competing legal systems and norms in the region shaped the ways Jews experienced family, marriage, and divorce in a predominantly Catholic country. Lelia’s research has been supported by the Center for Jewish History (Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Research Fellow, 2023–2024), the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR), the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. At Columbia, her research has also been supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS), the Harriman Institute, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL). In the 2025–26 academic year, Lelia is a fellow at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

Lelia holds a B.A. and M.A. in Latin American history from Tel Aviv University (summa cum laude). Her recent publication, “In Search of Wandering Husbands: Jewish Migration, Desertion, and Divorce between Poland and Argentina, 1919–1939,” appeared in Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Latin America (Brill, 2020). Her new article, “Ethical and Legal Bigamy: Transatlantic Jewish Families Caught between Conflicting Legalities, Argentina, 1930–1939,” is forthcoming in Jewish Social Studies 30, no. 2 (2025): 99–137.

At Columbia, Lelia founded and coordinated the Yiddish MMS Translation Workshop and served as coordinator of the Columbia Latin American History Workshop (2021–2022). Her teaching at Columbia has included courses in modern Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Ottoman history.