Hannah Greene is a doctoral candidate in American Jewish history at New York University’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, where she specializes in immigration, gender, and disability studies. Her dissertation, Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891-1934, explores how American Jews engaged with discrimination on the basis of health, disability, and poverty in federal immigration law and its enforcement.

Through centering immigrant advocates like Cecilia Razovsky and Max Kohler, who emphasized and contested constructions of “defect” in policy and its administration, her research investigates American Jewish leaders’ conceptions of American citizenship at the intersection of gender and disability. Hannah’s dissertation analyzes how American Jewish communal leaders responded to public charge’s selection and classification of immigrants into the “desirable” and “undesirable,” and in the process shaped their own political roles and voices.

Previously, she taught Jewish History at Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts, of the New School for Social Research. She has published an article on disability and Jewish immigration in AJS Review, and has forthcoming academic publications on Jewish history, gender, and public health. Hannah has also presented on her research at conferences including the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Scholars Conference, the Association of Jewish Studies Annual Conference, the Scholar-Activist Forum at CUNY Graduate Center, and the Jews, Money, Myth International Workshop at Birkbeck, University of London. She was also invited to present at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting cancelled due to Covid-19, and at the forthcoming American Historical Association Conference in January 2021.