Jessica Goldblatt is an MA student in the English Literature department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her BA Honours in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand. She was also the recipient of the Mandel Scholarship in 2023/2024. Her research examines the figure of the martyred Jewess in early nineteenth-century fiction from France, England, and America, analyzing works such as La Juive by Eugène Scribe and Fromental Halévy, Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr, and a number of American periodical short stories and the poem “Zara, the Martyr.” Goldblatt is interested in how the figure of the martyred Jewess reflects national, religious, and gender concerns.