Every summer, students at America’s top universities compete for internships and exclusive fellowships at academic institutions and corporations. Joining these opportunities this summer is the Princeton Institute for Hasidic Thought’s fellowship program, its ten spots having already been taken by scholars from Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton, among other institutions, who will spend their time studying and translating Hasidic texts from Yiddish and Hebrew into English.

The Meturgeman Translation Fellowship begins one week after the holiday of Shavuot, on May 31, with a five-day intensive retreat at Princeton, which will be led by Dr. Eli Rubin, an academic scholar of Chabad-Lubavitch philosophy and intellectual history and contributing editor at Chabad.org.

In its second year, this summer’s fellows include a finance professor from Pace University who studies how ancient economies intersected with religion, a UC Irvine student writing her dissertation on mysticism in modern Yiddish literature, a puppeteer and Yiddishist from western Massachusetts and a rabbinical student who co-founded a Chassidism-inspired magazine of art and poetry. What they have in common is a shared facility with languages, intellectual seriousness, and a desire to dive deep into religious texts that until now have not been translated and so have remained difficult to access for many.

It is the newest offering of the Princeton Institute for Hasidic Thought, itself founded little more than a year ago, in 2025. Affiliated with both Chabad of Princeton University and the university, PIHT has already carved a unique niche in American academic life—a sustained initiative to engage with Chassidic philosophy not only as an intellectual subject but a living one.

Last November, PIHT held its inaugural symposium at Princeton’s Chancellor Green Hall, where more than 130 scholars, students and community members gathered for a full day of sessions exploring the significance of Chassidic texts and ideas.

Beginnings of Princeton Institute for Hasidic Thought

The Institute’s roots go back to 2022, when Eli Scharlatt, a political philosophy graduate student at Princeton, returned to campus after a remote semester, when he met Rabbi Bentzi Brook at a Rosh Hashanah dinner at the Scharf Family Chabad House at the university.

“I was struggling between my intellectual pursuits and how it related to my life in the real world,” he remembers. “I didn’t feel that philosophy on its own could give me adequate direction, and it led to a feeling of existential frustration.”

Brook, who along with his wife, Chaya, has served Princeton’s graduate-student community since 2015 under the leadership of Rabbi Eitan and Gitty Webb, had long felt that Chassidic texts could offer something relevant to modern academics.

The pair began a weekly study session, in which Scharlatt and Brook pored over Chassidic texts. Brook found that Scharlatt’s philosophical rigor brought a fresh perspective to these texts, and Scharlatt found that these texts–rarely studied in academic settings–were just as sophisticated as the academic classics, yet spoke to something deep within him.

“Our learning was intellectually stimulating, but it always brought you back to the world, back to action,” Scharlatt reflected.

Brook began to see their weekly sessions as a model for something larger, exploring what it would look like if students from other academic disciplines had a chance to engage with the texts. He started talking about the idea with Scharlatt, and with the help of Jacob Unger, a history major focusing on Jewish identity and history and Rabbi Mendel Brawer, a Chabad rabbi with experience teaching Chassidut and Jewish thought, founded the Princeton Institute for Hasidic Thought in January 2025.

Engaging With Hasidic Thought on Its Own Terms

The Princeton Institute for Hasidic Thought joins a tradition of Chabad-academic partnerships, which were actively encouraged by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory. In 1981, Professor Herman Branover, a world-renowned physicist and Soviet refusenik, founded the journal B’Or HaTorah to explore the intersection of modern science and Jewish thought.

This was followed in 1985 by the Chabad Research Unit, founded by Dr. Naftali Loewenthal, a lecturer in Jewish spirituality at University College London and author of Communicating the Infinite, to explore how Chassidic teachings can speak to contemporary fields such as psychotherapy and social theory.

Two decades later, Professor Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, organized ‘Reaching for the Infinite,’ a three-day academic conference on the Rebbe’s life, teachings, and impact.

And in 2017, Rabbi Menachem Schmidt, president of Chabad on Campus International Foundation, partnered with the sociologist Philip Wexler to establish the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society.

In 2019 Wexler and Chabad.org’s Rubin co-wrote Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Transformative Paradigm for the World (Herder & Herder).

What makes PIHT unique is its approach to the texts themselves, along with the scope of the initiative. In most university settings, Chassidism is analyzed from the outside as a subject of sociological or historical inquiry. PIHT treats Chassidic texts as a living philosophical tradition, the way a campus reading group might engage with German philosophy or French literary theory. Participants bring their own disciplinary training, but the texts are read as having something to say about consciousness, ethics, morality and the relationship between humans, thought and action.

“One of the nice things about the reading group is that it allows me to rediscover the existential and personal impact that text can have on you in a way that is nonacademic,” says Dmitry Ezrokhi, a Classics graduate student at Princeton who is now exploring Chassidic ideas of medicine as a potential research subject. It does so “in a way that feeds my interests and reminds me why I am a graduate student in the humanities,” he said.

The Institute runs several programs alongside the translation fellowship. A bi-weekly seminar, open to university affiliates and community members, combines traditional text study with a university-style seminar format. “Pathways into Hasidic Texts,” an introductory course for undergraduates, opens the tradition to students with no prior background in Jewish studies or Hebrew, exploring themes like freedom, identity and the body through close reading of translated primary sources.

“I love getting to leave campus, leave my rhythms and specific ways of thinking and walk into a whole different world where Chassidus becomes the stuff of our conversation,” says Reyna Perelis, a junior majoring in Psychology with a certificate in Religion who also serves as Education Chair at Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life. “It’s a world of incredible richness that I wasn’t exposed to before.”

PIHT’s most intensive offering is the Princeton Seminar Fellows, a yearlong fellowship with a four-hour weekly commitment. Each fellow studies one-on-one with a PIHT educator and then joins a weekly group seminar for extended discussion of original Hasidic texts. This past year’s focus was the work of the Fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, known as the Rebbe Rashab. Jesse Smith, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in physics at NYU studying jets, waves, and vortices, and Eve Hepner, a mathematics undergraduate, are among this year’s fellows.

“Given how absolutely profound this is, I just carry myself completely differently around the questions of what it means to be human,” says Hepner.

Each fellow produces a paper at the end of the year. Translation, though, became central to PIHT’s broader project. Translating a text forces a different kind of engagement than reading one—every word, every conceptual move has to be accounted for, and the translator has to stay faithful to the original while finding their own voice.

“When you translate a text, you can’t glide through. You have to understand every word, every conceptual move,” said Brook. “You have to perform a delicate dance. Staying loyal to the original while finding your own voice.”

The Inaugural Symposium

In November of 2025, PIHT organized its inaugural symposium. Co-sponsored by the university, the full-day gathering drew more than 130 scholars, students, and community members for four sessions exploring how Chassidic thought speaks to contemporary questions. Speakers included professors from Princeton, Yale, Cornell, the University of Virginia, Michlalah College in Jerusalem and Cambridge University, and covered topics such as the spiritual world of Hasidism, the relationship between Kabbalah and theology, the challenges of translating Hasidic texts and the role of Hasidic study in the Western academy

The symposium will become an annual event, each year organized around a new theme and drawing on the fellows’ work.

One of the symposium’s presenters, Dalia Wolfson, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at Harvard and editor at the Yiddish studies journal In geveb, participated in last year’s translation cohort. She presented alongside Professor Olga Litvak of Cornell and Professor Ora Wiskind of Michlalah College, on a panel exploring how translators preserve the emotional and spiritual weight of the texts when rendering them into English.

The institute has already begun to expand beyond Princeton, with a weekly reading group now meeting in New York City, facilitated by Rabbi Mendel Brawer. The Meturgeman Translation Fellowship, will enter its second cohort of fellows with Dr. Eli Rubin once again leading seminars and guiding fellows through texts focused on self-consciousness and inner life.

“When we think about spreading the wellsprings of Chassidut outward,” Brook reflects, “we usually imagine the furthest points geographically. But in a way, the Western academy is actually the pinnacle of outward. Not only bringing Chassidus into the academy, but sanctifying the tools of the academy themselves.”