Prof. Ziva R. Hassenfeld is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education at Brandeis University. She completed her PhD at Stanford University. She studies reading comprehension from a sociocultural perspective, focusing on how children develop interpretations of the Hebrew Bible as a lens on reading development more broadly. Her qualitative methods include ethnographic observation, stimulated recall interviews and think-aloud interviews. This work draws on biblical hermeneutics, both contemporary and rabbinic, as well as literary theory and criticism. Ziva is also a passionate educator who has continued teaching Hebrew Bible throughout her move from high school classroom to academia. Her first book, The Second Conversation: Interpretive Authority in the Bible Classroom (Brandeis University Press, 2024), grew out of a two-year teacher-research project in which she taught seventh-grade Hebrew Bible during her postdoctoral fellowship, supported by the Ettenberg Research Grant in Jewish Education.