Our team

Kaplan Centre Staff

• Prof. Jeffrey Bagraim
• Michael Bagraim
• Dr. Louis Blond
• Lester Hoffman
• Robert Kaplan
• Romi Kaplan
• Prof. Shose Kessi
• A/Prof. Mandisa Mbali
• Gavin Morris
• Prof. Sandra Young

Research Associates

Veronica Belling
Veronica Belling was the Jewish Studies Librarian at UCT Libraries and the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research for 31 years. She  is currently an Honorary Research Associate attached to the Kaplan Centre. Veronica trained in Librarianship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and obtained a Masters in Jewish Civilization cum laude and a Ph.D. in Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests include South African Jewish bibliography, social and cultural history, and Yiddish. She has published several books and many scholarly articles. She currently conducts a weekly Yiddish group at the Cape Jewish Seniors in Sea Point.

Michael Cardo

Michael Cardo is an independent consultant, researcher and writer. He currently consults to South Africa’s leading development think tank on a broad range of public policy issues. Cardo's background is in politics. Between May 2014 and January 2024 he was a member of Parliament in the National Assembly, serving first as the Shadow Minister of Economic Development and later as the Shadow Minister of Employment and Labour. Before becoming a public representative, Cardo worked as a speech writer and policy analyst. Between 2011 and 2014, he was the Director of Policy Research and Analysis in the Department of the Premier, Western Cape Government. Cardo is a published biographer. His most recent book is Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty (Jonathan Ball: 2023). Cardo’s life history of the former South African Liberal Party leader, Peter Brown, titled Opening Men’s Eyes: Peter Brown and the Liberal Struggle for South Africa (Jonathan Ball: 2010), was written during the course of a visiting research fellowship at the Helen Suzman Foundation. While he is a Research Associate at the Kaplan Centre, Cardo will undertake a biography of the celebrated Jewish anti-apartheid activist and Progressive Party parliamentarian, Helen Suzman. Cardo holds a BA (Hons) in history from the University of Natal (now University of Kwazulu-Natal) as well as an MPhil and PhD in history from the University of Cambridge.

Shirli Gilbert
Shirli Gilbert is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London, and Academic Director of the Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre. She obtained her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cape Town and in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Her research is focused on modern Jewish history, with particular interest in the Holocaust and its legacies, modern Jewish identity, and Jews in South Africa. Her publications include Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford University Press, 2005), From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2017), and most recently, with Avril Alba, Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World (Wayne State University Press, 2019). A longer biography is available on the UCL website here.

Shlomo Glicksberg
Since 2014, Dr Shlomo Glicksberg has served as Rosh Kollel and Rabbi of the Mizrachi congregation in Johannesburg. In 2015 he was appointed Dayan and a member of the rabbinical court of Johannesburg. He has published dozens of articles in academic journals and six academic and halachic books. Before coming to South Africa he taught Jewish law and Jewish history at the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University, Efrata College, the Lander Institute and Beit Morasha in Jerusalem.

Boris Gorelik                                                                                                         

Boris Gorelik specialises in the history of cross-cultural encounters and interactions between Russia and South Africa. After receiving his PhD at the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences in 2004, he has collaborated with the Kaplan Centre. His study A Lost Tribe: Russian-Speaking Jews in South Africa Today came out in the Occasional Paper Series in 2010. In the field of Jewish Studies, Gorelik contributes to the Kaplan Centre’s exploration of the immigrant origins of the South African Jewish population. Much of that population can trace its roots to the Kovno Governorate in the Russian Empire. Those immigrants remained interlinked with their place of origin. In revealing the perceptions of far-off South Africa among Jews in the Russian Empire, Gorelik’s project will add a new dimension to our understanding of mass migration and of the mindset and thought processes of would-be immigrants.

His books, published in Russia, South Africa and the United Kingdom, include The Past and Current Russian Immigration to South Africa (2007), ‘An Entirely Different World’: Russian Visitors to the Cape 1797–1870 (2015) and A Russian on Commando: The Boer War Experiences of Yevgeny Avgustus (2022). His biography of a Russian Jewish film star who moved to South Africa to establish one of the first professional Yiddish theatrical troupes in the country just before the Second World War, Ossip Runitch: A Silent King of a Vanished Kingdom, is expected to be published in 2025. Gorelik is also a contributor to Jewish Affairs.

Brenda Gouws
Brenda Gouws is a post-doctoral researcher whose research interests lie in the sphere of South African history education. These interests encompass Jewish education, Holocaust education in both schools and museums, museum guides, history teachers' personal stories, and methodologically, narrative inquiry. Her work to date has focused on Holocaust education in South Africa; for her PhD, she examined history teachers’ personal stories and how their stories shape their teaching of the Holocaust, which is part of the national History curriculum, while her Masters investigated the work of Holocaust museum educators. She has written several articles that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, contributed a chapter to a book entitled, Oral History Education, and is in the process of writing further articles and book chapters. She has also delivered papers on Holocaust education and history teachers' personal stories at various conferences at home and abroad. She is a qualified matriculation level Mathematics and English teacher; has studied both locally and internationally to guide at Holocaust museums; and currently works for a charitable foundation.

David Graham
Dr David Graham is an Honourary Research Associate at the Kaplan Centre, UCT. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in London and Honorary Associate at the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, University of Sydney. A geographer by training and expert in the demographic study of Jews in Britain, Europe and Australia, his skills encompass statistical analysis, survey design, census analysis and GIS. Dr Graham has been at the forefront of multiple surveys of Jewish communities around the world and was most recently instrumental in the development and success of the nationwide Jewish Community Survey of South Africa. Dr Graham publishes widely for academic, professional and general interest audiences and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Irwin Manoim
Irwin Manoim is a former journalist and newspaper editor who is now researching Jewish history in South Africa. He was joint founder and joint editor of the Weekly Mail newspaper (now the Mail&Guardian) in 1985, and wrote a book about journalism under a State of Emergency (You Have Been Warned, Viking 1996). He published the first online news site in Africa (Electronic Mail&Guardian) from 1995 and edited a series of early books on digital technology and the internet. He has taught media theory and history, design and production to post-graduate students in the Journalism Studies Department at Wits University. His Masters dissertation (1981) dealt with the role of the mass media in the “Americanisation” of black township culture. A public lecture he delivered on behalf of the Kaplan Centre in 2017, dealing with the Jewish role in establishing a newspaper industry in South Africa, was published in Jewish Affairs (Pesach, 2018). He has been researching the development of a Progressive Jewish movement in South Africa and its impact on the wider community, and the role of the Jewish community in shaping the culture and economy of Johannesburg.

Barbara Nussbaum

Barbara Nussbaum  is an Honorary Research Affiliate at the Kaplan Centre, UCT. As a researcher at Wits Business School,  she co-authored pioneering work about the role of African culture in South African management at Wits Business School Sawubona Africa, Embracing Four Worlds in South African Management (Lessem and Nussbaum 1996). She has published a variety of articles globally on how and why Ubuntu could inform new business paradigms, curricula, and organizational development practices in the 21st century. She is a Penguin author and was the lead author for Personal Growth African Style ( Penguin 2010). Barbara’s interests also include the role of music in building wellbeing and belonging within and across diverse cultural contexts. In her work as a practitioner, she has been recognised globally, as a social innovator for her methodology called Finding Us in Music™ (FUIM). With a keen interest in Jewish diaspora communities, and the complexities of the Israel-Gaza conflict, she will be conducting research on the impact of October 7, on South Africans. She will also be exploring Ubuntu and Judaism: similarities and differences and will be reformulating her theory of Finding Us in Music, grounding the work in Jewish concepts. Barbara is a UCT alumna ( BA) and has postgraduate degrees from the London School of Economics, (MSc, Econ, Social Policy) and from Drexel University, Philadelphia USA (Masters in Creative Arts Therapies).

Frances Williams

Frances Williams is an Honorary Research Associate at the Kaplan Centre, UCT.  She received her Doctorate from Edinburgh University, Scotland, and her Masters degree from Exeter University, England.  Her research is interested in modern Jewish history, particularly within the British and South African context.  Previous research focused on the Kindertransport experience in Britain.  Her work continues to study Jewish refugee migration stories, Jewish diaspora communities and Jewish identities. Her current research work investigates Jewish and non-Jewish relations within South African rural communities.  Previous publications include The Forgotten Kindertransportees: The Scottish Experience, Bloomsbury Publishers, London, 2014.  She was instrumental in the creation of the international Kindertransport questionnaire and eventual database Making New Lives in Britain (https://ajr.org.uk/kindertransport-survey/).

Past Staff

Kerri Serman
Kerri Serman is an applied experimental and behavioural economist. She worked as a Research Fellow at the Kaplan Centre between 2019 and 2021 with responsibility for a large-scale social survey of the Cape Town Jewish community. More broadly, her research has focused on social norms, other behavioural biases and public good dilemmas. Her post-doc work, which evaluated the impact of behavioural interventions on effecting social change, was at the intersection of behavioural economics and randomized control trials. Kerri graduated with a PhD from the Department of Economics at the University of Cape Town in 2014.

Michael Rom
Michael Rom was the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Kaplan Centre from 2020 to 2022. He completed a PhD in Latin American and Jewish History at Yale University. His research examines the relationship between political activism and national, communal, and generational belonging within Jewish communities during the Global Cold War.