She received her undergraduate degree in Slavic Studies from Bologna University, an MA in Modern Jewish Studies from the Graduate School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and earned her PhD from the Department of History at Stanford University. Her first book was "Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, 1917-1939"; her new book project, tentatively entitled "The Blood Libel in Modern Eastern Europe: A Social History," explores the ritual murder accusation within the context of the social, economic and gender relations between the Jews and their neighbors in the Soviet Union and Poland in the twentieth century.