Rediscovering “El bukieto de romansas”: A century of Sephardic folk songs
By making a historic Sephardic songbook available online, graduate fellow Ke Guo hopes to pass on a rich legacy of Sephardic music — and to further our understanding of how Sephardic music has changed over time.
Mosaics of the Abraham & Isaac story show how Jews in late antiquity used art to connect with religion and community
Countering misperceptions, grad fellow Abby Massarano explains that Jews in the 6th century CE embraced visual art, and shows what we can learn about these communities from their depictions of the key story of Abraham's Binding of Isaac.
Seattle Sephardic Legacies
Trace the journeys of eleven Sephardic families with roots in the Ottoman Empire who came to Seattle in the early twentieth century.
“The yoke of the Gentiles is not upon them”: Benjamin of Tudela’s geography of Jews in medieval Iraq and Kurdistan
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela's travel writing shows that Jews in medieval Iraq and Kurdistan lived in (relative) peace and freedom, countering narratives of universal misery and oppression, grad fellow Jeffrey Haines writes.
PODCAST | Jewish Questions, Episode 5: Before Zionism — Liora Halpern
Present-day discussions of anti-Semitism often involve Israel and the Zionist movement… but before the 20th century, Jews’ and Jewish scholars’ understandings of anti-Semitism were completely connected with Europe and Christianity. In the last episode of our series, guest Liora R. Halperin looks at how 19th-century Jewish settlers to Ottoman Palestine were influenced by the anti-Semitism they experienced in the Russian Empire