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.
Trace the journeys of eleven Sephardic families with roots in the Ottoman Empire who came to Seattle in the early twentieth century.
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.
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
Can Jews be anti-Semitic against other Jews? In this episode, guest Devin E. Naar looks at the history of Jewish prejudice against other Jews in the United States, from the very first American Jewish settlers in the 1600s to twentieth-century efforts to exclude Jews from the Muslim world from Jewish institutions — as American Jews struggled to hold on to their “precarious whiteness.”
Postdoctoral fellow Smadar Ben-Natan has received a grant of $40,000 to study the effects of political incarceration on reconciliation, as opposed to radicalization, in Israel/Palestine.
Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time? In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo helps to answer these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and “conversos” (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, exploring how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents.
How did the progressive Weimar Republic give way to the genocidal Nazi regime… and could it happen here? In this episode, guest Laurie Marhoefer explains the rise of the Nazi party in one of the most progressive places in the world, detailing the swift and dramatic shift in government, efforts to resist, and troubling echoes of these events in the present day.
