Popular ideas about what it means to be a minority may change, but incidents of state-sanctioned violence remain eerily similar across millennia, explains Hazel D. Cole Fellow Brendan Goldman, a historian of the medieval Islamic world.
Like German-language Jewish writers, ethnic Slovenian author Maja Haderlap struggles with the language of the Nazis in telling the story of her community's persecution in Austria, writes graduate fellow Aaron Carpenter.
Annegret Oehme shares the stories of the nearly forgotten Yiddish knights' tales that inspired centuries of storytellers, both Jews and non-Jews alike.
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.
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.
Grad fellow Canan Bolel explains the unfortunate parallels between responses to 19th-century cholera outbreaks in Ottoman Izmir (present-day Turkey) — especially for Jewish communities— and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like people today, people in the ancient world were obsessed with having ideal children. And ancient theories of vision combined with fears around imperfect babies to create some funky beliefs about sex and conception, writes grad fellow Jennifer Hunter. But were they really weirder than our worries today?
Uniquely mobile, religiously unconventional Jews of 19th-century America laid the groundwork for American Judaism today, writes Dr. Shari Rabin.
