PANEL – POSTPONED | Jewish History and Jewish Memory Revisited: Yerushalmi’s ‘Zakhor’ at 40
Thursday, October 12, 2023, 7:00 pm PDT - 8:30 pm PDT
The Stroum Center is turning 50 years old and author Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor isn’t far behind! Please join us for the first SCJS 50th Anniversary event of the year.
Note: This event has been postponed to a TBD date later in autumn quarter. Check back soon for more information.
A tribute to Zakhor
Rachel B. Gross, an expert on Judaism and American Jewish history, will open the conversation by addressing Yerushalmi’s influence on the field of Jewish Studies. Then she will give an overview of how and why she uses the term “nostalgia” to bridge what Yerushalmi sees as a division between Jewish history and memory.
Across all editions, just under 20,000 copies of Zakhor have been sold to date! This panel on Jewish history and Jewish memory will be moderated by faculty member Nicolaas P. Barr (Comparative History of Ideas), who specializes in antisemitism, intellectual history and modern Europe. Faculty member Jason Groves (German Studies), who specializes in memory studies in the context of ecology, will share his perspective as well.
Note: This event has been postponed to a TBD date later in autumn quarter. Check back soon for more information.
About the speakers
Rachel B. Gross is Associate Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a religious studies scholar who studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Jews. Her book, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, is a 2021 National Jewish Book Award finalist in American Jewish Studies and received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society. She is currently working on a religious biography of the twentieth-century immigration writer Mary Antin.
Nicolaas P. Barr, Ph.D., teaches in Comparative History of Ideas and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He leads a UW study abroad program to Amsterdam and is the Dutch-to-English translator of Tofik Dibi’s coming-out memoir Djinn. Nicolaas has appeared on The Stranger’s podcast “Blabbermouth” to discuss such terms as anarchy, progressive, and neoliberal, and written on Dutch racism in The Nation and Jewish Currents. He’s an editor for H-Low Countries and a trombonist in the Mexican band Banda Vagos.
Jason Groves is an associate professor of German Studies at the University of Washington, where he is also a core faculty member in the Environmental Cultures and Values minor. His research interests encompass literature and art in German romanticism and realism, Jewish German literature, especially post-Holocaust poetry, literary theory, cultural criticism, memory studies, and trauma studies, particularly in the context of historical and ongoing ecological crises.
Since 2019 he has co-organized the Colloquium on Transcultural Approaches to Europe and from 2016-2019 he co-organized the Cross-disciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene, both funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access and accommodation in its services, programs, and activities. To make a request connected to a disability or health condition contact Grace Dy at (206) 543-0138 or jewishst@uw.edu at least 10 days before the event.