UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

COSPONSORED TALK | Ethnic Identity & Ethnic Organizing: Darfurian Asylum Seekers in Israel
2021-04-07 09:30 - 10:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | WA

VIDEO | American Christians and the Holy Land: Before, During and After Contemporary Pilgrimages to Israel/Palestine
2021-04-15 16:00 - 17:15 | RSVP for Zoom link
Anthropologist Hillary Kaell discusses American Christian trips to the Holy Land — the history, meaning, and importance of modern pilgrimages to Israel/Palestine.
Watch the talk now:

About the event

Since the 1950s, millions of U.S. Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit the places where Jesus lived and died. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey halfway around the world? How do they react to what they encounter, and how do they understand the trip upon return?
Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with groups of pilgrims before, during, and after their trips, Dr. Hillary Kaell (McGill University) frames the experience as both ordinary — tied to participants’ everyday role as “ritual specialists,” or religious practitioners — and extraordinary, since they travel far away from home, often for the first time.
This talk will examine the kind of Christian education and personal experiences that compel individuals to take the trip, and cover a few key examples of what they find once they arrive. Taking the rare step of following pilgrims after they return home, the talk will also examine whether the trip makes an impact in Christians’ lives over a longer term.
Throughout, the rising popularity of Holy Land pilgrimage is contextualized within changes to U.S. Christian theology and culture over the last sixty years, including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations and the development of a Christian leisure industry. Through explanations of research and context, Dr. Kaell will shed light on how individual Christians make sense of their experiences in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.
About the speaker
Hillary Kaell is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religion at McGill University, where she holds a William Dawson Research Chair. She writes about North American Christianity, often focusing on how Christians make and imagine global connections. She is author of “Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage” (New York University Press, 2014) and, most recently, “Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States” (Princeton University Press, 2020). She has also collaborated on public education tools including the PBS television series, God in America. More at www.hillarykaell.com and @hillarykaell
This event is made possible through the generosity of the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Fund for Excellence in Israel Studies, and is cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology and Global Christianity Initiative at the Comparative Religion Program in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

VIDEO | Ghetto: The History of a Word
2021-04-22 16:00 - 17:15 | Zoom
This lecture was originally scheduled as an in-person event in 2020, and has been rescheduled as a webinar in 2021.
Daniel Schwartz (George Washington University) will give a talk on the history of the word “ghetto,” from 16th-century Venice to today.
Watch the talk now:

About the event
Few words are as ideologically charged as “ghetto.” Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, the site of the first ghetto in Europe, established in 1516; and Rome, where the ghetto endured until 1870, decades after it had been dismantled elsewhere.
Over the nineteenth century, as Jews were emancipated and ghettos were dissolved, the word “ghetto” transcended its Italian roots and became a more general term for pre-modern Jewish life. It also came to designate new Jewish spaces — from voluntary immigrant neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side to the holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe — as dissimilar from the pre-emancipation European ghettos as they were from each other.
After World War II, “ghetto” broke free of its Jewish origins and became more typically associated with African Americans than with Jews. Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic journey, this talk will reveal how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word.
Register for this event here >
About the speaker
Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies Program at George Washington University. His first book, “The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image,” was co-winner of the Salo W. Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in history.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of History and the African Studies Program at the Jackson School of International Studies.

VIDEO | The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: Dina Danon in Conversation with Devin E. Naar
2021-05-05 17:00 - 18:15 | RSVP for Zoom link
Dina Danon (Binghamton University) will discuss her new book, “The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History.”
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About this talk
Across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir, a Mediterranean port city, invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? What happens when there is no “Jewish Question?”
Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, Danon will offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Through the voices of beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this talk will underscore how it was new attitudes to poverty and social class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sepharadi community’s encounter with the modern age.
About the speakers
Dina Danon is associate professor of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University. She holds a doctorate in History from Stanford University. She was recently a fellow at the Katz Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began work on new project on the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage, and divorce in the eastern Sepharadi diaspora.

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University and has also served as a Fulbright fellow to Greece. His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material and was named a finalist in Sephardic Culture. It also won the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studies awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association.
Presented in partnership with Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, the Seattle Sephardic Network, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, and the Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington; the department of History, and the Middle East Center.

GRAD COLLOQUIUM | Sephardic Experiences of Modernity: Newspapers, Migrants and Midwives
2021-05-19 10:00 - 11:30 | Zoom
Join 2020-2021 Stroum Center graduate fellows Ben Lee, Büşra Demirkol, and Oya Rose Aktaş, as they present their research in Jewish studies:

The Ladino Press: Using Machine Learning to Excavate Visual Content in Historic Ladino Newspapers
Ben Lee, Richard and Ina Willner Memorial Fellow

The Modernization of Education and Its Impact on Midwives: The Case of Jewish “Bloody Midwives”
Büşra Demirkol, Mickey & Leo Sreebny Memorial Fellow

Mapping Early Migration from ‘Turkey’ to Seattle: A Social History of Seattle’s First Ottomans
Oya Rose Aktaş, Rabbi Arthur A. Jacobovitz Institute Fellow

Colloquium Respondent: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania

Learn more about each presenter and their research:

Ben Lee, Richard and Ina Willner Memorial Fellow
“The Ladino Press: Using Machine Learning to Excavate Visual Content in Historic Ladino Newspapers”
Ben is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction, with application to cultural heritage and the digital humanities. Ben graduated from Harvard College in 2017 and has served as the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s History Department. He is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. For his fellowship research this year, Ben will be applying his project Newspaper Navigator to historic Ladino newspapers in order to extract and study the content using machine learning. Read about Ben’s research:

“Ladino newspapers are the new wave in ‘uncharted waters’ of digital history” (2021)

Büşra Demirkol, Mickey & Leo Sreebny Memorial Fellow
“The Modernization of Education and Its Impact on Midwives: The Case of Jewish ‘Bloody Midwives'”
Büşra Demirkol is a Ph.D. student the Interdisciplinary Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. She received her B.A. degree in sociology at Galatasaray University and her M.A. degree in Turkish studies at Sabanci University. Her master’s thesis focused on modernization in the legal field during the late Ottoman era and its impact on women on the margins. Based on penal codes, codification discussions and court records, she traces how marginal women were redefined and constructed within the boundaries of the public sphere in Ottoman legal culture, and were subjected to the state intervention according to a modern understanding of crime and punishment. Prior to graduate school, she also worked as a social worker with African, Afghan and Syrian refugees in Istanbul and conducted research about the official and unofficial schooling of Syrian children.

Oya Rose Aktaş, Rabbi Arthur A. Jacobovitz Institute Fellow
“Mapping Early Migration from ‘Turkey’ to Seattle: A Social History of Seattle’s First Ottomans”
Oya Rose Aktaş is a Ph.D. student in the University of Washington’s Department of History studying non-Muslim communities in the transition from imperial subject to liberal citizen in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Her current research focuses on how state violence targeted at Christians affected the position of Jews in Istanbul, and her project for the Stroum Center graduate fellowship will include work on the Sephardic diaspora in Seattle, Washington. Prior to graduate school, Oya worked on U.S. foreign relations and economic policy at Washington DC think tanks. Read about Oya’s research:

“How Jewish residents of Seattle remembered the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire” (2021)

Colloquium Respondent

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano studies early modern Ottoman intellectual history, and its connections to literature, poetry, and bureaucracy. Aguirre-Mandujano recently co-edited the book “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States” and is currently working on another book project, “Poetics of Empire: Literature and Political Culture at the Early Modern Ottoman Court.” Oscar is a former graduate fellow of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

GRAD COLLOQUIUM | Tradition and Continuity: Jewish Cultural History Through Art, Music and Travelogue
2021-05-21 10:00 - 11:30 | WA
Join 2020-2021 Stroum Center graduate fellows Ke Guo, Abby Massarano, and Jeffrey Haines as they present their research in Jewish studies:

From Home to Zoom: Sustainable Futures for Sephardic Music
Ke Guo, Robinovitch Family Fellow

The Binding of Isaac in Late Antique Synagogues: The Function of Biblical Art in Performing Jewish Identity
Abby Massarano, Robert and Pamela Center Fellow

Tracing Jews in Medieval Kurdistan: Syriac and Muslim Sources as a Window into Jewish History
Jeff Haines, I. Mervin and Georgiana Gorasht Fellow

Colloquium Respondent: Hamza M. Zafer, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization

Learn more about each presenter and their research:

Ke Guo, Robinovitch Family Fellow
“From Home to Zoom: Sustainable Futures for Sephardic Music”
Ke Guo is a Ph.D. student in music education with a focus in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington’s School of Music. She was born in Wuhan, China, and studied applied mathematics at UCLA for her B.S. degree. She then obtained an M.S. in management science and engineering from Stanford University and an M.M. in music education from San José State University. Her research in world music education and ethnomusicology has covered topics in both Chinese music and Sephardic music. As a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, she is also active as a concert performer, and has offered individual concerts as well as collaborative concerts in America and Europe. Focusing on the topic of the worldwide transmission and reception of Sephardic music both within and outside of the Sephardic community, she is excited to conduct future field research in the Iberian Peninsula, Turkey, and other countries around the Mediterranean. Read about Ke’s research:

“Rediscovering ‘El bukieto de romansas’: A century of Sephardic folk songs” (2021)

Abby Massarano, Robert and Pamela Center Fellow
“The Binding of Isaac in Late Antique Synagogues: The Function of Biblical Art in Performing Jewish Identity”
Abby Massarano is a graduate student in the School of Art, Art History, and Design at the University of Washington, where she is pursuing her M.A. in art history. Her research is focused on the interplay of image and biblical text in Mediterranean and Near Eastern Abrahamic art in Late Antiquity. She received her B.A in psychology with a minor in art history from Mills College in Oakland, CA. After moving to Seattle, she worked in art conservation and preservation before deciding to return to academia. For her fellowship project, Abby is researching the interplay of text and image in late antique Abrahamic art of the Near East and the Mediterranean through scenes of the Akedah (The Binding of Isaac) in synagogues and other worship spaces. In addition to the Stroum Center graduate fellowship, Abby is also a recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for Hebrew. Read about Abby’s research:

“Mosaics of the Abraham & Isaac story show how Jews in late antiquity used art to connect with religion and community” (2021)

Jeffrey Haines, I. Mervin and Georgiana Gorasht Fellow
“Tracing Jews in Medieval Kurdistan: Syriac and Muslim Sources as a Window into Jewish History”
Jeffrey Haines is a fifth year doctoral candidate in the University of Washington’s Department of History, having previously completed a double B.A. in history and classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an M.A. in early Christian studies at the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation, “Mosul’s Hinterland: Village and Monastery in Early Islamic Mesopotamia,” examines the history of the rural, multi-religious communities that flourished on the northern edge of the Islamic caliphate through the lens of Syriac monastic histories. As a graduate fellow in Jewish Studies, he will focus on the folklore and culture of the Jewish villages that have existed side by side with Christians, Muslims, Yezidis, and Zoroastrians in this region for centuries. Read about Jeff’s research:

“‘The yoke of the Gentiles is not upon them’: Benjamin of Tudela’s geography of Jews in medieval Iraq and Kurdistan” (2021)

Colloquium Respondent

Hamza M. Zafer, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, University of Washington
Hamza Zafer’s research focuses on the Quran’s engagements with Jewish communities in Arabia, and the portrayal of these communities in the earliest Muslim historical and exegetical writings, up to the 9th century. His first book, “Ecumenical Community: Language and Politics of the Ummah in the Qurʾan,” was published in November 2020.

5/25 | STROUM LECTURES | Reading Jewish Texts in an Age of Climate Change: Grappling with Risk, Reimagining Hope
2021-05-25 16:00 - 17:15 | RSVP for Zoom link
Julia Watts Belser shows how ancient Jewish stories invite us to tangle with grief, confront vulnerability, and re-imagine our survival.
In the 2020 Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, Professor Julia Watts Belser will use classic rabbinic Jewish texts on political violence, imperialism, and disaster to grapple with pressing contemporary questions about climate change and environmental justice. Bringing disability studies and activism into conversation with queer and feminist theory, these talks will examine how ancient Jewish stories invite us to tangle with grief, confront vulnerability, and re-imagine possibilities for communal survival.

5/27 STROUM LECTURE | Reading Jewish Texts in an Age of Climate Change: The Afterlives of Noah’s Ark – Gender, Disability & the Politics of Survival
2021-05-27 16:00 - 17:15 | RSVP for Zoom link

10/14 TALK | Book Launch: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture - Mika Ahuvia
2021-10-14 16:00 - 17:15 | WA
In a discussion with author and journalist Sigal Samuel, faculty member Mika Ahuvia will discuss the large role that angels played in the ancient Mediterranean world, drawing on her recent book, “On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture.”
Watch the conversation now:

About this talk
Mika Ahuvia’s new book on angels in ancient Jewish culture examines a common element of Jewish practice that is often overlooked or dismissed: angels, the invisible beings who serve as intermediaries, guardians and role models for humans.
In a conversation with author and journalist Sigal Samuel, Ahuvia will explain how angels have extended humans’ experience of the divine beyond scriptures and synagogue walls across time, and how related practices — including magical invocations — illustrate the many ways in which people have practiced Judaism and Jewishness throughout history. Learn more about the book.
About the speakers
Mika Ahuvia researches the formative history of Jewish and Christian communities in the ancient Mediterranean world. Specializing in Late Antique Jewish history, she works with rabbinic sources, liturgical poetry, magical texts, early mystical literature, and archaeological evidence.
Her new book, “On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture,” investigates conceptions of angels in foundational Jewish texts and ritual sources, and uncovers how angels made their way into the practices and worldview of ancient Jews. Ahuvia teaches courses in Jewish Studies, comparative religion, and global studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and is also the Stroum Center’s Undergraduate Program Coordinator.

Sigal Samuel is senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect project, and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She is also the author of two books. “Osnat and Her Dove,” a children’s book, tells the true story of the world’s first female rabbi. “The Mystics of Mile End,” a novel, tells the story of a dysfunctional family dealing with mysticism, madness, and mathematics in Montreal. The book was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Sigal earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and her B.A. in philosophy from McGill University.

10/25 EVENT | "The Hangman": On Adolf Eichmann’s Executioner — Screening & Conversation with Director Netalie Braun
2021-10-25 19:00 - 21:00 | WA
Following a screening of the 60-minute documentary, director Netalie Braun discussed “The Hangman” with faculty member and Benaroya Fellow in Israel Studies Smadar Ben-Natan.
*Stream “The Hangman” documentary any time as a $5 rental through Movie Discovery, a distributor of Israeli & other international films.*
About the event
The 2010 documentary “The Hangman” (“Hatalyan“) profiles Shalom Nagar, the Yemenite Jew who guarded, and eventually executed, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In spite of Eichmann’s role as a key organizer of the Holocaust, Nagar didn’t wish to execute him.
The film reflects on the assignment of the executioner role to Nagar as illuminating the position of Mizrahi Jews in Holocaust memory in Israel. Nagar’s reflections on this experience, and on the meaning of capital punishment even in the face of unforgivable acts, raises pressing questions about crime and punishment in our time.
Articles and essays related to the topic, compiled by faculty member Smadar Ben-Natan, are available below.
Further reading related to the documentary
Curated by Smadar Ben-Natan, 2021-22 Benaroya Fellow in Israel Studies

During & following the Eichmann trial

“Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” by Hannah Arendt; view online study guide for the book
“Buber Calls Eichmann Execution ‘Great Mistake’” by Lawrence Fellows, The New York Times (1962)

Articles for a general audience

“Who Opposed Adolf Eichmann’s Execution?” by Amit Naor, The Librarians, National Library of Israel
“‘I Don’t Know If This Letter Will Reach You’: The Letters Of Hannah Arendt And Gershom Scholem” by Nathan Goldman, Los Angeles Review of Books

Academic articles

“Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust” by Shoshana Feldman
“The Eichmann Trial – Toward a Jurisprudence of Eyewitness Testimonies of Atrocity?” by Leora Bilsky
“Hangman’s Perspective: Three Genres of Critique Following Eichmann” by Itamar Mann, available as PDF or video lecture

Books

“Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial” by Leora Bilsky (University of Michigan Press, 2004)

About the participants
Netalie Braun is a writer, director and producer of documentary and fiction films, and has won the Israeli Academy Award for best documentary. She currently teaches at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television in Tel Aviv University, and was previously the artistic director of the International Women’s Film Festival in Israel. She has a B.A. in literature and philosophy and an M.A. in film studies from Tel Aviv University. Her films include “Hope I’m in the Frame,” “The Hangman” & “Vow.”
Smadar Ben-Natan is the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies’ 2020-2022 Benaroya Fellow in Israel Studies. She is a longtime Israeli human rights lawyer who completed her Ph.D. in the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. She specializes in law & society and international law, with a particular focus on the intersection of criminal justice, national security and human rights. She holds a master’s in international human rights law, with distinction, from the University of Oxford (2011), and an LLB from Tel Aviv University (1995).

11/16 COSPONSORED TALK | Was the Biblical Joseph on the Spectrum?
2021-11-16 16:00 - 17:00 | WA

11/18 BENAROYA LECTURE | Analyzing the Israeli COVID-19 Response in Context: Social, Historical and Ethical Perspectives
2021-11-18 20:00 - 21:00 | WA
Image: Wheel of public health interventions, developed by the Minnesota Department of Health (2019).
Nadav Davidovitch, Professor of Health Systems Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, gave the 2021 Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Lecture in Israel Studies, discussing Israel’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in conversation with Abraham Flaxman, Associate Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington.
Watch the presentations now:

About this talk

Nadav Davidovitch, a public health professor and epidemiologist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, will explore the different meanings of public health from historical, sociological, political and health policy perspectives, focusing on several case studies from the Israeli perspective, from the 1950s absorption of mass immigration and related vaccination and public health efforts to the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the present day.
In conversation with Abraham Flaxman, UW professor of global health, Davidovitch will discuss the interaction between scientific advisory committees and policy makers, and pressing issues including health inequities, the influence of politics, and the role of trust and solidarity in public health practices and policy-making.
About the speakers

Nadav Davidovitch, M.D., MPH, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist and public health physician. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Systems Management in the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Guilford-Glaser Faculty of Business and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. He teaches on health policy, public health, health promotion, the Israeli healthcare system, public health ethics, and global health. He is also affiliated with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at the School of Public Health, Columbia University, NY, and with the School of Public Health, University of Illinois – Chicago.
Abraham Flaxman is Associate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, where he is currently leading the development of new methods for cost effective analysis through microsimulation. Prior to becoming an associate professor, Dr. Flaxman was a post-graduate fellow at IHME, and before that he was a post-doctoral fellow at Microsoft Research. Originally from Evanston, IL, Dr. Flaxman earned his B.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. Dr. Flaxman has written his popular blog, Healthy Algorithms, since 2008. His posts cover mathematics, computer science, and his research at IHME.
This event made possible through the generosity of the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Fund for Excellence in Israel Studies, and is cosponsored by the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology and the Population Health Initiative at the University of Washington, and by Americans for Ben-Gurion University.

12/8 STUDENT EVENT | Narrating Migration Stories: Podcasting Sephardic Jewish Journeys
2021-12-08 17:00 - 18:00 | WA
Scholar and co-creator of the well-known Ottoman History Podcast Chris Gratien and retired journalist Sam Negri discuss their approach to telling the stories of marginalized migrants to the United States, focusing on the story of Negri’s father, Sephardic Jew Leo Negri, who came to the United States undocumented in the early 1900s along with thousands of other Sephardim (Jews expelled from modern-day Spain in 1492 who sought refuge throughout the Ottoman Empire).
Watch the conversation now:

About this talk
In the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews migrated to the United States from the borders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. In addition to navigating inter-Jewish communal relationships with fellow Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews were also subject to racially biased immigration quotas that were becoming ever more restrictive during the 1920s.
Falsified papers were often the only way for many Sepharadim to gain entry to the United States — a route taken by Istanbul-born Leo Negri, whose fraudulent passport listed his country of origin as Cuba.
How can the podcast medium be leveraged to share the complex stories of Ottoman migrants to the United States? How can Negri’s story help us understand the stories of thousands of other Ottoman migrants like him, many of whom faced deportation threats and racism in their new American neighborhoods?
Join Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia, co-creator of the Ottoman History Podcast, and Sam Negri, a retired journalist and Leo Negri’s son, for a conversation about this understudied moment in Jewish, Ottoman, and American history.
About the speakers
Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on environmental history and the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the late Ottoman Empire. He is the co-creator of the Ottoman History Podcast and recently contributed a chapter to “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States” (Koç University Press, 2021) that was co-authored with Sam Negri.
Sam Negri is a retired journalist based in Arizona. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. His father, Leo Negri, was an Istanbul-born Jew who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century.

12/12 LADINO DAY | Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States
2021-12-12 10:00 - 11:15 | WA
In the University of Washington’s 9th annual Ladino Day celebration, editors of the new book “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States” discuss the book project, alongside presentations from three contributors to the volume.
Watch the program now:

About this event

How can family heirlooms, papers, and memorabilia help us to understand the process of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States? In a newly released edited volume, “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States” (Koç University Press, 2021), scholars of Ottoman history and Jewish studies explore this question using objects from the UW’s own Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, the world’s largest online collection of Ladino-language books and documents.
To commemorate Ladino Day 2021, join us for an interdisciplinary conversation with Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (University of Pennsylvania) and Kerem Tınaz (Koç University), the editors of this book, and with Hannah S. Pressman (Director of Education and Engagement, Jewish Languages Project), Maureen Jackson (independent scholar), and Laurent Mignon (University of Oxford), three of the book’s contributors, as they discuss important artifacts and their impact on Ottoman and Jewish history.
About the speakers

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His research focuses on intellectual and cultural history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. He is currently working on his first monograph, which examines the relationship among literary composition, Sufi doctrine, and political thought in the early modern Islamic world. He is a co-editor of “Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States.”
Kerem Tınaz is Assistant Professor of History at Koç University where he teaches courses on the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire with a particular interest in identity, ideology, and networks. He is a co-editor of “Sephardic Trajectories.”
Hannah S. Pressman, Ph.D., is a widely published scholar of Jewish languages and literatures. She is currently at work on “Galante’s Daughter: A Sephardic Family Journey,” a memoir tracing her family’s travels from the Levant into southern Africa and beyond, which she highlights in her contribution to “Sephardic Trajectories.” You can find her writings on Jewish culture and Sephardic family history at hannahpressman.com.
Maureen Jackson, Ph.D., is an independent scholar focusing on the urban history of Ottoman, Turkish, and Jewish music. She is the author of Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song (Stanford University Press, 2013), which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture. She has published in both English and Turkish language presses and created the online exhibit Bailar a la Turka: 78 rpm records in Seattle Sephardi Households.
Laurent Mignon is Associate Professor of Turkish language and literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College, and Affiliate Professor at the Luxembourg School of Religion and Society. His research focuses on the minor literatures of Ottoman and Republican Turkey, in particular Jewish literatures, as well as the literary engagement with non-Abrahamic religions during the era straddling the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.
Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and is faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University and has also served as a Fulbright fellow to Greece. His first book, “Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece,” was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material and was named a finalist in Sephardic Culture. It also won the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studies awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association.
This event is supported by the Lucie Benveniste Kavesh Endowed Fund for Sephardic Studies.

Presented in partnership with the Departments of Anthropology, History, Linguistics, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Spanish and Portuguese Studies; Aki Estamos, Centro Cultural Sefarad, El Amaneser, Ladino 21, Los Shadarim, Şalom Gazetesi, the Salti International Institute for Ladino Research at Bar Ilan University, the Seattle Sephardic Network, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, and the Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington.

1/19 EVENT| Book Talk & Discussion: “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past” - Liora R. Halperin
2022-01-19 16:00 - 17:15 | WA
In this event, faculty member Liora R. Halperin will discuss her new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” and the creation of historical narratives around Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, with Stroum Center Director and fellow faculty member Noam Pianko.
About this talk

In her new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” Liora R. Halperin looks at the history of moshavot, Jewish agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine, and the ways in which the history of these settlements has been folded into the story of the State of Israel in the early 20th century.
Beginning in the late 1870s, Jews from the religious communities of urban Palestine, joined in the 1880s by migrants from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire and other parts eastern Europe, began to purchase land and establish private agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, with the goal of creating productive, self-sufficient Jewish communities. Though these agricultural colonies predated the Zionist movement of the late 1890s, they served as hubs for subsequent Jewish migrants and later came to be seen as the first Zionist wave of Settlement, or “First Aliyah.” Yet, because of their more religious or socially traditional ethos and use of Arab workers, the stories and ideas surrounding these private settlements were often at odds with later Zionist movements, especially Labor Zionism and the call for “Hebrew Labor.”
In a conversation with Noam Pianko, Professor of Jewish Studies, Halperin will discuss the stories around these Jewish settlements, how they fit into the broader story of Zionism, and how she reconstructed this history via a wide range of sources.
About the speakers

Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Washington, and has scholarly interests in nationalism and collective memory, language ideology and policy, and Jewish-Arab relations both in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and in the early years after Israeli statehood. Her first book, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine” (Yale University Press, 2015), was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She has published academic articles in The Journal of Social History, Jewish Social Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and The Jewish Quarterly Review, among other venues. She received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2011, and is the Benaroya Chair of the UW Israel Studies Program.
Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies & Judaic Studies from Yale University in 2004. His most recent book, “Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation” (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015), won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book prize, and traces how the concept of “peoplehood” emerged at the beginning of the last century as an American-Jewish innovation calibrated to shape discussions of nationalism, Zionism, and American Jewish identity.
This event is cosponsored by the Department of History at the University of Washington.

1/20 PANEL| Scholarly Perspectives — "The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past"
2022-01-20 09:30 - 10:45 | WA
In a panel conversation, three scholars will offer responses to and commentary around faculty member Liora R. Halperin’s new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” and how the history of early Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine has been folded into the story of the State of Israel.
About this talk

In her new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” Liora R. Halperin looks at the history of moshavot, Jewish agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine, and the ways in which the history of these settlements has been folded into the story of the State of Israel in the early 20th century.
In this panel conversation, scholars Alon Confino (University of Massachussetts Amherst), Nahum Karlinsky (Ben-Gurion University), and Sherene Seikaly (UC Santa Barbara) will offer their responses to the book, connecting it to broader understandings around the processes of creating history and historical narratives, in particular as these relate to the State of Israel.
About the speakers

Alon Confino is Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, and Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His recent books include “Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding” (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012) and “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (Yale University Press, 2014). He studied at the University of Tel Aviv and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nahum Karlinsky is a Senior Lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, where he has taught numerous courses on Israeli identity, the social, cultural and urban history of Israel/Palestine, and post-Zionism, neo-Zionism and Jewish fundamentalism. In 2006-2007, he was chair of the Israel Studies Program at Ben-Gurion University. In 2008-2009, he was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2008, he has been affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and MISTI-Israel as a visiting associate professor at MIT’s Political Science Department. He is currenly a visiting professor at Boston University.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her forthcoming book, titled “From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine,” she will follow the trajectory of her great grandfather. Traveling with her ancestor from his nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon, Seikaly places the question of Palestine in the context of a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Washington, and has scholarly interests in nationalism and collective memory, language ideology and policy, and Jewish-Arab relations both in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and in the early years after Israeli statehood. Her first book, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine” (Yale University Press, 2015), was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She has published academic articles in The Journal of Social History, Jewish Social Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and The Jewish Quarterly Review, among other venues. She received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2011, and is the Benaroya Chair of the UW Israel Studies Program.
This event is cosponsored by the Middle East Center and the Department of History at the University of Washington.

2/8 EVENT | The Detention of Uyghur Muslims in China
2022-02-08 12:30 - 13:30 | WA
In this event, UW alum Darren Byler, Ph.D., will draw on his research, fieldwork, and first-hand experiences to explain the scope and impact of China’s detainment of Uyghur Muslims in forced labor camps, in conversation with UW Professor Emerita Sandra Silberstein.
About the speakers

Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His recent book, “Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City” (Duke University Press, 2021) is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia, and examines the impact of detention and surveillance on Uhgyur and Han male migrants. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Washington.
Sandra Silberstein is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Washington, where she researches rhetoric in times of national crisis and discourses around terrorism; linguistic constructions of gender, race, ethnicity; critical applied linguistics and second language studies.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Human Rights, the China Studies Program, and the East Asia Resource Center at the University of Washington.

2/24 TALK | "Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx" — Jonathan Israel
2022-02-24 12:00 - 13:30 | WA
In this online webinar, intellectual historian Jonathan Israel will discuss his recent book, “Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx” — part of the University of Washington Press’ Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies series — and the idea that revolutionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries were deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, particularly the works of Jewish thinkers like Baruch Spinoza.
The talk will be facilitated by Michael Rosenthal, Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto and UW Emeritus Professor of Philosophy.
Watch the webinar now:

About this talk

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, most intellectually driven, and most philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society, and their determination to change it, extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and others living in a rigid, hierarchical society first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness.
Drawing on his recent book, “Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights,” part of the University of Washington Press’s Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies series, leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel will show how the radical ideas in Marx’s early writings were influenced by this legacy.
Israel will also consider how writers of the “Radical Enlightenment” understood Jewish marginalization and ghetto-ization — and the forces of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained these structures — and how the quest for Jewish emancipation led “revolutionary” thinkers to formulate theories of social and legal reform, paving the way for later revolutionary actions that helped to change the world from the French Revolution onwards — though perhaps not in the ways these thinkers intended.
About the speakers

Jonathan Israel is professor emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. His many books include “European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750” and “Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750.” He delivered the 2017 Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, which focused on Spinoza as a revolutionary thinker and the idea of the “Radical Enlightenment” and the Jewish Emancipation.
Michael A. Rosenthal holds the Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy, with appointments in both the Department and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Prior to joining the department, he was professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Washington at Seattle. He teaches and publishes in the areas of early modern philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and Jewish philosophy. Michael’s current research focus is Spinoza’s political philosophy, both in relation to central issues in Spinoza studies and Spinoza’s engagement with the Jewish Philosophical Tradition, particularly Maimonides. Michael is also interested in the reception of Spinoza in subsequent Jewish philosophy including Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1996.

3/10 COSPONSORED EVENT | Negotiating Carceral Regimes - "All Things Being Equal": Mobile Extractions in a Carceral World
2022-03-10 16:30 - 18:00 | WA

3/11 COSPONSORED EVENT | Negotiating Carceral Regimes - Colloquium: "Interior Frontiers and the Entrails of Inequality"
2022-03-11 12:00 - 13:30 | WA

3/31 COSPONSORED EVENT | Negotiating Carceral Regimes: Why Is It So Hard to Shrink the Carceral State?
2022-03-31 16:30 - 18:00 | WA

4/10 PANEL | Perspectives on Cosmopolitan Istanbul in the Hit Netflix Series, “The Club”
2022-04-10 10:00 - 11:30 | WA
In this virtual panel, scholars Reşat Kasaba (University of Washington), Christine Philliou (UC Berkeley), and Aron Rodrigue (Stanford University) will discuss the historical context and contemporary significance of the hit Turkish Netflix series, “Kulüp” (“The Club”). A recorded interview with “Kulüp” writer Rana Denizer conducted by Melike Yücel-Koç (University of Washington) will also be screened at the event.
This event is supported by the Hazzan Isaac Azose Fund for Community Engagement in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington.
Watch the panel now:

View the interview with Rana Denizer, conducted by Melike Yücel-Koç

About this talk

Poster for “Kulüp” (“The Club”). (Source: IMDB)
Despite the fraught political climate in Turkey today, Neflix recently released an unprecedented and wildly popular hit series, “Kulüp” (“The Club”), that brings to life the once-cosmopolitan world of 1950s Istanbul.
The show features Turkey’s first mainstream depictions of Sephardic Jewish culture, Ladino language and song, and multidimensional Jewish characters that challenge common stereotypes on the screen in Turkey and the United States. “Kulüp” also tackles difficult questions not only about the position of Jews, but also other non-Muslim populations in Istanbul and Turkey more broadly — especially Greeks.
How does the show depict controversial historical moments, such as the Varlık Vergisi affair, a capital tax imposed by the Turkish state on non-Muslims in 1942, and the “Events of September 6-7,” riots in 1955 targeting Istanbul’s non-Muslims?
What social, political, and cultural factors help explain the emergence of such a poignant depiction of mid-century Istanbul in the 21st century?
These questions, and many more, will be addressed by the panel of experts.
A recorded interview in Turkish (with English subtitles) with “Kulüp” writer Rana Denizer conducted by Melike Yücel-Koç (University of Washington) will also be screened at the event.
About the panelists

Rana Denizer’s family story is the inspiration for “Kulüp.” She began sharing her story first with friends, then on her blog and Twitter under the pseudonym Ranini. She is a lead writer for “Kulüp.”

Reşat Kasaba (University of Washington), Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Professor in American Foreign Policy, is an expert in the history and politics of the Middle East and has taught undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington for over 30 years. Kasaba served as the director of the UW’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies for 10 years, completing his tenure in June 2020. He is currently researching history of U.S. foreign policy in Turkey, and the political consequences of rural-urban divide in modern Turkey.
Christine Philliou (University of California, Berkeley) is Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Programs in Modern Greek/Hellenic Studies and Ottoman/Turkish Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of two books: Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2021; Turkish edition İş Bankası Kültür Press, 2022) and Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2022). Philliou is currently working on a third book and developing a collaborative digital humanities project, the aim of which is a granular reconstruction and analysis of the Greek Orthodox communities of late Ottoman Istanbul/Constantinople (1821-1923) using a wide range of Ottoman and Greek sources.
Aron Rodrigue (Stanford University) is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program at Stanford University. He teaches courses in Modern Jewish history, the history and culture of Sephardic Jews, and the Ottoman Empire. His scholarship focuses on the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in modern times, and his writings are considered among the most influential in the field. Rodrigue has held fellowships at the American Academy of Jewish Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. He was awarded the honor of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2013.
About the moderators

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and is faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University and has also served as a Fulbright fellow to Greece. His first book, “Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece,” was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material and was named a finalist in Sephardic Culture. It also won the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studies awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association.
Melike Yücel-Koç is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses in elementary and intermediate Turkish, including Turkish Language and Culture; Turkish TV Series: ETHOS; Oral History: The Stories of Immigrants in the U.S.; and an honors course titled Immigrants from the Middle East in the U.S. She also has academic experience as a graduate teaching assistant at Portland State University, where she served as a Fulbright Scholar, and as a graduate research assistant at Seattle Pacific University. Since 2017, Yücel-Koç has been at work on a research project titled “Turkey in Seattle Oral History Project.”

Presented in partnership with the department of Cinema and Media Studies and the Middle East Center, as well as Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, the Seattle Sephardic Network, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, and the Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington.

4/12 TALK | The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew: How Language Shapes Identity (and Vice Versa)
2022-04-12 16:00 - 17:15 | WA
In this talk, linguist Ivy Sichel will discuss the rise of modern vernacular Hebrew in the 1950s and related ideas — how using particular language variety can influence its speakers, and how speakers make the language their own.
Watch the talk now:

About this talk

How did the modern vernacular variety of Hebrew — the informal, everyday version of the language — come to eclipse the prestigious prescriptive variety of Hebrew to become the standard? How does value accrue to particular varieties of a language?
In this talk, Ivy Sichel will analyze the social meanings associated with the new native vernacular of Modern Hebrew, taking a positive stance towards the new native vernacular, which is constructed via differentiation from its alternatives (formal or text-based Hebrew).
The new vernacular is reflexive, and it speaks for itself with the authority of experience, as opposed to the traditional authority of the text. A speaker of modern vernacular Hebrew necessarily, and often unknowingly, possesses a positive attitude towards it, and is an active agent in the propagation of a new collective (of speakers) and its values.
The talk will explore this type of subjectivity, and the ways in which speakers participate in the dissemination of a collective set of ideas about the modern vernacular.
The talk will also explore the consolidation and dissemination of these values by particular individuals, with a focus on Ma Nishma, a weekly column written in Modern Hebrew published in the 1950s.
Event image from the “World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang,” written by Netiva Ben-Yehuda and Dan Ben-Amotz and published in 1982. Via the Jewish Women’s Archive.
About the speaker

Ivy Sichel is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on syntactic theory. She is also interested in the sociolinguistics of the revival of Hebrew speech, and has written about women’s contributions to the revival project at the turn of the 20th century (with Miri Bar-Ziv Levi), and about the relationship between the revival and the establishment of the State of Israel (with Uri Mor).

4/22 SEMINAR | Jewish Writers from 20th-Century Ukraine: In Anticipation of the Revolution
2022-04-22 10:30 - 12:00 | WA

COSPONSORED EVENT | De Inga y Mandinga: A Diaspora Tale from Latin America
2022-04-23 14:00 - 15:15 | WA

5/6 SEMINAR | Jewish Writers from 20th-Century Ukraine: In the Midst of Pogrom Violence
2022-05-06 10:30 - 12:00 | WA

5/10 STROUM LECTURE | Does the United States Have a Jewish Question?
2022-05-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Kane Hall 220, 4069 Spokane Ln, Seattle, WA, 98195, US

5/12 STROUM LECTURE | Belonging in Question: Jews in the American Civic and Legal Imagination
2022-05-12 19:00 - 20:00 | Kane Hall 220, 4069 Spokane Ln, Seattle, WA, 98195, US

5/12 STUDENT EVENT| Post-Stroum Lecture Boba and Conversation
2022-05-12 20:15 - 21:00 | Private Location, 1400 NE Campus Parkway, Seattle, WA, 98102, United States

5/19 WORKSHOP | Nation-State and Citizenship: The Exclusion and Persecution of Greek Jews in Romania Under the National Legionary State
2022-05-19 15:30 - 17:00 | Mary Gates Hall, Room 211B
When someone leaves his or her country of citizenship, who is responsible for their protection: the country in which they now live, or the state to which their passport points?
Join Fulbright Scholar and UW Visiting Lecturer Nikos Tzafleris (Ph.D., University of Thessaly) to workshop his article-in-progress on how this question impacted Jews with Greek citizenship living in Romania in the twentieth century — a time of rising antisemitism and nationalism across Europe. UW Department of History professor James Felak (Newman Center Professor in Catholic Christianity) will serve as a respondent.
Open to graduate students and faculty. Click here to RSVP and to receive Nikos’ paper in advance of the talk. All participants are asked to read the paper prior to the workshop.

About the workshop

The stories of Jews with Greek citizenship living outside the boundaries of Greece are little known. The case of those who lived in Romania, in particular, illuminates Greece’s position towards its extraterritorial citizens.
For decades, Greek Jews of Romania — recognized as Greek citizens — were considered “desirable” to the Greek state as long as they lived in Romania. Yet when it became evident that rising antisemitism in the region would force many of those Jews to sooner or later find refuge in Greece, they were perceived as an imminent danger to the Greek state, and to the integrity of its Greek Christian identity.
This talk follows the stories and vicissitudes of those Greek Jews living in Romania during the turbulent years of 1866-1940, when the rights of Romanian Jews were in constant flux and when the Iron Guard came to power, resulting in a dramatic uptick in antisemitism in the region. This talk will also consider the complex dynamics of Greek diplomats, who could see the danger that Jews with Greek citizenship faced from Romanian antisemitism and impending Nazism, but who also felt compelled to pursue a nationalist agenda.

About the speakers
Nikos Tzafleris is a Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Washington hosted by the Department of History and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. His Fulbright project, “The Relief Program of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) in Greece after WWII,” investigates how the AJDC established a relief network to help Greek Jews in the immediate postwar years. He received his PhD from the University of Thessaly.

Read Nikos’ full faculty profile >

James Felak is Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of History and the Newman Center Professor in Catholic Christianity. He teaches courses on the history of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to World War I, and the history of the region from 1918 to the present. He also teaches history of Modern Europe since 1648 and the History of Christianity, as well as seminars on topics such as Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust; the Nazi-Soviet occupation of East Central Europe; and Christians in Nazi Germany. Read Prof. Felak’s full faculty profile >
