UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

Daytime panels: 50 years of impact on campus and beyond
2025-03-11 09:30 - 12:45 (America/Los_Angeles) | Petersen Room, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
We invite you to join past and present SCJS faculty and students as we mark fostering five decades of meaningful and insightful discussions on diverse Jewish experiences.
We have a full day of events planned, starting with a series of daytime panels highlighting SCJS’s key accomplishments.

Morning panels: “50 years of impact on campus and beyond”
9:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m, Petersen Room, Allen Library

9:30-10:15 – Panel 1: Engaging the Public: The Legacy of the Stroum Lectures

Moderator: Sasha Senderovich, University of Washington
Anita Norich, University of Michigan
Ruth Behar, University of Michigan

10:15-11:00 – Panel 2: Launching the Next Generation of Scholars with the Cole and Graduate Fellowships

Moderator: Sarah Zaides Rosen, University of Washington
Michael Alexander, University of California, Riverside
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Stanford University
Benjamin Lee, University of Washington

11:00-11:15 – Break — Coffee/Snack

11:15-12:00 – Panel 3: Creating an Institutional Mark on UW’s Campus: Honoring our Faculty Trailblazers

Moderator: Noam Pianko, University of Washington
Paul Burstein, University of Washington (emeritus)
Hillel Kieval, Washington University (emeritus)
Joel Migdal, University of Washington (emeritus)
Sarah Stein, University of California, Los Angeles

12:00-12:45 – Panel 4: Shaping the Future of Sephardic Studies: A Decade of Scholarship, Global Engagement and Cultural Preservation

Moderator: Devin Naar, University of Washington
Canan Bolel, University of Washington
Jonathan Decter, Brandeis University
Makena Mezistrano, Stanford University
Hannah Pressman, Jewish Language Project, Hebrew Union College

RSVP HERE >

Today's campus conflicts and the future of Jewish Studies
2025-03-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 210, 4069 Spokane Ln NE, Seattle, WA, 98105

STROUM LECTURES 2025 | Jewish Women in Antiquity
2025-05-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Thomson Hall 101, 2023 King Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies is proud to announce our 2025 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture series, featuring Bernadette Brooten from Brandeis University.

Stroum Lectures 2025 | Jewish Women in Antiquity: Untold Stories of Leadership and Desire
Join us as 2025 Stroum Lecturer, Bernadette Brooten, explores new scholarship on taboo topics in Judaism and Christianity in the ancient world. While Judaism and Christianity today often emphasize conservative values, the evidence suggests that ancient Jews were far more comfortable with women in leadership roles than many modern interpretations would acknowledge. This series provides an opportunity to grapple anew with how the Judeo-Christian tradition has dramatically changed over the centuries.
Lecture 1: Gender and Leadership in Ancient Synagogues
Tuesday, May 6, 7 – 8:30 p.m. | UW Campus, Thomson Hall 101
Could it be that some women held official positions in ancient Mediterranean synagogues? And where did women, men, and non-binary persons sit in these synagogues? Visiting scholar Brooten discusses ancient burial and other inscriptions and what we can know about gendered and non-gendered experiences.
View a recording of this event:

Lecture 2: Jewish and Christian Women Desiring Women in the Early Roman Empire
Thursday, May 8, 4 – 5:30 p.m. | Zoom webinar
The Hebrew Bible does not prohibit or condemn sexual relations between women, the New Testament does. Brooten will discuss why, as well as compare ancient Jewish and Christian responses. Although not present in Jewish sources, the names of women who desired other women appear in texts from an ancient Egyptian monastery. Jewish and Christian leaders overlap in condemning marriages between women, raising the question of what they meant.
View a recording of this event:

About the speaker

Bernadette J. Brooten, Ph.D., is the Kraft – Hiatt Professor Emerita at Brandeis University. She is also Director for the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project (https://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/). She researches enslaved and slaveholding women in early Christianity, female homoerotic desire, and texts on female-female marriage in the Roman world. Publications include: Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (1982; 2020); Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (1996; 2020); and, with Jacqueline L. Hazelton, editor: Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (2010). Fellowships include: MacArthur, Fulbright, Harvard Law School, and Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies are an annual series of talks given by luminaries in the field of Jewish Studies, hosted by Stroum Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. For more than thirty years, through the generosity of Samuel and Althea Stroum, Jewish Studies has been able to bolster public scholarship around Judaism. View highlights from the past thirty years, learn more about the history of the lectures, or view the full archive.

AI and the Future of Holocaust Research & Memory: A Public Symposium
2025-05-20 09:00 - 17:00 | WA

10/29 | Book Launch - Gilah Kletenik's "Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality"
2025-10-29 18:30 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 225, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of faculty member and Hazel D. Cole Fellow Gilah Kletenik’s new book, “Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality.”
In it, Kletenik takes a dazzlingly fresh reading of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” thinking with Spinoza to present an alternative to dominant “Western” theories about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and the status of humans.
Kletenik will be joined by Stroum Center Director Noam Pianko to discuss the book, share how Jewish philosophy can be applied in this moment, and answer questions. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase.
Register to attend >
“It is rare to find a thorough and compelling reading of a great philosophical classic, Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ that upends some of the central presumptions about sovereignty that have populated standard readings for many years. Kletenik shows that sovereign rule functions neither as a political form nor as a model of conceptual mastery in that work. The implications of this thesis include the critique of anthropocentrism, and the socially idealized human form upon which it depends. The book offers a way to expose and criticize social inequalities in light of a political theology that prompts us all to question what we thought we know about what is and what ought to be.”
—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
About the speaker
Gilah Kletenik is Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

Ladino Day 2025 | Sephardic Homelands: Spanish and Portuguese Citizenship and the Question of Belonging Today
2025-11-16 10:00 - 11:00 | Kane Hall 210, 4069 Spokane Ln NE, Seattle, WA, 98105
This year’s Ladino Day program, “Sephardic Homelands: Spanish and Portuguese Citizenship and the Question of Belonging Today,” critically examines the significance of the decision exactly ten years ago, in 2015, of the Spanish and Portuguese governments to offer citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled five centuries ago.
The discussion will situate Spain and Portugal’s offers within broader debates about the homelands that Sephardic Jews have claimed as their own over the generations, while also recognizing that millions of people in the world remain stateless today.
Register to attend >
A kosher reception will follow the program.
About the program
Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and program Chair, Devin E. Naar, will host Professor Emerita Rina Benmayor, California State University Monterey Bay, and Professor Dalia Kandiyoti, City University of New York (CUNY), College of Staten Island, in a conversation to discuss their research on this topic as featured in their edited volume, “Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants,” appearing in paperback this autumn.
The event will also feature readings by Los Muestros Ladineros, Seattle’s Ladino-language group, of Ladino poems about the multiple “patrias” claimed by Sephardic Jews.
View the program livestream
* This event will be livestreamed! *
Starting at 10am Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, November 16, we invite you to view the livestream below on this page, or on our YouTube channel.

About the speakers
Rina Benmayor is Professor Emerita in the School of Humanities and Communication at California State University Monterey Bay, where she taught oral history, literature, digital storytelling, and Latinx studies. She has authored books and articles on these subjects as well as on Sephardic folklore, identity and migration, cultural citizenship, testimonial writing and storytelling. She authored “Romances judeo-españoles de Oriente” (1979), an original field collection and study of Sephardic romansas collected in Los Angeles and Seattle (1972-73). The recordings are archived at the University of Washington Sephardic Studies Digital Collection. In 2017, she conducted with Dalia Kandiyoti an extensive oral history project on the Spanish and Portuguese citizenship laws for Sephardi descendants, and coedited “Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal” (Berghahn Books 2023). The interviews gathered for this study are being archived at the University of Washington as well. She is currently coediting, with Rachel Amado Bortnick and Liliana Benveniste, a Ladino translation of “Las Romansas de la Ratona Savia,” a collection of Spanish ballads for children written by Paloma Díaz Mas. She has also been writing a family memoir about her Greek Sephardic family.
Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), College of Staten Island. Her Ph.D. is in Comparative Literature from New York University. She is the author of “The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture” (Stanford UP, 2020) and “Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures” (Dartmouth College/UP of New England, 2009), and of peer-reviewed articles on migration in contemporary literature and on Sephardic and Latin American diasporas and experiences. She has also co-edited, with Rina Benmayor, “Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal” (Berghahn, 2023). Her contribution to this volume received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Rina Benmayor, she has conducted extensive oral histories with Sephardic applicants for Spanish or Portuguese nationality. These oral histories are being archived at the University of Washington.
Ladino Day 2025 is generously supported by the Lucie Benveniste Kavesh Endowed Fund for Sephardic Studies and The Sephardic Foundation on Aging.
The event is cosponsored by the Departments of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures and Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Washington, as well as by the Sephardic Brotherhood of America.

Book Launch: Mark Letteney – Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
2026-01-22 18:30 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 225, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of faculty member Mark Letteney’s new book: Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, co-authored by Matthew D. C. Larsen.
Letteney will be joined by Stroum Center faculty and history professor Joel Walker and classics professor Sarah Levin-Richardson to discuss the book, unpack what role prisons played in ancient societies and how this history continues today, and answer questions. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase.
Registration required: register here.
Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarcerationtraces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.

What’s at stake in this study is our picture of history itself, and of how incommensurable one period truly is with another. The odd effect of Larsen and Letteney’s study is to make the continuities more vivid to us than the breaks. Suffering and cruelty, after all, are constants—remarkably consistent in their distribution throughout time.
Even against that darker kind of universalism, however, some light manages to break through. What lingers with us after reading this book is not so much the sense of an abstract argument won or lost as a helpless awareness of the endless, needless suffering of humanity. The idea of a common humanity, in this very stakesy view, is not an invention that separates us from the ancients but an inheritance that connects us to them. It’s what makes the dialogue of the dead a conversation among the living. – Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Mark Letteney, University of Washington, is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. He holds the Carol Thomas Endowed Professorship in Ancient History, and is also a faculty member of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Comparative Religion Program.

Public Lecture: Umbrella Sky – Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature
2026-01-28 16:30 - 18:00 | HUB 145, UW Campus, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Join us for a talk on Miriam Udel’s new book: Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature.
Registration required. Register here.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is, of course, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. Investigated as an archive, the stories, poems, and plays written for children during the early twentieth century furnish a novel record of the movements—geographic and ideological—that made Ashkenazi Jewry fully modern.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Udel’s translation of Chaver Paver’s 1935 story collection Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup will appear in 2026 with SUNY Press. Last October, Princeton published her critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature. Her research looks to children’s literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology. She is working on a new project with the working title Reading Together for Democracy.

Book Talk: Seeing Like a Merchant – Jews and Greeks from Ottoman to Greek Rule
2026-02-26 16:30 - 18:00 | HUB 145, UW Campus, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Join us for a talk on Paris Papamichos Chronakis’ book: The Business of Transition – Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule.
Registration Required: Register here.
How did the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigate the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century? In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Salonica’s merchants were present in their own—and their city’s—remaking.
Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway University of London. His work explores the entangled histories and divided memories of Jews and Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean from the late Ottoman Empire to the Holocaust. In recent years, his research and publications have expanded to Salonica in World War One, Greek interwar Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Holocaust of Sephardi Jewry, and digital Holocaust Studies. His first book, The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024 winning that year’s National Jewish Book Awards – JDC-Herbert Katzki Award (Writing Based on Archival Material).
