6/25 LECTURE | Not a Good Time for Hebrew? Novelist Maya Arad & "The Hebrew Teacher"
2024-06-25 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | RSVP for location
Join us for a lively discussion with best-selling Hebrew-language author and Stanford University faculty member Maya Arad.
Often called the “foremost Hebrew writer outside Israel,” Arad will discuss her latest book, “The Hebrew Teacher,” which presents three remarkable novellas focusing on Israeli American life, with Professor Naomi Sokoloff.
This event will be held in person on the UW main campus. Please register for more details:
Register Now >

About the speaker

Maya Arad is the author of eleven books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California, where she is currently writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

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 Elizabeth Dy at (206) 543-0138 or jewishst@uw.edu at least 10 days before the event.

10/15 PANEL | The Scholarly Legacy of Hayim Katsman
2024-10-15 10:00 - 11:30 | UW Campus, 1410 NE Campus Parkway, Seattle, WA, 98195
Please join us on Tuesday, October 15, 2024, to commemorate the life of Hayim Katsman, Ph.D. 2021 and 2018-2019 Stroum Center graduate fellow.
This memorial event will feature a panel led by UW Professor Emeritus Joel Migdal, with remarks from others who knew Katsman’s scholarly works well.
Open to the public, this event will take place as a Zoom webinar, with an in-person viewing option on the University of Washington campus.
Register Now >
About the event

In this event, Joel Migdal, UW Professor Emeritus of International Studies, along with a panel of other distinguished scholars, will discuss the scope and impact of Hayim Katsman’s academic works, which focused on the interrelationship between religion and politics in the Middle East, with a focus on the Religious Zionist movement.
Panelists
Joel Migdal, Professor Emeritus, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Yoav Duman, Professor, Green River College
Liora Halperin, Professor, History, University of Washington
Francis Abugbilla, Lecturer, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Jim Wellman, Professor of Comparative History, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Hannah Wacholder Katsman, Hayim’s mother
Register for the event >
Event will be offered as a Zoom webinar with in-person viewing option. For in-person, please register to receive the location information in advance of the event.
The in-person event will be followed by a kosher reception.
About Dr. Katsman

Hayim Katsman graduated in June 2021 from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington with a Ph.D. in international Studies. His doctoral focus was in religions, cultures, and civilization, and his research explored the interrelations between religion and politics in the Middle East, with a focus on the Religious Zionist movement in Israel. He was murdered at his home on Kibbutz Holit on October 7, 2023.
Photo of Hayim Katsman by Eliyahu Hershkovitz.

10/23 COSPONSORED TALK | Rabbis in Zoroastrian Fire Temples: New Histories of Babylonian Jews
2024-10-23 15:30 - 17:00 | UW Campus, 1410 NE Campus Parkway, Seattle, WA, 98195

10/29 COSPONSORED TALK | Were the Ancient Greeks Responsible for Antisemitism?
2024-10-29 16:30 - 18:00 | UW Campus, 1410 NE Campus Parkway, Seattle, WA, 98195

12/8 LADINO DAY | "The Familiar" with Author Leigh Bardugo
2024-12-08 10:00 - 11:30 | Kane Hall 210, 4069 Spokane Ln NE, Seattle, WA, 98105
In Ladino Day 2024, acclaimed fantasy author Leigh Bardugo (“Shadow and Bone”) discusses her new novel, “The Familiar,” which features a Sephardic Jewish heroine in 16th-century Spain who draws magic and power from her family’s secret language, Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish.

About the event

In this event, author Leigh Bardugo discusses her new novel, “The Familiar,” and its use of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) with UW faculty member Canan Bolel, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.
In the novel, Bardugo follows the struggles of a “converso” heroine — from a family forced to convert to Christianity and keep its Jewish heritage secret in 16th-century Spain — who draws magic from her family’s secret language, Ladino, and the refranes (sayings) that preserve Sephardic Jewish wit and wisdom across time.
In the conversation, Bardguo discusses what drew her to this story and setting, how she wove Ladino into her narrative, the family history that inspired her, and the collaboration with Bolel that led to the selection of refranes included in the book.
About Leigh Bardugo & Canan Bolel

Leigh Bardugo is the New York Times bestselling author of “The Familiar” and “Ninth House,” and is the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series) which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.

Canan Bolel is a historian of the Ottoman Empire’s Jewish communities and is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her first book project, “Constructions of Jewish Modernity and Marginality in Izmir, 1860–1907,” explores how Sephardic Jews constituted their identities in imperial and communal settings, focusing on marginalized Jews — the diseased, criminals, and converts to Christianity. She teaches courses on Ladino every year at the UW, and consulted on the use of Ladino in “The Familiar.”

Ladino Day 2024 is supported by the Lucie Benveniste Kavesh Endowed Fund for Sephardic Studies. This event is cosponsored by the Departments of History, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Spanish & Portuguese Studies and the Arts & Sciences Humanities Division at the University of Washington, as well as the American Ladino League, Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, the Seattle Sephardic Network and the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation.

2/5 | Bad Jews: Bad for the Jews? Sex, Shame and Moral Policing in Argentine Jewish History with Mir Yarfitz
2025-02-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Thomson Hall 101, 2023 King Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
How did twentieth century Argentine Jewish organizations view sexual morality? And how did these views impact the broader Jewish community? Hear guest lecturer Mir Yarfitz discuss this and more.
Register Now >
About the event

Fearful not only of shame in front of non-Jews, but violent reprisals, Jewish leaders and institutions have often tried to keep dirty laundry indoors. In early twentieth century Argentina, as the Jewish population became one of the largest in the world, the Zwi Migdal, a mutual aid and burial society of several hundred Ashkenazi Jews, became infamous for moving thousands of Jewish sex workers across the Atlantic to brothels in South America. “Respectable” Jews battled this organization for decades, and in later years continued public conflicts over other aspects of sexual morality, raising debates about protecting Jews from antisemitism and from one another.
Register for the event >
This event is co-sponsored by UW’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program
About the speaker

Mir Yarfitz has lived in each of the four corners of the US as well as South and Central America. His enthusiasm for Latin America grew from his college study abroad experience in Nicaragua, a Fulbright in Argentina, and work with migrant farmworker labor unions in Washington, Oregon, and Georgia. His teaching and research interests include Latin American cultural production, social movements, dictatorships and resistance, racial hierarchies, migration, gender, sexuality, masculinity, and transgender studies. His current research explores what might fruitfully be framed as trans lives in Argentina from 1900 to 1945, as part of the larger development of archivally-based trans studies. His 2019 Rutgers University Press book “Impure Migrations: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina”, historicizes immigrant Ashkenazi Jews in organized prostitution in Buenos Aires between the 1890s and 1930s and in broader transnational flows of sex workers and moral opposition. In addition to publishing in the fields of Latin American trans studies, sex work history, and Jewish studies, he has written collaboratively with a team of Wake Forest Librarians about their experiences in cooperative pedagogy and ungrading, including creating a zine together about the books (and zines) their students have written. He is a 2023 Kulynych Family Omicron Delta Kappa Award winner, selected by students for bridging “the gap between the classroom and student life.”

2/6 | Letters from Mothers in the Thessaloniki Ghetto to their Sons: Researching the Holocaust through eye-witness accounts and intimate correspondence
2025-02-06 16:30 - 18:30 | Communications 120, UW Campus, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States

2/19 | Translating Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Popular Jewish Press with Naomi Seidman
2025-02-19 16:30 - 18:00 | Communications 120, UW Campus, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Guest lecturer Naomi Seidman will take us inside “the Freud craze” to explore the impact Freud’s work had on Eastern European Jews.
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About the event
The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus reportedly quipped, “Psychoanalysis is the disease of assimilated Jews; Eastern European Jews make do with diabetes.” And yet, Eastern European Jews were fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis, flocking to lectures on the subject and following Freud’s life and career with curiosity and enthusiasm. This lecture will trace “the Freud craze” in the burgeoning Hebrew and Yiddish press of the interwar period, when readers eagerly sought information about “the most famous Jew in the world,” and journalists and others were compelled to actively translate psychoanalytic terminology from German into Jewish languages.
Register for the event >
Photo credit: Nancy Rosenblum/Frisco Graphics

About the speaker
Naomi Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, and a National Jewish Book Award in 2019. Her writings include the 2006 Faithful Renderings: Jewish—Christian Difference and the Politics of Difference, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (2016) and the 2019 Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition. Her podcast, “Heretic in the House,” was released in 2022. Translating the Jewish Freud (2024) is her fifth book.

This event is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities Translation Studies Hub

Daytime panels: 50 years of impact on campus and beyond
2025-03-11 09:30 - 12:45 | 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, UW Campus, 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, UW Campus, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of SCJS faculty member and history professor 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 Incarceration traces 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, Department of History at the 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.
This event is being co-sponsored by UW’s Department of History.

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, short-listed for the 2025 National Jewish Book Awards.
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.
This event is co-sponsored by UW’s Slavic Languages and Literatures. Book sales, by Third Place Books, and book signing will follow the event.
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.

Public Lecture: 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‘ award-winning 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).
This event is co-sponsored by UW’s Hellenic Studies Program.

Book Launch - Sasha Senderovich's "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union"
2026-03-10 18:30 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 225, UW Campus, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in celebrating a new book edited and translated by SCJS faculty member Sasha Senderovich, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.
Senderovich will be joined by Stroum Center faculty and iSchool professor Ben Lee to discuss how these works, and the act of translating them, open new ways of thinking about Holocaust literature, Soviet Jewish history, and the long, uneven afterlives of mass violence. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase from Elliott Bay Book Company.
Registration required: Register here.
The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust, translated by Senderovich and Harriet Murav, recovers a range of compelling voices that had been scarcely known or translated, with particular emphasis on the work of women writers. Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus—some writing in Yiddish and others in Russian—tell stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust on Soviet territory, depicting memory, conflict, love, and loss. Writers in this collection offer especially powerful perspectives on survival in the aftermath of genocide. These are not stories only about how people died, but about how they continued to live and make meaning.
Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, United States. With Harriet Murav, he translated David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel (2017) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (2026). He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). He has also written cultural criticism for a number of outlets, including Jewish Currents, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Republic.
This event is co-sponsored by UW’s Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Public Lecture - Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism
2026-04-22 16:30 - 18:00 | Communications 120, UW Campus, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
Join us for a talk on Elizabeth E. Imber’s award-winning new book: Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism
Registration Required: Register here
Following the British takeover of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British world found themselves at the center of global political debate. This talk explores the complex relationship among British Imperial policy, Zionism, and emerging movements of national self-determination from 1917 to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In doing so, it shows how the trajectory of British rule became central to Zionist and broader Jewish political thought during a period marked by profound urgency and uncertainty.
Elizabeth E. Imber is Associate Professor of History and the Michael and Lisa Leffell Chair in Modern Jewish History at Clark University. Her work examines the cultural and political dimensions and intersections of Jewish history and European imperial history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism was published by Stanford University Press in 2025 winning that year’s National Jewish Book Awards – JDC-Herbert Katzki Award (Writing Based on Archival Material).

Stroum Lectures 2026 with Rafael Neis
2026-05-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Kane Hall 225, UW Campus
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies is proud to announce our 2026 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture series, featuring Professor Rafael Neis from the University of Michigan.
Both events are free and open to all. Please register here: Registration Required
Lecture 1: Have ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ Always Existed? What the Talmud Can Tell Us
May 12, 7:00-9:00pm, Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room 225
We often assume that the categories “man” and “woman” are stable and self-evident. Indeed, ideas about the timelessness of gender may also underpin the refrain that “trans and nonbinary people have always existed.” This framing asks us to support the right of contemporary gender-diverse people to exist and flourish, in part, by recognizing that they, too, have an ancient lineage. In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis presents an altogether different approach to gender. Through a journey into Talmudic texts composed in late ancient Iraq, they invite us to set aside what we think we already know about gender categories. Doing so, Professor Neis argues, will illuminate how the ancient rabbis sought to invent, classify, and make meaning of the diverse plurality of human and other beings.
Lecture 2: Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images – Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art
May 14, 4:00-5:30pm, HUB, 214
Walk through the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, and you would have been surrounded by images of all kinds—human figures, animals, hybrids, and creatures that blur the line between the familiar and the fantastic. These images appeared everywhere: in streets and homes, bathhouses and synagogues, public buildings and sacred spaces. Art historians have traditionally taken upon themselves the role of assigning gender or species designations to such images in ways that replicate modern gender and sexuality concepts (especially of “male” and “female” or “masculine” and “feminine”). In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis explores a handful of examples from late ancient Jewish art in the Roman Galilee and Sasanian Iraq. Instead of sorting these images into boxes like “human,” “animal,” or “hybrid,” or even “male,” “female,” and “queer,” they invite us to see the complex ways in which ancient artists and communities imagined species, divinity, and gender. The result is an account of ancient Jewish visual culture that offers a more expansive representation of kinship, difference, and the sacred.

About the Speaker
Rafael Neis is a scholar and artist. Neis is the Jean and Samuel Frankel Professor of Rabbinic Literature and is appointed in the Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. As Faculty Director of Arts Learning at Michigan’s Arts initiative, Neis supports campus-wide art-integrated pedagogy. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species, was published in 2023 by University of California Press. Their artwork has been featured in shows and in many publications.
The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies is a nationally-renowned series of public lectures, which has brought Jewish studies luminaries from around the globe to the University of Washington for more than fifty years. Made possible through the support of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures Endowment, this annual series is a cornerstone program of UW’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and has led to impactful conversations, groundbreaking scholarship, and award-winning publications. You may view the full Stroum Lectures archive here and review corresponding books published by University of Washington Press here.

Image: 4th-7th c. incantation bowl written in Aramaic from Iraq. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons.

Public Lecture - The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders
2026-05-19 16:30 - 18:00 | HUB 145, UW Campus, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Join us in welcoming visiting author and scholar Jacob Daniels, discussing his new book, The Jews of Edirne: The End of the Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders.
Free and open to all; registration required here.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne Province—among the most religiously diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, the city had become a Turkish border town, and the province had lost much of its non-Muslim population. With this book, Jacob Daniels explores how one of the world’s largest Sephardi communities dealt with the encroachment of modern borders.
Jacob Daniels is Assistant Professor of Instruction and Assistant Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University in 2022.
Sponsored by the Sephardic Studies Program, the Middle East Center, and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.
