10/29 | Book Launch - Gilah Kletenik's "Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality"
2025-10-29 18:30 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.
