UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

1/12 COSPONSORED TALK | The Power of Personal Stories: UW Students Grapple with Stories of Survival and Loss
2021-01-12 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

12/8 TALK | Holocaust Lecture Series Concluding Roundtable
2020-12-08 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

12/6 | Ladino Day 2020 — Revolutionizing Ladino: From the Printing Press to the Smartphone
2020-12-06 10:00 - 11:30 | Zoom
The 8th annual Ladino Day at the University of Washington will explore the intersection of Ladino and technology over the last century, and how revolutions in print and on the web have impacted the language over time.
We’ll begin with a multimedia talk by Devin E. Naar, Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies, on the history of the Ladino press in the Ottoman Empire and the United States. Naar will then host virtual conversations with Rachel Amado Bortnick, founder of Ladinokomunita, and Carlos Yebra López, Ph.D., creator of the Ladino module on uTalk, a language learning app.
The program will include a demo of uTalk Ladino led by Yebra López. Throughout the virtual event, audience members can submit questions to be answered by all speakers during a Q&A session at the end of the program.
Please note your time zone if you are tuning in outside of Seattle:
Ladino Day will begin at 10 a.m. PST / 1 p.m. EST / 8 p.m. Israel
Register Now
About the speakers
Rachel Amado Bortnick was born and raised in Izmir, Turkey, and came to the United States in 1958 on a scholarship to Lindenwood College (now University) in St. Charles, Missouri, from which she earned a B.A. in Chemistry. She and American-born architect Bernard Bortnick went back to Izmir to get married and subsequently lived in Holland, in Israel, and several cities in the United States before settling in Dallas, Texas in 1988. Rachel is now retired after teaching ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) for 35 years. Rachel has always been active in the preservation and promotion of Judeo-Spanish language and culture. In the San Francisco Bay area she founded and led the Ladino-speaking club Los Amigos Sefaradis, and was featured in the documentary film, “Trees Cry for Rain: a Sephardic Journey.” In 1999 she founded Ladinokomunita, the Ladino correspondence group on the Internet, which now has nearly 1,500 members worldwide.

Carlos Yebra López is a Lecturer in Spanish at New York University, and a Research Assistant in Judeo-Spanish at the University of Birmingham, UK. Since 2017, he is the CEO of Ladino 21, a community-based company devoted to the online documentation, preservation and promotion of Ladino in the 21st century. In 2019 he helped create, launch and promote the first-ever Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) course on any online language-learning platform through a partnership with the uTalk app. This course allows people across the globe to learn Ladino from over 150 different languages.

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. Dr. Naar 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.
Supported by the Lucie Benveniste Kavesh Endowed Fund for Sephardic Studies.
Cosponsored by the departments of Linguistics and Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, the Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, the Seattle Sephardic Network, and the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America.

12/1 TALK | Genocide in Myanmar: The Case Before the International Court of Justice
2020-12-01 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

11/24 TALK | In the Bloodlands: History and Memory of the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R.
2020-11-24 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

11/19 BENAROYA LECTURE | Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins
2020-11-19 16:00 - 17:15
Sarah Willen of the University of Connecticut will give the 2020 Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Lecture in Israel Studies on the topic of global migration to Israel and the Middle East.
This event will take place virtually on Zoom.
Register Now
About the talk
In this talk, sociocultural anthropologist Sarah Willen will reflect on nearly two decades of ethnographic engagement with global migrants who arrived in Israel from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork in homes and in churches, medical offices, advocacy organizations, and public spaces, Willen’s talk will explore how global migrants in Tel Aviv struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusions and vulnerabilities they endure. Her work will challenge us to reconsider our understandings of global migration, human rights, Israel and the Middle East— and even dignity itself.
RSVP for this virtual talk >
About the speaker
Sarah S. Willen, Ph.D., M.P.H. is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and Director of the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the university’s Human Rights Institute. A former NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, she holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.P.H. in Global Health, both from Emory University.
Her first book, “Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel Margins” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), was awarded both the 2019 Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies and the 2020 Edie Turner First-Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.
Willen has edited or co-edited three books and five special journal collections and authored over 35 articles and book chapters on issues of migration and health, health and human rights, social justice mobilization, medical education, and other topics.
Willen is co-founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project, a combined journaling platform and research study about the lived impact of COVID-19, and Principal Investigator of ARCHES | the AmeRicans’ Conceptions of Health Equity Study, an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods study of how people in the United States think about health, fairness, and social interconnectedness (“health-related deservingness”), funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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, the Department of Law, Societies, & Justice, and the Middle East Center and African Studies Program at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

11/18 DISCUSSION | "Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making"
2020-11-18 16:00 - 17:00

11/17 TALK | From the Ottoman Empire to Auschwitz and Beyond: Is the Holocaust a “European” Event?
2020-11-17 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom

STUDENT EVENT | Teaching computers to read Ladino, a heritage language of Sephardic Jews
2020-11-12 15:00 - 16:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
How do you teach a computer to read an endangered language — and a language that many people don’t even know exists? While machine learning technology has enabled us to read and research texts online in many languages, there’s one language that our computers and smartphones have yet to learn: Ladino, a heritage language of Sephardic Jews.
Join Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, a third year PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering and the Stroum Center’s Richard Willner Memorial graduate fellow, who will speak about his Library of Congress Innovator in Residence project, Newspaper Navigator, and his ongoing work with Professor Devin Naar studying Ladino newspapers using machine learning and computer vision.
Great for students of Ladino, Sephardic studies, information science and management, digital humanities, computer science & engineering, history, Spanish, communications, and any fan of the UW libraries.
For undergraduates and graduate students only.
RSVP for Zoom link.

11/10 TALK | “A Reply to Screamers”: How Americans Responded to the Holocaust
2020-11-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom

11/3 TALK | Jewish Dogs and the Nazi Beast: Animal Studies and Holocaust Literature
2020-11-03 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

10/27 TALK | Ideologies of Racial Superiority and Purity: Why Did Germany and Japan Engage in Such Extreme Mass Murder During World War II?
2020-10-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

10/25 CONFERENCE | Jewish Romance in the Middle Ages: Literature, Piety, and Cultural Translation
2020-10-25 08:00 - 11:00

10/20 TALK | Racism, Anti-Semitism, and the Lines of Solidarity
2020-10-20 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

10/13 KEYNOTE | The Difficulty of Confronting the Holocaust — Mass Murder in Jedwabne, Poland
2020-10-13 19:00 - 20:30 | Zoom

10/6 TALK | The History of Jewish Difference and Anti-Judaism as Ideology
2020-10-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom

Insights from a Half-Century of Ladino Studies: David M. Bunis in Conversation with Devin E. Naar
2020-08-09 10:00 - 11:00
Join us for an online conversation between Professor David Bunis, internationally renowned expert on the Ladino language and chair of Ladino Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Devin E. Naar, Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and chair of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington.
About this event
As a world-renowned authority on Ladino (also known as Judezmo) at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor David Bunis has dedicated his career to documenting and analyzing Ladino, and inspiring generations of students to take an interest in this endangered Sephardic language.
What led Professor Bunis, originally from New York City and interested in Yiddish, to delve into the realm of Ladino? What people, places, and experiences most shaped his scholarly trajectory? What major insights has Professor Bunis gleaned along the way? And what does the future hold for Ladino?
Register for this event
*NOTE: This event is an online webinar. Please register below to receive a link to attend. The link will be e-mailed to you several days in advance of the event, and again several hours before the event begins.*

About the speaker
David Bunis is the chair of Ladino Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting professor at the University of Washington in 2013-2014. He is the world’s leading authority in the field of Ladino linguistics and one of most notable instructors of the language in the world. Professor Bunis received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Columbia University and has published extensively on Ladino, including in the fields of sociocultural linguistics, language and politics, and translation studies, including the translations of important Ladino texts from the 16th to 20th centuries. He has also authored a highly regarded Ladino language textbook and is an expert in soletreo, the traditional Sephardic Hebrew cursive script.

Seattle Jewish Film Festival Sephardic Spotlight | The Final Hour
2020-06-17 19:00 - 2020-06-19 19:00 | WA, United States
Join the Seattle Jewish Film Festival for this year’s Sephardic Spotlight film, the 2019 documentary “The Final Hour,” directed by Ҫağlar Malli. The film will stream online from June 17 through June 19, 2020 as part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival’s 2020 online programming.
About the film: Deniz Bensusan is a young Sephardic woman who has just come to the realization that her ancestral language, Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish), is on the verge of extinction. Alarmed by the imminent demise of her heritage, she embarks on a journey of discovery in an attempt to uncover the roots of her Sephardic culture, language, and traditions. She voyages across Europe through Turkey, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Poland to visit sites where her relatives once lived and thrived.
Join producer Cem Kitapci, subject Deniz Bensusan, and UW Sephardic Studies Chair and Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies Devin Naar for a Zoom discussion of the film on June 21 at 1:00 p.m.
About Cem Kitapci: Cem Kitapci has been in film production for ten years and is the cofounder of Case Productions UK Ltd. He coproduced “The Final Hour” with Selim Kemahli.
Buy tickets and learn more on the Seattle Jewish Film Festival website.

6/5 COLLOQUIUM | Tracing Unruly Edges: Jewish Embodiment from Babylonia to the Mediterranean
2020-06-05 11:30 - 13:00 | Zoom

VIDEO | The History of a Page: Reflecting on the Talmud as a Physical Book (and What I've Learned Since My Stroum Lecture 23 Years Ago)
2020-06-04 16:00 - 17:00
Dr. David Stern of Harvard University will discuss what he’s learned about the Talmud — a carefully curated collection of thousands of years’ worth of rabbinic commentaries on Jewish law and the Jewish Bible — and its shifting form over time, based on research related to his recently published book, “The Jewish Bible: A Material History,” part of the University of Washington Press’s Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies series.
This talk is available online:

A page from the Talmud, with commentary and notes surrounding central text. Example from YUTorah Online, a project of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future.
About the talk
The layout of the Talmudic page, with its text in the center surrounded by a sea of commentaries, is the iconic page format of the Jewish book. Where does this page layout come from, and what is its history? What impact has it had on the reception of the Talmud, and the way the Talmud has been studied over the centuries?
In this special online presentation, Stern will reflect on what he’s learned about the Talmud and its physical form in the years since his original Stroum Lecture in Jewish Studies in 1997 — and will discuss how the physicality and formatting of books can profoundly impact the way we read and interpret them.
About the speaker
David Stern is the Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including a junior fellowship in Harvard’s Society of Fellows and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute.
The main topic of Stern’s scholarship is the nature of Jewish literary creativity within its larger historical and cultural contexts, and he has written articles, essays, and books on virtually every period of Jewish literary history from the early post-Biblical to the contemporary.
His work has primarily focused on two areas. The first of these is classical rabbinic and medieval Hebrew literature, with a special interest in biblical interpretation (Rabbinic midrash in particular) and its intersection with contemporary literary theory. The second field is the history of the Jewish book as a material object, and specifically the histories of the four classics works of Jewish literary and religious tradition: the Hebrew Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, the prayerbook, and the Passover Haggadah.

VIDEO | Richard Block —The 2015 Hungarian Drama "Son of Saul" and a New Chapter in Films About the Holocaust
2020-06-03 16:00 - 16:30
Join Dr. Richard Block, professor of Germanics at the University of Washington, for a 20-minute “quick talk” on how the 2015 Hungarian historical drama “Son of Saul” represents a turning point in how the Holocaust is portrayed in film.

The talk is available online:

About the talk
This talk explores how László Nemes’s 2015 film “Son of Saul” responds to the challenges put forth some two decades earlier by Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking 1985 documentary, “Shoah.” Specifically, Block will discuss how “Son of Saul” defies Lanzmann’s dismissal of any attempt to represent the Shoah, and offers instead “a biographical fable.”
Learn more

Richard Block will offer a fall 2020 course on portrayals of the Holocaust in film: JEW ST 175, Popular Film and the Holocaust. Bookmark the course on MyPlan.

About the speaker
Richard Block is professor of Germanics at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in German literature and critical theory from Northwestern, and has published several books, including “Echoes of a Queer Messianic: From Frankenstein to Brokeback Mountain” (2018) and “The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic and the Attraction of Goethe” (2006).
He frequently teaches courses on Jewish-German relations and the Holocaust, and emphasizes placing philosophical, literary and cultural texts (including films) in dialogue with each other in his work with students.

6/3 COLLOQUIUM | Violence, Victimhood & the "Natural Order" in the Armenian Genocide & Holocaust
2020-06-03 11:30 - 13:00 | Zoom
Jewish Studies graduate fellows Oya Rose Aktas and Derek Wiebke discuss victim / perpetrator relationships in history and literature.
Presentation #1 — Oya Rose Aktas, Ph.D. student, History
“Beyond Victim and Perpetrator: Understanding the 1915 Genocide Through the Jewish Press Between the Liberal and National Orders”
Presentation #2 — Derek Wiebke, M.A. student, Germanics
“Between Victim and Perpetrator: Reading the Holocaust as Ecological Wound in Elfriede Jelinek’s ‘The Children of the Dead’”

VIDEO | Chagall, Modigliani, & Jewish Painters from the Russian "Pale of Settlement"
2020-06-02 16:00 - 16:30
Join Dr. Galya Diment, professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, for a 20-minute “quick talk” on how early 20th-century painters Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani related to Jewishness in their lives and art — and how their work contrasts with that of other Jewish painters from the Russian “Pale of Settlement.”

This talk is available online:

About this talk
The Russian “Pale of Settlement” was the region of western Imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to settle permanently. Many gifted painters emerged from this area in the early twentieth century, though few were as famous as Marc Chagall (1887-1985), a modernist painter famous for portraying biblical scenes and themes in his art.
In the talk, Galya Diment will discuss Marc Chagall’s career alongside that of his contemporary, Amedeo Modigliani. Then she will offer an overview of other Jewish painters in the “Pale of Settlement” region, previewing her fall 2020 course, RUSS 426, Painters from the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement.
Learn more

Read Galya Diment’s new article on Chagall and Modigliani in Paris: “Judaism vs. Cubism in Paris” (Tablet, 2020).
Galya Diment will offer a course in early twentieth-century Jewish painters in fall 2020: RUSS 426, Russian Art and Architecture — Painters from the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement, looking at the work of Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Leon Bakst, and others, and the history and debates around their work. Bookmark the course on MyPlan.

About the speaker
Galya Diment is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and has authored and edited six books, including “Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel” (2013), and “A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky” (2013).
Her essay about her grandfather, who was a rabbi near Vitebsk in present-day Belarus, was featured in a Vitebsk publication “Mishpoka” in 2013. Her articles have also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, New York Magazine, and London Magazine. She is currently working on a book about Jewish painters from Vitebsk at the turn of the twentieth century, titled “Vitebsk and Beyond: Yehuda Pen, Marc Chagall, and Leon Gaspard.”

VIDEO | Sasha Senderovich — Against Nostalgia: The Old Country in the Jewish American Imagination
2020-06-01 16:00 - 16:30 | WA
Join Dr. Sasha Senderovich, assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, for a 20-minute “quick talk” on immigrants’ perspectives towards “the old country” as seen in American Jewish literature, centering around a poem by the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932).
This talk is available online:

About the talk
The vast majority of Jews who arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century were Yiddish-speaking Jews from the Russian Empire. Their progeny — Ashkenazi Jews who, by the turn of the 21st century, have been Americans for three or four generations — derive the understanding of their collective history, in part, from the popular representations of the “old country,” disseminated through such mass culture productions as the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
But the story — and history — is more complicated. In this talk we will look at the famous, caustic poem “Zlochov, My Home,” written by the modernist Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, who immigrated to New York City in 1908. The discussion will focus on the poet’s imperative to think beyond and even against nostalgia for the “old country” as he tries to make sense of his new world.
This talk will offer a preview of the fall course Jewish American Literature and Culture, and will be followed by a Q&A session with questions submitted via http://www.slido.com and moderated by a staff member. Please RSVP below for more details.
Get ready

Read the poem “Zlochov, My Home,” in English translation (or Yiddish)
Learn more about Sasha Senderovich’s fall 2020 course, JEW ST 357, Jewish American Literature and Culture. This course considers ways in which American Jews assimilate and resist assimilation, while Jewish writers, filmmakers, comedians, and graphic novelists imitate and transform American life and literature — with particular emphasis on questions of immigration, identity, gender, sexuality, race, inter-generational trauma, and cultural memory. Bookmark the course on MyPlan.

About the speaker
Sasha Senderovich holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (2010). His published work includes articles on Russian Jewish writers David Bergelson and Isaac Babel, as well as on contemporary English-language fiction by Russian Jewish émigré authors, including Gary Shteynart and Anya Ulinich. His and Harriet Murav’s critical translation, from the Yiddish, of David Bergelson’s “Judgment: A Novel” was published in 2017. He is currently at work on his first book manuscript, “How the Soviet Jew Was Made: Culture and Mobility after the Revolution.”
In addition to his academic work, Sasha has published journalism and public scholarship in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, Lilith, The Forward, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New Yorker’s Page-turner blog (these articles can be found here). One of his additional regular activities involves summertime teaching as a faculty member of the Great Jewish Books program for high school students, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Our pdf to word converter service is totally free and it makes handling PDF documents painless. Try it and you will see your DOC ready in seconds.

6/1 COLLOQUIUM | Regional and Global Dimensions to Israeli Foreign Policy: Shifting Relationships with the Palestinian Territories, Ghana, and Taiwan
2020-06-01 11:30 - 13:00 | Zoom
University of Washington Jewish Studies graduate fellows Bret Windhauser, Francis Abugbilla and Eryk Waligora offer perspectives on Israeli foreign policy.
Presentation #1 — Bret Windhauser, M.A. student, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
“Over and Under the Border: Goods Smuggling in Israel/Palestine”
Presentation #2 — Francis Abugbilla, Ph.D. candidate, International Studies
“Diplomacy at the Crossroads of Recognition and Development: Israel-Ghana Relations Explained”
Presentation #3 — Eryk Waligora, M.A. student, International Studies
“Unrecognized: How Israel and Taiwan are Forging New Soft Power Relations”

STUDENT EVENT: Jewish Studies Virtual Coffee Hour
2020-05-12 14:00 - 14:45, 2020-05-04 11:30 - 12:15, 2020-04-30 14:30 - 15:15 | RSVP for Zoom link
Undergrads are invited to grab a cup of coffee or tea and join student engagement director Lauren Kurland and other students involved with the Stroum Center to hang out, get to know each other a little better, and hopefully laugh a little! Attendance limited to 5 students so we can all “see” each other and interact. Note, this coffee “hour” is only 45 minutes. Multiple coffee hours will be offered this spring to accommodate schedules.

POSTPONED | Hans Calmeyer and Holocaust Rescue in the Netherlands
2020-04-10 16:30 - 17:30 | Thomson Hall 101, 2023 King Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States

AUDIO | From Humanitarian Relief to Holocaust Rescue: The Story of Tracy Strong, Jr.
2020-03-03 19:00 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 110, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
An audio recording of this lecture is available:

Born in Seattle in 1915, Tracy Strong, Jr. served as a humanitarian relief worker in the Vichy internment camps for “undocumented” refugees, primarily Jews from central Europe, in southern France from 1941-42. Convinced that the most important goal should be to get people out of the camps, not improve life in the camps, Strong set up one of the first “safe houses” for refugees in the French rescue village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
His story illustrates how individuals, working together with community and organizational networks, were able to oppose Nazi policies and save lives in World War II, and offers insights into how concerned citizens can organize to resist inhumane policies today.
About the speaker
Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was formerly on the faculty at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. He has published nine books on the Holocaust, including “Ordinary Men,” “Origins of the Final Solution,” and “Remembering Survival,” all of which won the National Jewish Book Award. He is currently a visiting instructor for the University of Washington’s Department of History.

This event is generously supported by Deborah and Doug Rosen.
