UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

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

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.

Insights from a Half-Century of Ladino Studies: David M. Bunis in Conversation with Devin E. Naar
2020-08-09 10:00 - 11:00 | WA
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.

10/6 TALK | The History of Jewish Difference and Anti-Judaism as Ideology
2020-10-06 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

10/20 TALK | Racism, Anti-Semitism, and the Lines of Solidarity
2020-10-20 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 | WA

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

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

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

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

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

11/19 BENAROYA LECTURE | Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins
2020-11-19 16:00 - 17:15 | WA
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.
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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.

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

12/1 TALK | Genocide in Myanmar: The Case Before the International Court of Justice
2020-12-01 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.

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

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 | WA

1/14 TALK | The Converso's Return: Dalia Kandiyoti in Conversation with Devin E. Naar
2021-01-14 17:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
Dalia Kandiyoti (College of Staten Island, City University of New York) will discuss her new book “The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture.”
To purchase the book at a discount from Stanford University Press, use code Kandiyoti20.
Please note your time zone if you are tuning in outside of Seattle:
This event will begin at 5 p.m. PST / 8 p.m. EST
Register Now

About the talk
In the fifteenth century, thousands of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula (today’s Spain and Portugal) were forced to convert to Catholicism under threat of death and became known as conversos (literally meaning “the converted”). Five centuries later, their descendants have been uncovering their long-hidden Jewish roots; as these stories come to light, they have taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. “The Converso’s Return” explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past.
About the speakers
Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of “The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture” (Stanford, 2020). Her first book, published by University Press of New England, is called “Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures.” She has also published articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes on Sephardi and Latinx writing and co-edited a special journal issue entitled “Jewish-Muslim Crossings in the Americas.” Her current work includes an oral history project and an edited volume about Sephardi Jews and the citizenship laws in Spain and Portugal, both in collaboration with Rina Benmayor. This work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University and has also served as a Fulbright fellow to Greece. His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material and was named a finalist in Sephardic Culture. It also won the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studies awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association.
Presented in partnership with the departments of English, History, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Spanish and Portuguese Studies; Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, Jewish Currents Magazine, the Seattle Sephardic Network, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, and the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

1/27 TALK | A Land of Milk and Honey: Biblical Narratives in Modern Israel
2021-01-27 16:00 - 17:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
Ruth Tsoffar (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) will give an online talk exploring the “land of milk and honey” in the Bible, and the way it has been mythologized in modern Israeli discourse.
This talk has already taken place, but a recording is available below.

About the talk
“Life in Citations,” Ruth Tsoffar’s recent book, tells a complicated story about the relationship of secular Israelis to biblical narratives. From the early days of Zionism, the Bible has wielded an immense power as a “primal script,” giving birth to nation, selfhood and Jewish ontology.
The story of the twentieth-century arrival to Zion was conflated with the story of the exodus out of slavery and into the Promised Land. In this talk, Tsoffar will explore the sublime space of milk and honey in the Bible and the way it has been mythologized in modern Israeli discourse. First, Tsoffar will interrogate the utterance of “a land of milk and honey” for Moses through the burning bush in Exodus and the narrative of the twelve spies returning from an expedition to the Promised Land in Numbers.
Numerous examples from art, poetry and the eco-friendly industry of milk will help in tracing the historical development of the “land of milk and honey” from the Bible to various Zionist manifestations, showing how the discourse of milk and honey has been mobilized as the cultural elixir of the nation.
About the speaker
Ruth Tsoffar is a Professor of Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of “Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture,” (Routledge, Studies in Comparative Literature, 2019) and the award-winning “The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women,” (Wayne State University Press, the Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, 2006).

2/2 STUDENT EVENT | Ancient Perspectives on Same-Sex Relationships
2021-02-02 14:00 - 15:00 | WA
NOTE: DATE CHANGE!
How has the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as related in the Qur’an and Hebrew Bible shaped the ways Jews, Muslims and Christians thought and continue to think about same sex relationships?
Join Stroum Center Cole Fellow Brendan Goldman to explore this question through close readings of the story in the Qur’an and Hebrew Bible. We will examine how premodern and current interpretations of this story have shaped conceptions of homosexuality and the boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviors.
Goldman will teach Queer Premodernity (JEW ST 489/HSTCMP 490) in Spring 2021, so this is a great opportunity to experience his teaching style and subject matter.
Open to undergrads and graduate students only.
RSVP for Zoom link.

2/10 COSPONSORED TALK | Rethinking Israeli Citizenship: The Case of Ethiopian Jews and Their Struggle for Naturalization Between 1955-1975
2021-02-10 09:00 - 10:30 | WA

2/11 TALK | Outside of the Frame: Enslaved Persons in New Testament Ethics
2021-02-11 16:00 - 17:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
Bernadette Brooten (Brandeis University) will give a virtual talk on the ways early Christian authors sought theologically to form gender and other relationships.
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About the talk
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
— Colossians 3:18-22
The New Testament books Colossians, Ephesians, Titus, and 1 Peter enjoin either the weaker parties in a household (wives, enslaved persons) or all parties (wives and husbands, children and fathers, enslaved persons and owners) to fulfill their respective duties.
Subordinate persons, however, may well not have been able to fulfill these duties. Could an enslaved child obey their parents when the master or mistress said otherwise? Could an enslaved wife be subordinate to her husband? Would the mistress or master even recognize a relationship that an enslaved wife saw as marriage? Did mistresses treat their enslaved laborers differently from masters?
The answers to these questions will demonstrate that a child is never just a child, but rather an enslaved, freed, or freeborn child, who also differs by gender, and that the same applies to other household members. In this lecture, I will explore how the early Christian authors of these writings sought theologically to form gender, freedom and enslavement, and childhood and parenthood in relation to one another, and how their ideas influenced the ancient world — and our modern one.
About the speaker
Bernadette J. Brooten, Brandeis University Professor emerita, researches Jewish and Christian women’s history in the Roman world; female homoeroticism in the ancient Mediterranean; slavery in early Christianity; and sexual violence, currently in collaboration with Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson.
The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project aims to create Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sexual ethics rooted in freedom, mutuality, meaningful consent, responsibility, and the pleasure of each participant, untainted by slave-holding values. 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; revised German edition, 2020); and, with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton, editor: Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (2010).
Brooten was a MacArthur Fellow and has held fellowships from the Harvard Law School, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and many other agencies. In 2014, the University of Bern awarded her a Dr. Theol., honoris causa. She previously taught at the School of Theology at Claremont, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tübingen, Harvard University, the University of Oslo, and Williams College.

Protests, Corruption, and Civil Rights During COVID — Israel
2021-02-18 15:00 - 16:00 | WA
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Israel experienced two years of intense, multi-generational and cross-sector weekly demonstrations against corruption in the Netanyahu government.
How did a public health emergency that threatens everyone’s health figure into protests against government corruption and other political and social justice issues? How did people and social movements tackle the wide range of issues that have come up during the pandemic? And what are possible effects of the current moment?
This talk uses various visual materials and takes the perspective of the sociology of social movements – how do social movements form, act, and mobilize people – in order to discuss these questions.
Watch this talk now:

About the speaker
Smadar Ben-Natan is a longtime Israeli human rights lawyer who completed her Ph.D. in the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University. She specializes in law & society and international law, with a particular focus on the intersection of criminal justice, national security and human rights. She holds a Master in International Human Rights Law, with distinction, from the University of Oxford (2011), and an LLB from Tel-Aviv University (1995). She is the 2020-2022 Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel Studies at the University of Washington.

2/25 COLE FELLOW TALK | Minorities and State Violence: The View from the Jews of Medieval Cairo
2021-02-25 16:00 - 17:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies has a proud tradition of supporting early-career scholars through the Hazel D. Cole Fellowship in Jewish Studies. In 2020-2022, Brendan Goldman, an expert in medieval Jewish history, will join our faculty as the Cole Fellow in Jewish Studies.
Brendan Goldman, the 2020-2022 Cole Fellow in Jewish Studies, will look at the history of state violence against minorities by delving into records of the punishment, imprisonment, and expulsion of Jews found in the Cairo Geniza, a cache of thousands of documents found in an Egyptian synagogue.
Register Now
About this talk
Today, Jews perceived as white occupy a position of privilege in American society, with powerful allies in the halls of Washington D.C. But before the emergence of concepts of race in seventeenth-century Europe, Jews were a (and sometimes the) quintessential minority in many regions of the Christian- and Islamic-ruled world.
In these contexts, diasporic Jewish communities most often experienced state actors not as advocates or even neutral arbiters; rather, they were the enforcers of Jews’ second-class status. Policemen, jailers and soldiers worked at the behest of Christian and Muslim kings and nobles to imprison, torture, expel and even slaughter Jews. The Jewish sources that record these acts are critical to understanding the evolution of how states have used violence to disempower their most marginalized communities.
This talk focuses on a remarkable cache of personal letters, court deeds and petitions from medieval times preserved in the geniza (storage room) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt. Each section of the talk will focus on a different facet of how Jews and other non-Muslim minorities (known as dhimmis) experienced state violence in the Islamic world. The first section addresses interactions with the police and state courts; the second focuses on institutions of incarceration — prisons and the system of house arrest; and the third and final section deals with state-sanctioned popular violence against Jews.
Goldman’s reflections on this topic will be available for viewing before the live event, which will include a live Q&A starting at 4:45pm. You may watch the pre-recorded video on YouTube here.
Part 1 | Police and State Courts
Part 2 | A Carceral State: Prisons and House Arrest
Part 3 | State Sanctioned Popular Violence
Register for the webinar >
About the speaker
Brendan Goldman comes to the Stroum Center from Princeton University, where he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies, in addition to coordinating the Comparative Diplomatics Workshop and teaching at Northern State Prison in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. in history from The Johns Hopkins University in 2018.
His first book, “Camps of the Uncircumcised: The Cairo Geniza and Jewish Life in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” is under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press and will be published in 2021. His second book project, tentatively titled “A Disciplinary Society: Medieval Prisons through Jewish Eyes, 1000-1300,” examines how documents found in the Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storehouse preserving more than 40,000 medieval writings, can illuminate the ways in which state violence shaped the lives of everyday people during the Middle Ages.

3/7-10 COSPONSORED FILM | "From Cairo to the Cloud": SJFF Sephardic/Mizrahi Spotlight
2021-03-07 14:00 - 2021-03-10 14:00 | WA

VIDEO | Israel Through a Colored Lens: African American Perspectives on Mizrahi Israelis
2021-03-11 16:00 - 17:00 | RSVP for Zoom link
Bryan Roby (University of Michigan – Ann Arbor) outlines the history of African American thinkers and writers who influenced Israeli society in the 20th century, and how their work has coincided with the process of constructing racial categories within Israel/Palestine.
Watch the talk now:

About the talk
Bryan Roby’s latest book, “Israel through a Colored Lens: Racial Constructs in the Israeli Jewish Imagination,” explores the shifting boundaries of racial constructs in Israel/Palestine as well as African American intellectual contributions to Israeli sociology and theories on race and ethnicity.
In examining American and Israeli writing, and French colonial archives, Roby will show how and why Middle Eastern Jews became associated with Blackness throughout the 20th century, and what this tells us about the processes of constructing race in modern times.
About the speaker
Bryan K. Roby is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. His expertise is on Middle Eastern and North African Jewish history in the modern era. His research interests include the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in Israel/Palestine; 19th and 20th century North African history; and the legacy of French colonialism on Arab and Jewish identity. His first book, “The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle 1948-1966” (Syracuse University Press, 2015), provides an extensive history of social justice protests by Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. “Israel through a Colored Lens” is his second book project.
This virtual event is hosted by the Israel Studies Program at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. It is cosponsored by the Sephardic Studies Program as well as the Departments of History and American Ethnic Studies.

VIDEO | Writing Trauma, from the Holocaust to the Pandemic: Poetry from Immigrant Jewish Writers from the Former Soviet Union
2021-03-18 16:00 - 17:15 | RSVP for Zoom link
In a combined conversation and reading, writers Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Luisa Muradyan will discuss their poetry and the ways in which it speaks to traumas past and present with Sasha Senderovich, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures.
Watch the talk now:

About the event
In one of the poems addressed to her friend and written the morning after Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah) in April 2020 — as many parts of the United States were entering the second month of lockdowns necessitated by the spread of the Covid-19 virus — Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach queried:
Just imagine, one day we will ask our children,
Remember when the whole world stopped
touching? They’ll hug us and answer, No.
In her poetic response later the same day, Luisa Muradyan, answering her friend — a fellow one-time immigrant from the Soviet Union and, like her, a mother of two young children born in the United States — speculated:
I can’t decide what I’m more afraid of. My son
barreling across the room to hug strangers,
or my son barreling back away from others,
permanently terrified of touch.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach responded:
I know you’ve had
such days, and far worse. It’s not
that bad, we tell ourselves, and hours later,
we read poems about our dead ancestors
while our children scream in the background,
raging against our history, already inside them,
against an isolation that is the antonym
of Jewish family.

In ways that are often provocatively quirky and brimming with U.S. American pop culture references (Muradyan) and influenced by theories of trauma (Kolchinsky Dasbach), each poet’s body of work dwells on the experiences of loss — of people, lands, words — across generations, continents, and languages.
Register for the event now >
This online event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
About the speakers
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her recent poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
Luisa Muradyan (https://www.luisamuradyan.com) is originally from Ukraine and holds a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston where she was the recipient of an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellowship and a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. She is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press) and was the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018. She was also the recipient of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and non-binary writers from the former Soviet Union. Previous poems have appeared in the Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, Coffee House Press, Pleiades, Poetry International, and Ninth Letter among others.
Sasha Senderovich has published on Russian Jewish literature and culture in the Soviet Union and in the United States. His and Harriet Murav’s translation, from the Yiddish, of David Bergelson’s Judgment: A Novel was published by Northwestern University Press in 2017. His first book, How the Soviet Jew Was Made, is forthcoming (Harvard University Press, 2022).

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