STUDENT EVENT: Meza de Ladino ~ Ladino Table
2019-05-01 11:30 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | SMITH 320
Join Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington to explore Ladino, a Mediterranean language that blends Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian & French all into one!
Delicious Sephardic and Mediterranean treats will be provided.
Open to undergraduates, graduates, and the UW community.
All language levels welcome.
Please RSVP here for the location.

5/6 TALK | "More Mexican than the Nopal": From Ottoman Jew to Mexican Diplomat in Vichy France, or the Story of Mauricio Fresco
2019-05-06 15:30 - 17:00 | Thomson 317, UW Campus, 2023 Skagit Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Dr. Devi Mays will use the life of Mauricio Fresco — an Ottoman Jew and Mexican diplomat — as a foil for exploring the multiple tensions, at times coexisting and at times conflicting, that undergirded global Sephardic life in the tempestuous years of the late interwar and World War II eras. Mays’ research draws the narrative of transnational Sephardic networks into a period in which they began to break down just as they were most crucial.
While in many ways an exceptional character, Fresco nonetheless embedded himself within, contributed to, and drew on Sephardi ties within and without Mexico. Simultaneously, he rocketed to prominence as a Mexican diplomat, traveling the world and bearing written witness to some of the era’s greatest calamities — the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria, the Nazi occupation of Paris and its subsequent liberation, and Spanish Civil War refugees languishing in French concentration camps.
About the speaker
Devi Mays is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History from Indiana University and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is currently revising a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora.”
This event is co-sponsored by the Sephardic Studies Program at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, the Middle East Center and Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; the Department of History, and the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Fund at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization (NELC).

STUDENT EVENT: Queer Jews in Nazi-Era Berlin
2019-05-08 14:00 - 15:15 | RSVP for location
For our quarterly Jewish Studies Coffee Hour, Prof Laurie Marhoefer (History) will present on research methods and challenges she has encountered while researching queer Jews in Nazi-era Berlin.
Coffee and pastries provided.
Open to undergraduates and graduate students only.
Space is limited to 18 students.
Please RSVP for location.

5/14 STROUM LECTURE | Jewish Manuscripts in the Digital Age: Lost Archives, Sacred Wastebins, and Jews of the Medieval Islamic World
2019-05-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 220, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98103, United States
Dr. Marina Rustow of Princeton University will deliver the 2019 Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, considering the place of ancient manuscripts in our digital age. Focusing on documents from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of more than 300,000 pages preserved in an Egyptian synagogue that came to light in the late 19th century, Rustow will discuss the strange position these documents inhabit in an online era.
About the speaker

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University. Her first book, “Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate,” was published in 2008, and she is currently working on another volume looking at state documents found within the Cairo Geniza. She runs the Princeton Geniza Lab.
In 2002, Rustow was the Hazel D. Cole Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, and in 2015, she received a MacArthur Fellowship supporting her work. She is the co-editor of “Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition” (2011) and has published scholarly articles in such journals as “Past & Present, Jewish History, al-Qantara, Mamlūk Studies Review, and Ginzei Qedem: Geniza Research Annual.”
Photo via the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

STUDENT EVENT: Meza de Ladino ~ Ladino Table
2019-05-15 11:30 - 13:00 | SMITH 320
Join Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington to explore Ladino, a Mediterranean language that blends Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian & French all into one!
Delicious Sephardic and Mediterranean treats will be provided.
Open to undergraduates, graduates, and the UW community.
All language levels welcome.
RSVP here.

5/16 STROUM LECTURE | Jewish Manuscripts in the Digital Age: Manuscripts, the Digital Revolution, and the New Materiality
2019-05-16 19:00 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 220, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98103, United States

5/21 COLLOQUIUM | Jewish Memory, History & Thought
2019-05-21 12:00 - 13:30 | HUB 145, UW Campus, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Join 2018-2019 Stroum Center Graduate Fellows Vincent Calvetti-Wolf, Pablo Jairo Tutillo Maldonado and Hayim Katsman as they share their research.
A light lunch will be served. Please RSVP at the bottom of the page if you plan to attend.
Vincent Calvetti-Wolf, Mickey Sreebny Memorial Scholar
“Protocols and Protest: The Yemenite Babies Affair, the Mizrahi Struggle, and Struggles of Interpretation”
Vincent is a first-year student in the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Interdisciplinary PhD Program. He holds a BA in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College and obtained a Master of Arts in International Studies, with a focus in Comparative Religion, from the University of Washington in 2017. His research explores the histories and politics of social movements led by Mizrahi Jews in Israel. His current project focuses on the strategies used by grassroots movements in Israel to raise awareness about the Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan Children Affair that took place in the early 1950s. Vincent is graduate student co-coordinator of the Israel/Palestine Research Colloquium.
Read about Vincent’s research on the Yemenite Babies Affair and Mizrahi history:

“Remembering the thousands of children who disappeared in the “Yemenite Babies Affair”” (2019)

Pablo Jairo Tutillo Maldonado, Richard M. Willner Memorial Scholar
“Politics and Society: The Role of Memory in the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca”
Pablo Jairo Tutillo Maldonado, who hails from Connecticut, is a second-year MA student in Middle East Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Pablo obtained his BA in International Relations and a minor in Arabic Studies from Connecticut College. Pablo has studied at Alexandria University in Egypt and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. At the University of Washington, Pablo has been researching the intersection of history and politics in countries in the Middle East, particularly the political and historical narratives of Jewish refugees, Syrian refugees and other forced migrants from the Arab world. He speaks conversational Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish.
Faculty respondent: Noam Pianko, Professor, Jackson School of International Studies
Read about Pablo’s research on Mizrahi identity and history:

“How should we remember the forced migration of Jews from Egypt?” (2019)
“How Iraqi Jews are reclaiming their cultural legacy in Israel” (2018)

Hayim Katsman, I. Mervin & Georgiana Gorasht Fellow
“Contemporary trends in religious-Zionist thought and practice”
As a PhD student in International Studies, Hayim researches the interrelations between religion and politics in Israel/Palestine. Focusing on the religious-Zionist movement and the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza, Hayim’s research shows how developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have affected religious Zionists’ theological interpretations of the Israeli state. Before coming to the University of Washington, Hayim lived in a Kibbutz on the Israel/Gaza/Egypt border, where he works/ed as a car mechanic. Hayim received his BA in philosophy from the Open University of Israel and completed his MA thesis on the theology of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginzburg at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University.
Faculty respondent: Noam Pianko, Professor, Jackson School of International Studies
Read about Hayim’s research on life in modern Israel:

“Protecting academic freedom in Israeli higher education” (2019)

5/23 TALK | Visualizing Resistance: From Conflict to Concord in a Synagogue Mosaic
2019-05-23 13:30 - 15:00 | Odegaard Library 220, 4060 George Washington Lane NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
“The elephant panel” from the Huqoq synagogue mosaic. Via the Journal of Roman Archeology’s blog.
Since 2011, the Huqoq Excavation Project has been excavating a late Roman (fifth century) synagogue in lower Galilee paved with stunning floor mosaics.
One mosaic in particular, dubbed the “elephant panel,” departs in significant ways from other ancient synagogue mosaics. Rather than depicting a narrative scene from the Hebrew Bible, the panel depicts a striking scene from the Hellenistic period: the bloody defeat of a Greek army by a Judaean force and the subsequent peace treaty between the two sides.
In this talk, Huqoq site historian Dr. Ra’anan Boustan will consider what this visual narrative — which juxtaposes conflict with mutual recognition — would have meant to a Jewish community living in the rapidly Christianizing Galilee of late antiquity.
Learn more about the Huqoq synagogue mosaics:

Man-eating fish, Tower of Babel revealed on ancient mosaic (2018)
Mind-blowing 1,600-year-old biblical mosaics paint new picture of Galilean life (2018)

This talk is supported by a Royalty Research Fund grant given to Stroum Center faculty member Mika Ahuvia for the 2018-19 academic year.
About the speaker
Ra‘anan Boustan is a research scholar in the program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University specializing in the study of ancient Judaism. Boustan completed his B.A. in classics at Brown University in 1994 and received a graduate degree in classics and religious studies (Vrij doctoraal letteren) from the University of Amsterdam. In 2004, he completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Religion at Princeton University.
Boustan is the author of “From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism” (2005) and co-author of “The Elephant Mosaic Panel in the Synagogue at Huqoq: Official Publication and Initial Interpretations” (2017). He has co-edited eight books or special issues of journals and has published his work in leading journals such as Harvard Theological Review, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Medieval Encounters. He co-edits the journal Jewish Studies Quarterly and is currently the site historian for the Huqoq Excavation Project in Lower Galilee, working with Karen Britt on the mosaics in the Huqoq synagogue.

Seattle Sephardic Legacies | National Endowment for the Humanities
2019-06-02 14:00 - 17:00 | HUB 160: Lyceum, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Trace the journey of Seattle’s Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire to the Pacific Northwest through the letters, documents, books, and material artifacts transported from the Mediterranean world to the Puget Sound. Get a glimpse of the diverse and rich libraries of Ladino literature that they established right here in Seattle to transmit Ladino culture to future generations in the United States.
Do you have Ladino books, family letters, immigration documents, postcards, audio recordings, or other artifacts pertaining to the Sephardic experience? Bring your Sephardic treasures for evaluation, digitization, and inclusion in the Sephardic Studies Collection. Museum-quality professional scanning services will be available onsite!
The program will recognize and acknowledge the individuals and institutions from Seattle and beyond who have contributed their treasures to the UW Sephardic Studies Program’s Sephardic Studies Collection–now one of the largest repositories of Ladino artifacts in the world.
2:00 pm Multimedia presentation by Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and Chair of the Sephardic Studies Program
3:30 pm Exhibition, open house scanning, and kosher reception.
More information on Open House Scanning at 3:30 pm:
Do you have books, family letters, immigration documents, postcards, photographs, artifacts including tapestries, ritual items, oral histories, audio recordings, or other items related to the Sephardic Jewish experience and Ladino culture? Please bring them in for evaluation, digitization, and possible inclusion in the UW Sephardic Studies Collection. For more information contact the Sephardic Studies Research Coordinator, Ty Alhadeff, at tda2@uw.edu.
This event is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant.

STUDENT EVENT: Meza de Ladino ~ Ladino Table
2019-06-06 11:30 - 13:00 | SMITH 320
Join Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington to explore Ladino, a Mediterranean language that blends Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian & French all into one!
Delicious Sephardic and Mediterranean treats will be provided. This week we’ll be joined by special guest Lela Abravanel, a native Ladino speaker and Holocaust survivor from the city of Salonika. You can learn a little more about her history and learn some beautiful Refranes from her gust spotlight at our 2014 International Ladino Day HERE.
Open to undergraduates, graduates, and the UW community.
All language levels welcome.
RSVP here.

Katja Petrowskaja: A Family Story Between Memory and Forgetting
2019-10-07 18:00 - 19:30 | Communications 120, UW Campus, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98105, United States
The writer Katja Petrowskaja will discuss family history and memory with Sasha Senderovich.
About the speaker
Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kyiv, Ukraine, studied literature at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and was awarded fellowships to study at Columbia University and Stanford University. She received her doctorate in Moscow. Since 1999, she has lived and worked as a journalist in Berlin. Maybe Esther (English translation in 2018 by Shelley Frisch) is her first book, was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2013 in Germany, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Pushkin House Prize in the U.K.
About this talk
How do you talk about what you can’t know, and how do you bring the past to life?
The writer Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents, some of whom lived through and others died in the 20th century’s many calamities, including Stalinism and the Holocaust.In the stories of her travels to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, and the United States, Petrowskaja reflects on a fragmented and traumatized century and brings to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity. Maybe Esther is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on one family as well as a deeply affecting exploration of memory.
This talk is hosted by the departments of Germanics and Slavic Languages & Literatures. It is co-sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, the Simpson Center‘s Translation Studies Hub and the Transcultural Approaches to Europe Colloquium Series, and the Goethe Pop Up Seattle.
Free and open to UW students, faculty, staff, and the larger public.
RSVP: https://bit.ly/PetrowskajaUWEvent

STUDENT EVENT | A Colloquium with Katja Petrowskaja on Language, Memory, and the Holocaust
2019-10-08 12:00 - 13:30
Graduate students, undergrads, and faculty are invited to join acclaimed Ukrainian-German author, literary scholar, and journalist Katja Petrowskaja for a lunchtime colloquium on the process of writing and translating a multilingual, transnational family history whose archives have been erased by the Holocaust. Petrowskaja garnered wide international acclaim with her book Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther) which was published in 2014 with Suhrkamp Verlag and has been translated into more than twenty languages. “An unfinished family history” in which Petrowskaja “writes about her journeys … reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century, and placing her focus on figures whose faces are no longer visible” (Suhrkamp). For an excerpt from its fifth chapter, titled “Maybe Esther,” she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2013.
Moderated by Jason Groves (Germanics)

Lunch will be provided and a limited number of copies of Maybe Esther will be available to confirmed participants beforehand.Please RSVP to Prof. Sasha Senderovich at senderov@uw.edu for location.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Germanics, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and the Goethe Pop Up Seattle. It is affiliated with the Simpson Center-sponsored 2019-2020 colloquium on Transnational Approaches to Europe and the Translation Studies Hub.

10/29 TALK | No Pasarán!: Jewish Collective Memory in the Spanish Civil War
2019-10-29 17:30 - 18:50 | HUB 145, UW Campus, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Dr. Amelia Glaser of the University of California, San Diego, will speak about how three Jewish poets who wrote in Yiddish, Soviet Peretz Markish, American Aaron Kurtz, and Mexican poet Jacobo Glantz, addressed the fight against fascism in 1930s Spain, the massive participation by international volunteer soldiers, including many Jews, and the long, troubled history of Jews in Spain.
About this talk
“I am yet again your guest!,” wrote the Soviet Yiddish poet Peretz Markish in his 1936 poem, Spain, “The honor makes me sad!” The Spanish Civil War (1936-1938) united the anti-fascist left around the world. Jewish leftists, in particular, took the rallying cry of “No Pasarán” (“They must not pass”) to signify not only the necessity of the Spanish struggle against the monarchists, but a united struggle against Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini.
William Gropper, illustration in Jacobo Glantz, Fonen in blut [Bloodied Flags] (Mexico City: Gezbir, 1936) The Soviet journalist Melech Epstein went so far as to declare that “No ethnic group in Europe or the United States was so deeply touched by the Spanish civil war as was the Jewish …”Although many antifascists across ethnic groups traveled to Spain to join the war effort, others fought on a literary front. This lecture will present and analyze three book-length poetic cycles about Spain in Yiddish, by the Soviet poet Peretz Markish, the American poet Aaron Kurtz, and the Mexican poet Jacobo Glantz. Markish, Kurtz, and Glantz merge collective Jewish memory of the Spanish Inquisition with descriptions of the Spanish Civil War to yield visions of a collective future for Spain that Jews were participating in creating. As these works help to demonstrate, the Spanish Civil War can be considered the beginning of a decade-long international struggle against the rising threat of fascism.
About the speaker
Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, where she also directs both the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program and the Jewish Studies Program. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern U.P., 2012), the translator of Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets (U Wisconsin Press, 2005), and the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford U.P., 2015). Her co-edited anthology, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics, is forthcoming next year with U. Toronto Press. She is currently completing her second monograph, provisionally titled Passwords: Yiddish Poetry in the Age of Internationalism.
Glaser will also give a lunchtime talk on translation studies in the Simpson Center on October 29. For more information on that event, visit the Simpson Center’s calendar here.
This event is cosponsored by the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic Languages and Literatures, & the Translation Studies Hub initiative at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

STUDENT EVENT | Lessons on Communicating with the Media from a Middle East Commentator
2019-11-06 11:45 - 13:30 | RSVP for venue
Dr. Marwa Maziad, regular BBC political commentator on global affairs, will speak about her experiences as a journalist and political analyst for a variety of networks and will offer tips for speaking effectively with the media.
Lunch provided.
Open to undergraduate and graduate students.
Please RSVP to Student Engagement Director Lauren Kurland at kurlandl@uw.edu for the location.

11/19 TALK | American Jews and Israel in the Trump Era: Polarization and Protest
2019-11-19 19:00 - 20:30 | Kane Hall 110, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
Dov Waxman (UCLA) will give the 2019 Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Lecture in Israel Studies, on the topic of how American Jewish support for Israel is shifting in the context of the Donald Trump presidency.
Note: Seating for this lecture is first come, first served. Doors will open at 6:45 p.m. We cannot guarantee late seating.
About the talk
In his 2016 book Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton University Press), Dov Waxman argued that the age of uncritical and unconditional American Jewish support for Israel is over, and that Israel is now becoming a source of division in the American Jewish community.
In this talk, he will discuss how the Presidency of Donald Trump has deepened American Jewish divisions over Israel, heightened communal concerns about anti-Semitism, and mobilized a new generation of Jewish activists. As a result, American Jewry’s relationship with Israel, and American Jewish politics, is being reshaped.
About the speaker
Dov Waxman is the incoming Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies and director of the Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently the director of Northeastern University’s Middle East Studies program and the co-director of its Middle East Center.

An award-winning professor, he previously taught at the City University of New York, Bowdoin College, and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. He has also been a visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, and an MA and PhD in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Waxman’s research focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, and American Jewry’s relationship with Israel.
He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and four books: The Pursuit of Peace and The Crisis of Israeli Identity: Defending / Defining the Nation (Palgrave, 2006), Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within (with Ilan Peleg, Cambridge University Press, 2011), Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (Princeton University Press, 2016), and most recently, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs To Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has also been published in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, Foreign Policy, The Forward, and Haaretz.
Light vegetarian reception to follow.

Ladino Day 2019: Exploring Sephardic Life Cycle Customs
2019-12-05 19:00 - 21:00 | HUB 160: Lyceum, 4001 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States
De la fasha asta la mortaja: From the cradle to the grave
Ladino Day 2019 will survey the life cycle customs and traditions unique to Sepharadim from the Ottoman Empire. From berit mila to bar mitsva, weddings to funerals, the program will highlight a selection of major life events and explore shifts in Sephardic culture and the Ladino language through textual and material artifacts, oral histories, and photographs. Performances of Ladino songs by the Ladineros, Seattle’s long-time Ladino conversation group, a Ladino reading by Anna Jacoby (Northwest Yeshiva High School ’22), and a multimedia presentation by Professor Devin Naar will bring memories of these Sephardic traditions to life.
Share your memories and photos with us

The Sephardic Studies Program is actively collecting photographs for the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection. We are specifically interested in photos that document:

birth
berit mila (circumcision)
pidyon ha-ben (ceremony for the first born son)
zeved ha-bat (baby naming for a girl)
bar/bat mitsva (Jewish coming of age)
weddings
funerals/mourning

Please share your photos on this form.
We are also interested in hearing your memories, reflections, and impressions of Sephardic life cycle events that you experienced. Did your wedding have a Sephardic twist? Does your family have unique traditions related to celebrating birth, death, or anything in between? Share your memories with us here.
Beyond Ladino Day: Sephardic life cycles digital exhibit
The Sephardic Studies Program will be piloting a new digital exhibit with the same theme as this year’s Ladino Day celebration. The exhibit will go live online the evening of December 5th and will offer a deeper dive into the themes, questions, and artifacts presented at the public Ladino Day program. Make sure you are following the Sephardic Studies Program on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and are signed up for our e-newsletter, to receive updates about the digital exhibit!
Register for the event
If you are a UW student or faculty member, please register for a UW student or faculty ticket.
Because of a high level of interest in the program, our remaining general-audience tickets are very limited!

This event is made possible through the generosity of the Lucie Benveniste Kavesh Endowed Fund for Sephardic Studies. Cosponsored by the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Linguistics, History, and Anthropology; The University of Washington Libraries; The Turkish and Ottoman Studies Fund at the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations; Sephardic Bikur Holim, Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, and the Seattle Sephardic Network.

1/28 TALK | Behind the Scenes with NPR's Correspondent in Jerusalem
2020-01-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Kane Hall 130, 4069 Spokane Lane, Seattle, WA, 98195, United States

2/4 TALK | "Family Papers" Book Talk with Sarah Abrevaya Stein
2020-02-04 19:00 - 20:30 | The Seattle Public Library Central Library, 1000 4th Ave, Seattle, Washington 98104, The Seattle Public Library, Central Library, 1000 4th Ave, Seattle, Washington 98104, Seattle, WA, 98104, United States
About the event
Join the Sephardic Studies Program at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Seattle Public Library for a conversation with Dr. Devin E. Naar and Dr. Sarah Abrevaya Stein about her new book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century.
Note: Seating for this lecture is first come, first served, and no RSVP is required. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. We cannot guarantee late seating.
About the book
Explore the intertwined histories of Sephardic Jewry through the personal correspondence of the Levy family from Salonica. In “Family Papers,” Stein weaves together a narrative of the Sephardic diaspora through the lens of one family during the most tumultuous moment in European history.
About the author
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is the Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She is also co-editor (with David Biale of UCD) of Stanford University Press Series in Jewish History and Culture and co-editor (with Tony Michels and Ken Moss) of Jewish Social Studies. She is the author or editor of nine books, and her books and articles have won numerous prizes, including two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

2/12 STUDENT EVENT | Crossroads: Exploring Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Semitic Sentiment
2020-02-12 17:00 - 19:00 | The HUB
Learn and talk about the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment from historical and contemporary perspectives, with a particular focus on Jewish and Latinx immigration.
UW professors Devin Naar, Kathie Friedman and Angelina Godoy will speak on a panel to their area of expertise, followed by Q&A.
Doors open for registration, check-in, and food (vegetarian) at 5PM.
You must register to attend this free event! https://tinyurl.com/CrossroadsUW
You can also learn more on our Facebook event page.
This event is intended for current undergraduate and graduate students. A limited number of seats are available for members of the general public, as well.
Organized by the Antisemitism Working Group RSO, a student organization at the University of Washington.

2/27 STUDENT EVENT | Visit to the Holocaust Center for Humanity
2020-02-27 15:00 - 17:00 | Holocaust Center for Humanity, 2045 2nd Avenue, Seattle, WA, United States
Undergrad and grad students are invited to join SCJS student engagement director Lauren Kurland for a guided tour of the Holocaust Center for Humanity in downtown Seattle.
Meet at 2:30 pm on the UW campus, or at the Center (2045 2nd Ave) at 3:00 pm.
We will watch a film, explore the permanent exhibit, and meet with Legacy Speaker Ron Friedman.
The tour will end by 5:00 pm.
Limit for the tour is 50 students.
Note that weapons of any kind are not allowed inside the building, including pocket knives and pepper spray. Please leave large bags and backpacks at home; otherwise, bags may be safely stored in our atrium, and/or are subject to search before bringing into the main building.
Attendees are invited for dinner at a local restaurant and reflection on the experience afterward. Note: Limit for dinner is 15 students.
No cost. Thanks to the SAMIS Foundation for underwriting the cost of the museum admission.
RSVP required. When you RSVP, please indicate: 1) where you will meet us (UW light rail or at the museum) 2) if you will be joining for dinner afterward

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.

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

STUDENT EVENT: Jewish Studies Virtual Coffee Hour
2020-04-30 14:30 - 15:15, 2020-05-04 11:30 - 12:15, 2020-05-12 14:00 - 14:45 | 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.

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”

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.
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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.”

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 | 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.
