Expanding what it meant to be Jewish in East Germany as the Berlin Wall fell
Ph.D. candidate Katja Schatte explains how ideas of Jewishness gradually expanded in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) starting in the mid-1980s.
Reproduction in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire: The story of the “bloodstained” Jewish midwives
Concern over a shrinking population led Ottoman authorities to undermine reproductive autonomy in the 19th century, writes grad fellow Büşra Demirkol, starting with outlawing abortion and exiling two "bloody" Jewish midwives.
Global Holocaust education? What Taiwan can teach us
Graduate fellow Eryk Waligora explains why Holocaust education matters on a global scale by looking at the case of Taiwan — a country with a painful past of its own to contend with.
Arts & Culture
François Azar brings folktales and the French Sephardic revival to Seattle Ladino Day
François Azar, a leader of the French Sephardic revival, on writing his own Ladino folktales, censorship, and why he is confident about the future.
Reading Agnon in Indiana
How scholar Adam Rovner's move from Israel to Indiana deepened his appreciation of Hebrew, thanks to one of Israel's most classic authors.
Shem Tov de Carrión: How a Jewish poet from medieval Spain speaks to us today
Shem Tov de Carrión's "moral proverbs" about human nature and right rulership are surprisingly relevant today, Graduate Fellow Vivian Mills writes.
Hebrew & Israel Studies
Why Israel isn’t a settler colonial state
Dr. Alan Dowty analyzes various aspects of Israel's past and present to determine that it is not a settler colonial state, at least not by the usual definition.
What is Israel’s policy on Africa post-Netanyahu?
Benjamin Netanyahu was known for strengthening ties between Israel and Africa. Will Israel's new government follow the former prime minister's lead? Grad fellow Francis Abugbilla explains the situation.
How imagined “bizarro worlds” invite us into the real worlds of ancient Israel and Egypt
Looking at ancient texts' "topsy-turvy" visions of the world can reveal a lot about the authors' assumptions, writes grad fellow Forrest Martin.
Personal History
What I learned from majoring in Jewish Studies and studying abroad in Israel and London
Senior Lily Rosencrantz reflects on what she learned in her time with Jewish Studies, both at the University of Washington and abroad.
Learning Ladino, a Language I Already Knew
Graduate Fellow Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano specializes in Ottoman Turkish history, but his Jewish Studies research project has led him to a rare Ladino manuscript.
What a year in Israel taught me about community
Finding a truly international community was why opportunity grant winner Marissa Gaston decided to spend a whole year studying abroad in Israel.
Jewish History & Thought
Activist ancestors: Reaching towards the Jewish Labour Bund’s strategies for cultural organizing
Graduate fellow Shelby Handler shares the history of the General History Labor Bund, the 20th-century Jewish socialist organization that inspired her new collection of poetry.
What does it mean to be a minority? Anti-Jewish violence in medieval Egypt offers insights for today
Popular ideas about what it means to be a minority may change, but incidents of state-sanctioned violence remain eerily similar across millennia, explains Hazel D. Cole Fellow Brendan Goldman, a historian of the medieval Islamic world.
Maja Haderlap, Jewish writers, and telling the story of ethnic Slovenians in Austria using the “language of the enemy”
Like German-language Jewish writers, ethnic Slovenian author Maja Haderlap struggles with the language of the Nazis in telling the story of her community's persecution in Austria, writes graduate fellow Aaron Carpenter.
Sephardic Studies
Soletreo lessons from my great-grandfather
Hannah S. Pressman describes her journey learning soletreo, and how it can help scholars and family historians alike access their Sephardic pasts.
UW sophomore Lauren Zarlingo applies digital text encoding tools to Ladino newspapers
With the tools learned in a textual studies course, Lauren Zarlingo encoded two English sections from La Vara, New York's longest running Ladino newspaper.
UW graduate students present at international conferences, win research awards for Sephardic studies projects
A roundup of speaking engagement and recent awards earned by graduate students whose research lies at the intersection of Ottoman, European, Jewish, Mizrahi, and Sephardic studies.
Digital Jewish Studies
PODCAST | Jewish Questions, Episode 5: Before Zionism — Liora Halpern
Present-day discussions of anti-Semitism often involve Israel and the Zionist movement… but before the 20th century, Jews’ and Jewish scholars’ understandings of anti-Semitism were completely connected with Europe and Christianity. In the last episode of our series, guest Liora R. Halperin looks at how 19th-century Jewish settlers to Ottoman Palestine were influenced by the anti-Semitism they experienced in the Russian Empire
PODCAST | Jewish Questions, Episode 4: Jewish Anti-Semitism? — Devin Naar
Can Jews be anti-Semitic against other Jews? In this episode, guest Devin E. Naar looks at the history of Jewish prejudice against other Jews in the United States, from the very first American Jewish settlers in the 1600s to twentieth-century efforts to exclude Jews from the Muslim world from Jewish institutions — as American Jews struggled to hold on to their “precarious whiteness.”
PODCAST | Jewish Questions, Episode 3: Being Jewish in Medieval Spain — Ana Gómez-Bravo
Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time? In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo helps to answer these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and “conversos” (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, exploring how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents.
Videos
VIDEO | 9th Annual Ladino Day – Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States
Editors and contributors to "Sephardic Trajectories: Archives, Objects, and the Ottoman Jewish Past in the United States" (Koç University Press, 2021) discuss this multidisciplinary volume that highlights artifacts from the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection.
VIDEO | Narrating Migration Stories: Podcasting Sephardic Jewish Journeys
In this exclusive student event, scholar and co-creator of the well-known Ottoman History Podcast Chris Gratien and retired journalist Sam Negri discuss their approach to telling the stories of marginalized migrants to the United States, focusing on the story of Negri’s father, Sephardic Jew Leo Negri.
VIDEO | Graduate Fellows Research Colloquia
The 2020-2021 cohort of graduate fellows in Jewish studies presents their research on Sephardic Jews in modern times, midwives in the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic music, ancient Jewish art, and Kurdish Jews in medieval Iraq.