Recap: The Stroum Lectures – Shaping Jewish Scholarship and Creative Practice

By Sasha Senderovich

Since 1975, the Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington have hosted distinguished scholars whose work has reshaped the field of Jewish studies. These lectures—and the books that grew from some of them and were published by the University of Washington Press over the years—have left a lasting imprint on both academic scholarship and public discourse. Among some of the influential contributions to emerge from this lecture series are Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, which fundamentally reframed the relationship between memory and historiography in Jewish tradition, and Paula Hyman’s Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995), a groundbreaking study of Jewish women’s experiences in modern Europe. Not all Stroum Lectures have been limited to academic subjects: there is also a legacy, exemplified by talks by the writer Gary Shteyngart (2018) and the musician Anthony Russell (2023) of creative artists reflecting on their practice and presenting their new work.

Anita Norich: From Theory to Practice of Translation

Anita Norich, a leading scholar of Yiddish literature and modern Jewish culture, describes her Stroum Lectures in 2009 as “the most productive experience” of her academic life—”and I’m not given to hyperbole,” she adds. Her lectures culminated in the influential book Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century(2013), which examines how translation shaped the reception of Yiddish literature across borders, languages, and time. The experience of writing that book launched Norich’s work as a translator in her own right. “If you’ve spent this much time talking about how people were translating, what word choices were possible,” she adds, “you can’t help but be influenced by that in your translations.”

Norich’s translation work began with a simple but radical question: why had critics long claimed that women who wrote in Yiddish didn’t write novels and other types of prose? That claim seemed absurd to Norich, who notes that “it goes counter to everything that I know from English, French, German, other European literatures.” She began searching for “girls’ names” in bibliographies and card catalogs of libraries—and found plenty of them attached to women who authored novels. The result is a growing body of work that challenges assumptions about genre, gender, and modern Jewish cultural history. Since publishing her book about Yiddish translation based on her Stroum Lectures, Norich herself has translated, from Yiddish: Kadya Molodovsky’s A Jewish Refugee in New York (2019), Chana Blankshteyn’s Fear and Other Stories (2022), and Celia Dropkin’s Desires (2024).

“I have to say,” Norich adds, “that translating, of all of my academic work, has given me the most pleasure. I just love doing it. I mean, this is not a profound academic statement, but it is a true one. And it did really come out of those [Stroum Lecture] talks. I understood what the stakes were in translating.”

Ruth Behar: Translating Cultures, Writing Fiction

Ruth Behar, a cultural anthropologist and writer, also traced a major turning point in her career to the Stroum Lectures. Before delivering her 2015 talks on “Dreams of Sefarad: Explorations of Modern Sephardic Identity” – one titled “Sephardic Places: Loss and Memory” and another titled “Sephardim: Longing and Reinvention” – she spent several months in Seattle conducting fieldwork among the city’s Sephardic Jewish community. Engaging with a group that differed from the worlds of Cuban Jews she had previously studied—most of Seattle’s Sephardic Jews come from the lands the former Ottoman Empire (today’s Turkey and Greece)—Behar immersed herself in local histories and new contexts, meeting with local Ladino speakers, cultural figures, and scholars like Devin Naar, and learning about Seattle’s Sephardic Studies program.

Giving the Stroum Lectures was a pivotal moment in Behar’s career. Of that experience, she notes: “I was encouraged to explore interdisciplinary forms—blending anthropology, storytelling, poetry, photography, and fieldwork. It was a kind of blurred genre, inspired by writers like Victor Perera, who combined scholarship with creative work. The [Stroum] Lectures gave me the space to experiment with that hybrid style.”

That period also marked the beginning of Behar’s career as a writer of fiction. Her first middle-grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl (2017), based on her childhood experience as a Cuban Jewish immigrant in New York, was followed by Letters from Cuba (2019), Tía Fortuna’s New Home (2022), and Across So Many Seas (2024). “I love sharing these stories with children—especially stories about Sephardic and Jewish Ladino culture.” While written for young readers, these books have resonated widely across age groups. “Like Anita Norich with translation,” Behar says, “I find deep joy in this work. It’s a new way to bring cultural history and identity to life.”

Enduring Impact

In the reflections at the 50^th anniversary celebrations of the Stroum Center, Anita Norich and Ruth Behar exemplify how the Stroum Lectures continue to inspire interdisciplinary, creative, and transformative scholarship and creative work. Their journeys—from academic research to the practice of literary translation and writing fiction—reflect the series’ lasting commitment to expanding the boundaries of analysis of Jewish cultural expression and that cultural expression itself. In 2026, the Stroum Lectures will be given by Rafael Neis of the University of Michigan and, in 2027, by Saul Noam Zaritt of the Ohio State University.

Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies at the University of Washington.