Hannah Pressman makes remarks during a panel discussing the history and impact of the Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington, part of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies’ 50th anniversary celebration on March 11, 2025

In March of 2025, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies marked 50 years of impact on campus and in the community. Part of this celebration included a series of morning panels that touched on key themes and accomplishments of the Center over the last 50 years.

This article offers highlights from the Sephardic Studies panel. Panelists included:

UW’s Sephardic Studies Program hasn’t even reached bar mitzvah age yet but has already made a lasting global impact. What helped lay the groundwork for this program? And once created, what has helped sustain it?

Part of the success is rooted in the local community. Seattle is home to one of the largest Sephardic populations in the United States: a community that is steeped in cultural memory, Ladino speakers, and memories of the lost world of the Ottoman Empire that echoed across continents and generations. The creation of the Sephardic Studies Program at the UW offered people of Sephardic heritage — both those still connected to the organized institutions and those beyond them — as well as many others interested in the rich intersections of Jewish, Spanish, and Middle Eastern pasts new avenues to engage with, celebrate, and think critically about this often overlooked history, culture, and language.

As Devin E. Naar, chair of the Sephardic Studies Program, mentioned in his opening remarks, the field of Sephardic Studies in the United States began at a small number of institutions in the 1930s, such as the University of Washington, where the Istanbul-born siblings Emma and Albert Adatto pioneered scholarship in the field. Yet their work, and the field of Sephardic Studies in general, largely remained sidelined even as the field of Jewish Studies began to blossom over the subsequent generations. Major scholars like Aron Rodrigue at Stanford University, as well as one of his first students, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, who became a professor at the University of Washington in 1999 before moving onto UCLA, have played a pivotal role in bringing Sephardic Studies into the mainstream.

“What I saw in 2000 was the potential for a rich relationship between the University and the Seattle Sephardic community… the growth of positions in the field now is quite remarkable and you can really speak about there being a west coast school of Sephardic Studies that focuses on the heartland: the Ladino-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire.”

— Jonathan Decter

Over the last quarter century,  Stanford and UCLA started enriching their Jewish Studies curricula by offering classes in the history and culture of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and other Sephardic-focused courses — and began training graduate students, like Naar, another of Rodrigue’s mentees, who took up his current faculty position at the University of Washington in 2011. His job, however, was advertised as “Modern European Jewish History.” Naar sought to demonstrate the relevance of Jews from the Muslim world to our understanding of the broader Jewish experience in modern times and helped to expand the boundaries of the field of Jewish studies further, moving it beyond its Eurocentrism.

Now, the UW also plays a leading role in the efforts to continue to expand and legitimize the field of Sephardic Studies, not only via the Sephardic Studies Program’s public events and digital projects, but also by training new graduate students in the field. UW boasts the only publicly funded Sephardic Studies faculty position in the county. The scope of this program not only enables UW faculty to expose undergraduate students who may never have heard of Ladino, or Sephardic Studies, to this language and culture for the first time, but also those with Sephardic roots to see their heritage legitimized in the halls of academia.

“Thinking about the diversity of my students, they bring their own languages into the class, so every week, I’m witnessing different cultures, dialects, and words coming together, just as Ladino came into being many years ago.”

— Canan Bolel

Beyond the classroom, Sephardic Studies provides rich and engaging public programming. Available both online and in-person, these events not only spotlight Sephardic Studies as an academic field, but also build community on campus, in Seattle and around the world. Beyond its world-renowned annual Ladino Day events (twelve and counting), the Sephardic Studies Program has hosted over thirty public events featuring guest scholars from the disciplines of history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, material culture, music, and literature as well as writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who have reached thousands in person and many more virtually. The partnership of community institutions has enhanced the reach of Sephardic Studies programming even further.

“UW’s Sephardic Studies and its public programming and engagement have changed the conversation about Jewish identity in the U.S. and globally and have fed and led the resurgence of public interest in Ladino in recent years.”

— Hannah Pressman

The last major emphasis for Sephardic Studies has been building the Sephardic Studies Collection, both a physical archive housed in the UW Library Special Collections stacks and the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection online, which provides access to a vast trove of original archival materials — letters, postcards, institutional records, wedding contracts, photos, immigration documents — as well as being one of the world’s largest repositories of books published in Ladino, dating back to the eighteenth century. Almost all of the materials have been contributed by members of Seattle’s Sephardic community, starting with the efforts of local leaders like Al Maimon, Lilly DeJaen, and Isaac Azose. Now, nearly a hundred individuals and families have shared their family’s “treasures.” Naar lovingly refers to the genesis of this collection as the “Safeway archive” — a nod to the grassroots origins of the collection, as some of these books were in grocery bags in the closet of a Seattle synagogue prior to making their way to the UW.

“We have at the University of Washington, in the Sephardic Studies Collection, 10% of the known corpus of all known published Ladino books.”

— Makena Mezistrano

These texts and artifacts offer snapshots into the lives of Sepharadim who lived in the Ottoman Empire, those who first immigrated to America, and those who helped build Seattle’s Sephardic community. Just as importantly, they offer windows into the broader historical, cultural, linguistic, and social transformations that have shaped Jewish, Middle Eastern, and American life over the centuries — and how these seemingly separate worlds are inextricably linked.

Panel participants, left to right: Canan Bolel, Makena Mezistrano, Devin E. Naar, Hannah Pressman and Jonathan Decter

To help render these texts and artifacts accessible to community members, students, and the public, the Sephardic Studies Program has worked diligently over the years to produce accessible digital essays and exhibitions that bring the sources to life and tell us about the worlds from which they came. One such snapshot is a bar mitzvah speech. Through piecing together these artifacts, readers can see how a bar mitzvah was a new institution for Seattle’s young Sephardi residents, a “new” tradition adopted as they settled into American Jewish culture.

In building the mechanisms to share these snapshots, along with Ladino language and culture, globally, the UW’s Sephardic Studies Program continues to expand its reach and impact among the undergraduate and graduate students it serves; among the Seattle Sephardic community individuals and organizations with whom it partners; and among scholars, interested community members, and the general public all around the world.