Graduate fellow Lili Brown explains how community archives — community-centered archives that preserve all kinds of documents and materials — help researchers to construct richer pictures of the past, and how this approach is helping to preserve Seattle Sephardic history.
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.
Graduate fellow Ben Lee explains how machine learning can help historians to learn from the photographs, illustrations and advertisements found in Ladino-language newspapers.
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.
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.
Using census data from the early 20th century, grad fellow Oya Rose Aktaş sketches a portrait Seattle's very first residents from the Ottoman Empire, from 1890-1910.
By making a historic Sephardic songbook available online, graduate fellow Ke Guo hopes to pass on a rich legacy of Sephardic music — and to further our understanding of how Sephardic music has changed over time.
Countering misperceptions, grad fellow Abby Massarano explains that Jews in the 6th century CE embraced visual art, and shows what we can learn about these communities from their depictions of the key story of Abraham's Binding of Isaac.
