Upcoming Events › Center for Jewish Studies

How and when did Jewish scholars enter into the mainstream of biblical scholarship? What religious and other constraints prevented them from entering the mainstream until the second half of the twentieth century? And once they entered, did they produce a body of distinctive Jewish biblical scholarship? Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Yale University, Brown University, Wellesley College and…

Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of sexual assault in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, radical Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin has been branded as a misandrist and a censorial demagogue for her controversial stances on pornography, sex and violence. This event will bring together Johanna Fateman, editor of Last Days at Hot Slit, a new collection of Dworkin’s writings, and Professor Katherine Marino, an historian of women, gender, sexuality, and race in the Americas, to…

Since the late 1940s, the approximately 1,000 manuscripts discovered in caves alongside the Dead Sea – popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls – have been reshaping in significant ways study of the Bible and ancient Judaism. Often left out of discussions about the scrolls are the approximately 30 Jewish literary works written in Aramaic. This talk will introduce the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, survey their use of earlier biblical traditions, and assess their place in the broader landscape of ancient…

When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated…

Almost 8,000 Jews were deported from Italy during the Holocaust and killed in Auschwitz. About half of them were arrested by Italians: members of the fascist party, police and military forces. Informing was widespread, often motivated by greed and turning in next-door neigbours. In the postwar period the role of Italians in the genocide fell mostly into oblivion. Simon Levis Sullam is associate professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His publications include Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of…

The following presentation asks: What does it mean to grow old in Yiddish literature? To answer the question, I turn my attention to the work of the American Yiddish modernist Yankev Glatshteyn. Senescence functions across his early work as both a literary topos and aesthetic tool. Writing “long sheets of gray hair and deep wrinkles,” Glatshteyn engaged a Yiddish literary tradition, responded to Hebrew critics, and embarked on a literary polemic against that icon of English maturity: T.S. Eliot. Glatshteyn’s…

This talk explores African-American interactions with Middle Eastern Jewish Israelis in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus will be on how African-Americans navigated racial constructs in Israeli society as well as an exploration of their observations on racial dynamics in Israel. I center the travel writings of scholar and social worker Ida B. Jiggetts, who wrote extensively on the social positioning of North African and Yemenite Jewish immigrants to Israel. I conclude with reflections on how Israeli Jewish racial constructs…

Through new archival research and a close reading of the Yiddish press, this talk will explore the metamorphosis of the centuries-old false allegation that Jews murder children for ritual purposes in modern Eastern Europe. Ritual murder accusations in modern society (which involved the intervention of local and central authorities, police investigations and trials) can be used as a canvas to explore neighborhood sociology, memory and habits of violence, and reasons for the endurance and permutation of the accusation. Elissa Bemporad is…

American Jewish historian Tony Michels joins in conversation with practitioners and critics of comedy, including Jessica Chaffin, Jena Friedman, Michaela Watkins, to discuss the outsized role that Jewish women have played as path-breaking writers and performers. Together, the group will reflect on how comedy has changed in recent years, and what labels such as “Jewish comedian,” “woman comedian” mean today. This event is co-sponsored by UCLA’s Leve Center and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

One of the enduring problems in biblical studies is how the Bible came to be written. Clearly, scribes were involved. But our knowledge of scribal training in ancient Israel is limited. William Schniedewind explores the unexpected cache of inscriptions discovered at a remote, Iron Age military post called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud to reconstruct how scribes were taught to write. Here, far from such urban centers as Jerusalem or Samaria, plaster walls and storage pithoi were littered with inscriptions. Apart from the…

The term perpetrator is an ‘essentially contested concept;’ the field of its contestation is perpetrator studies. The recent turn to the perpetrator poses fundamental challenges to the adjacent field of memory studies, which has been largely informed by the figures of the victim and the witness. In this talk I will explore how thinking about perpetrators affects the way we talk about memory and commemoration and how the inherent contradictions of the term perpetrator can be made productive for an…

For this seminar, I will use Now!, the 1965 short film by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, as a prompt to imagine new Jewish political and cultural alliances in the 21st century. Álvarez’s film consists of photographs and newsreel footage related to the African-American freedom struggle, all set to Lena Horne’s recording of “Now!,” a song written to the melody of “Hava Nagila.” How did this happen? And why? And what is its legacy for how Jewish social justice and critical…

In his public lecture, “Jewish Listening: A Reckoning,” Professor Kun explores what it means to listen “as a Jew” in the context of contemporary debates across Israel and Palestine, reflecting on his own life as a listener and his earlier writings on the history of Jewish-American music. Josh Kun is Director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication, where he holds the Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication and is Professor of Communication, Journalism, and American Studies and Ethnicity. He is the…