UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

In its eleventh consecutive year, the ucLADINO symposium remains dedicated to encouraging the study of Ladino: the endangered language of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora and its multifaceted histories. Through literary artifacts, written and oral testimony, as well as musical works, this event explores how to poetically approach Sephardic indigeneity. Particularly significant is Ladino culture’s vast archive, composed of diaries, family stories, religious manuals, burial practices, dietary laws—even dreams. The ‘poetic past’ is conceived broadly. It entails cultural acts directed at transmitting an unsung Sephardic heritage to the present and future. Such acts are forged through the expressive media of word...

Taking a cue from a passage in Shakespeare’s play, the talk analyzes the tension between the contractual freedom that Western Sephardic merchants enjoyed within the confines of the marketplace and the discrimination to which they remained subjected in their daily lives, even in the most tolerant cities of Western Europe and the Americas, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that this tension has broad implications for how we think about the development of capitalism at large. Francesca Trivellato is the Andrew W. Mellon of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and...

Anti-Semitism, long a part of the fabric of American history, has been neglected by scholars of American Jewish history until recently. Contemporary events make this no longer possible. This informal conversation between scholars will explore the history of anti-Semitism in America and its explosion in recent months. Together, our guests will consider whether contemporary anti-Semitism represents a reanimation of traditional forms of Jewish hatred, or whether it is a new phenomenon altogether; and will ask in what ways other forms of racism and anti-religious hatred converge and diverge with expressions of prejudice towards—or outright violence against—Jews. Anti-Semitism in America: Past,...

Most popular accounts of the Holocaust depict Jewish people as passive victims who went to their deaths “like sheep.” A common question is, “Why didn’t they resist?” In this talk, I ask the opposite question: Why did Jewish people resist? I pose the question this way because from the perspective of theory and research on social movements, collective Jewish resistance should not have happened. By comparing resistance efforts in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Vilna, and Łódź, I argue that decisions about resistance rested on ghetto residents’ assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place...

Drawing on her in-progress book project on Forgetting, this seminar will explore the place of memory and forgetting in the reception of Second Temple Judaism, revisiting the supposed Rabbinic retreat from “history” after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and exploring Christian and Jewish contestation over pre-70 Jewish pasts, from antiquity to the present. Annette Yoshiko Reed is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She studies ancient Jews and Christians, with a focus on questions of knowledge, identity, and difference. Her recent books include Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism and Christianity​ (2018 and Demons,...

It is often noted how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls transformed our understanding of ancient Judaism, radically expanding our evidence for Jews and Judaism prior to the rise of Christianity. Yet this material also stands as a striking reminder of how much of the literary heritage of Jewish antiquity has been lost to us. How and why was this material lost to the Jewish tradition, and what might its forgetting tell us about Jewish memory-making, past and present? This lecture explores these questions with a focus on lost books, real and imagined, and the shifting meanings of writing...

In biblical texts, we find preserved the “mark of contradictions, fragmentations, and adjunctions,” as intellectual historian Michel de Certeau once wrote (The Writing of History 1988: 313). This talk will explore the mark of contradictions in what may seem a peripheral set of texts within the broader biblical narrative, the Samson stories of Judges 13-16. Buried in the book of Judges, these quirky stories have consistently baffled scholars: where do they come from, why were they preserved, and what role do they serve? In the talk, I will trace shifting portrayals of Samson through different biblical witnesses and rewritings through...

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. In this talk, Professor Leibman overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados. Leibman traces the siblings’ extraordinary journey around the Atlantic world, using artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and,...

For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three-years-old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard dog. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson, Julian, arrives from New York City. Like many a twenty-something, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight. Mamie was only eleven when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles where they...

With the rise of digital media, the ‘death of the book’ has been widely discussed. But the physical object itself persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artist’s books, offering a new frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. Barbara Mann is the inaugural Stephen H. Hoffman Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. Prior to her arrival at CWRU, she taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, and in the Department of...

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now...