UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

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...

In its twelfth consecutive year, the ucLADINO conference continues to advocate for the preservation of Ladino language and culture in the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. The theme for this year’s ucLADINO conference,  Encounters with Judeo-Spanish Culture in the MENA and Beyond, seeks to highlight the ways in which Judeo-Spanish speakers (including but not limited to Haketia and Ladino) came into contact with neighboring languages and cultures throughout its dynamic history. We conceptualize Judeo-Spanish encounters as moments of discovery, dialogue, and/or interaction. April 18, 2024 · 9AM(PST)/12PM(EST) · Zoom (online) 12th Annual ucLADINO Judeo-Spanish Conference Encounters with Judeo-Spanish Culture in the MENA & Beyond Keynote...

In 2017 in Charlottesville, antisemitism and anti-Black racism converged as white supremacists, in a highly choreographed and violent protest against the removal of a statue honoring a Confederate general, carried Confederate flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us.” In this talk, Magda Teter, the author of Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism, will explain the deep roots of that connection and explore the interplay between Christian theology and law to demonstrate how legal and theological frameworks created centuries ago have led to the creation of social hierarchies, legal exclusion of and a denial of equality to...

Since the Hebrew Bible is a sacred text for Jews and Christians many readers naturally assume it cannot contain any humor. This talk will explore several biblical narratives that employ humor to make serious theological points. Becoming aware of such biblical humor can enrich our understanding of these stories and of certain theological ideas the ancient biblical writers wished to emphasize. Joel Kaminsky is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a professor of Bible in the Religion Department at Smith College where he has taught since 1997. His research explores the intersection between narrative and theological currents in the...