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...

While the bulk of biblical scholarship on the book of Genesis had been conducted by men and about men, more recent works have used feminist approaches to center the female characters in Genesis from numerous perspectives, enhancing our understanding of how the women in Genesis function. In light of these new works, this talk will...

This lecture will tell the story of a long overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their...

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...

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...

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...

We at the Leve Center are carefully monitoring UCLA’s policies regarding COVID-19 Coronovirus.  We ask for your patience as we adjust our schedule:  some Leve Center events will likely be cancelled due to guests’ travel restrictions.  All updates will be shared as quickly as possible via our weekly email blast and our website. Latest updates: www.cjs.ucla.edu/event-list-classic

We at the Leve Center are carefully monitoring UCLA’s policies regarding COVID-19 Coronovirus.  We ask for your patience as we adjust our schedule:  some Leve Center events will likely be cancelled due to guests’ travel restrictions.  All updates will be shared as quickly as possible via our weekly email blast and our website. Latest updates: www.cjs.ucla.edu/event-list-classic

Student, staff, and faculty affiliates of the Leve Center share outrage at the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black men, women, and trans folks at the hands of the police. We support and have participated in the protests in L.A. county and across the world, and applaud the years-long...

William Schniedewind (UCLA) with Aaron Burke (UCLA) 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...

Video of talk now available at: https://youtu.be/bLzeCmxe2vw Book available now: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520366206/togo-mizrahi-and-the-making-of-egyptian-cinema https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.91/ UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Luminos Book Talk Series In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of...

https://youtu.be/l-CSXXR1bVQ Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Maurice Amado Seminar in Sephardic Studies https://www.cjs.ucla.edu/podcasts/ https://www.facebook.com/UCLACJS 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...

https://youtu.be/JX8KuJITiUE The Blood Libel in Modern Eastern Europe: A Social History Michael and Irene Ross Lecture in Yiddish Studies Elissa Bemporad (CUNY) 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...

https://youtu.be/231Uxx5zsIk American Jewish historian Tony Michels (UW Madison) in conversation with practitioners and critics of comedy, including Jessica Chaffin, Jena Friedman, Lynn Harris, Michaela Watkins, and Josh Kun (USC, 2019-2020 Etta and Milton Leve Scholar-in-Residence), to discuss the outsized role that Jewish women have played as path-breaking comedic writers and performers. Together, the group will...

https://youtu.be/XaNcD10ttU0 Simon Levis Sullam in conversation with Marla Stone will explore the role of Italians – from members of the Fascist Party, police and military forces to everyday citizens – in the Holocaust and meditates on how their involvement became obscured in the postwar era. Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish...

This webinar brings together David S. Koffman (York University), author of The Jews Indian, and Sarah Imhoff (Indiana University), author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, in dynamic conversation with host Caroline Luce (UCLA) about Jews’ relationship to the physical and discursive landscapes of the American west. How did the American colonial project shape Jewish ideas about masculinity, morality, and...

https://youtu.be/Ue5gEu1SIuQ This Teach-In gathers together a diverse array of students and faculty from UCLA and beyond, to consider how Jewish Studies scholarship and pedagogy has (and has not) engaged with racism, anti-racism, and structural violence; and to strategize what we can do to deepen and expand our engagement with these themes. Introduction by: Sarah Abrevaya...

Twenty years after the publication of Jan T. Gross' book Neighbors, which told the story of a the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, during which ethnic Poles tormented and murdered their Jewish neighbors, Poland is sharply divided over the history of World War II and the role Poles played in the Holocaust. While a significant portion...

In this workshop, we discuss the state of African research and archival collecting on the subject of the Jews of West and Sub-Saharan Africa and their many complex cultural, spiritual, and economic engagements. We also reflect on the emerging interest among many African scholars in the history of Nazi and Vichy race laws, forced labor,...

Alyssa Quint (Yeshiva University) with Amelia Glaser (UCSD) and Todd Presner (UCLA) Video available now: https://youtu.be/kI0bujeKu08 The institution of the modern Yiddish theater coalesced in a short period (from roughly 1876 to 1883) under the stewardship of a Russian-Jewish intellectual named Avrom Goldfaden, known as the father of the Yiddish theater. In composing and producing...