February 2022
“Ottomans After Empire: Sephardi Immigrant Space and Daily Life in Interwar Paris”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Sephardi Jews migrated out of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and its successor states to build new lives in France. Most Ottoman Sephardi immigrants settled in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, which became known in common parlance as “Little Turkey.” With streets lined with Sephardi restaurants and grocers, apartment buildings inhabited by Sephardi immigrant families, and a center marked by the Ottoman Sephardi Temple Popincourt, the Roquette Quarter recast what it…
Find out more »January 2022
“Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center”
The Hebrew imagination, incubated in ancient Zion, travelled with the Jews throughout their diasporas, generating rich mimetic cultures meant as temporary waystations along the path to eventual return and redemption. While Jerusalem and the site of the ruined Temple remained the focus of liturgical attention, distance, deferral and substitution liberated the poetic imagination. But, from the “beginning,” the question of the locus of holiness remained unresolved—in the Hebrew Bible itself, and even after Solomon completed building a “house to the…
Find out more »November 2021
“Quarantine in the Prague Ghetto: Jews, Christians, and Epidemic Disease in an Early Modern City”
Joshua Teplitsky, Stony Brook University. In 1713, plague ravaged the city of Prague. It struck Christians and Jews alike, but contemporary observers singled out the Jewish quarter of the city as a hotspot of contagion, and authorities acted to segregate and separate the Jews of the city from Christians. Jews actively crafted responses both to plague and policy, marshaling health resources, funds, and a deep cultural reservoir shaped by past traditions and in confrontation with new circumstances. This lecture explores…
Find out more »October 2021
Satmar Hasidism: History, Ideology, and Sociology
Menachem Keren-Kratz. With an estimated 120,000 members, Satmar is by far the world’s largest and wealthiest Hasidic court. It is also the most recognizable “brand” associated with Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy in America, with the possible exception of Chabad/Lubavitch. Moreover, Satmar is known for its leaders’ strict anti-Zionist policy and ultra-conservative, anti-modern outlook. Satmar is also the only Jewish group that has established its own town: Palm Tree in Orange County, New York. This lecture explores the court’s history, its unique ideology,…
Find out more »The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood: A Book Talk with Mark Oppenheimer
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill–the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one. In this talk, Mark Oppenheimer offers a piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of one of America’s renowned Jewish neighborhoods in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. Shifting the focus away…
Find out more »“The Oldest Guard: Landowners, Local Memory, and the Making of the Zionist Settler Past”
Liora R. Halperin, University of Washington. In this talk, Liora Halperin tells the story of Zionist memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) that were established in late 19th-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries in British mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the “first wave” (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded—and disregarded—in the history of…
Find out more »April 2021
Race and Responsibility: A Conversation on Black-Jewish Relations and the Fight for Equal Justice
Eric K. Ward (Western States Center) in conversation with Michael Rothberg (UCLA). How are the historical experiences of the Black and Jewish communities at once distinct and interconnected? Should we see efforts to combat racism and antisemitism as separate struggles? What are African Americans' and Jews' responsibilities to one another in America's current racial reckoning? In this conversation, Eric K. Ward, a leading expert on the relationship between racism, antisemitism, and authoritarian movements; and Michael Rothberg, an eminent scholar of…
Find out more »“Hitler’s Laboratory: How Munich Became the Capital of Antisemitism After World War I”
Pell Lecture Michael Brenner, American University and University of Munich. The Free State of Bavaria was established in November 1918 by the Jewish socialist, Kurt Eisner. After his assassination in February 1919, Bavaria went through intense political infighting, in the midst of which, Jewish politicians were very prominent. Amid the turmoil, the conservative government of Bavaria identified Jews with left-wing radicalism and Munich became a hotbed of right-wing extremism as well as the center of the emerging Nazi movement under Adolf Hitler. The Jews in Hitler’s Munich of the early 1920s…
Find out more »March 2021
Harry Potter in Yiddish: Translating Across Languages and Cultures
Arun Viswanath in conversation with Robert Alter (UC Berkeley). Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the first book in the most-translated series of all time recently appeared in a new language: Yiddish (Heri Poter un der Filosofisher Shteyn). In this talk, Arun Viswanath, the translator, a native Yiddish speaker, will engage with Prof. Robert Alter in a conversation on the unique challenges of transposing Harry Potter's characters and cultural contexts into the Ashkenazi Jewish tongue with an eye towards the rich history of Jewish…
Find out more »February 2021
Modernity in the Eastern Sephardi Diaspora: The Jews of Late Ottoman Izmir
Dina Danon (SUNY-Binghamton University) in conversation with Karen Barkey (UC Berkeley) Synopsis: 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 religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view…
Find out more »