Summer School IIAS, Jews on the Move July 5-9, 2015

2020

The history of Jewish peoplehood is one of constant migration, of moving from place to place by choice or force, and building a home on new grounds. This class will chart the trajectories of Jews throughout history, from biblical times to modernity. We will trace this movement around the globe by sampling the fiction, poetry, and essays left in its wake. Through surveying cultural expressions across time and geographies, the class presents Jewish identity and its many iterations, exploring lineages such as Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi heritage and intersections of gender and sexuality. The class syllabus contains three sections. The first introduces canonical sacred texts of Judaism, covering relevant narratives from the Tanakh, the Talmud, Midrash, and the Passover Haggadah. The second section explores the cosmopolitan transformation of Jewish culture through poetry, travelogues, and philosophy from medieval Iraq, Iran, and Andalusia (Southern Spain). The third section jumps forward to the 20th century, presenting the literature of Jewish immigrants before and after WWII, as they travel back and forth among Europe, North-Africa, Mandatory Palestine, Israel, and the US.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent significant transformations in its political conduct, the cultural and religious life of its subjects, and material culture and consumption of goods, as well as important demographic changes (mainly fluctuating numbers, movement and migration of population). The urban landscape, economy, social hierarchies, religious life, culture and patterns of consumption all underwent dramatic change, not necessarily voluntary or resulting from the will of the authorities. Naturally, all these also had their effect upon the Jewish minority that resided in the cities.

Jews Out West , 2019

Details of the 2019 Biannual Embodied Judaism symposium at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Entitled "Jews Out West," this event and permanent installation considers the history of Jews in the American West, and the history of Jewish summer camps and retreats in the Rocky Mountains.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2014

A history of the Western Jewish Studies Organization examining why it was originally founded in 1995, its impact on the Association for Jewish Studies, and how it has evolved through 2013.

Frankfurt/Main (Germany), July 16th–20th, 2023

2016

A conference taking stock of scholarship taking (and theorizing about) transnational dimensions of American Jewish history

2008

This international symposium focuses on the decades from 1880-1950, a time of cultural, political, and economic ferment in Euro-American Jewish communities, when thinkers, writers, and artists generated a host of platforms and ideas about what shape the Jewish future would take in the twentieth century. Leading scholars gather to present papers and discuss the wide array of possibilities for Jewish life – many now forgotten – that this vibrant, often stormy period generated, and to consider how these trends both emerged from and further shaped the era’s views of what the future would hold.