FROM THE DIRECTOR
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, Director, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor, Middle Eastern Studies
In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the war between Israel and Hamas, and the turmoil on college campuses (including this year at UT Austin), the 2023–24 academic year has been challenging to say the least. The faculty, students, and staff affiliated with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies remain committed, however, to the importance of a quality Liberal Arts education, which values reasoned debate and inquiry as well as the primacy of truth seeking. This year the Center has also deepened our commitment to the importance of learning, teaching, and research in Jewish Studies not only for those on UT’s campus, but also for the members of the public from Texas, the Americas, and across the globe. As UT Austin’s slogan says, “What starts here changes the world.”
For this reason, the 2024 issue of the Schusterman Center’s Annual focuses on the ways that our research and learning are connected to life beyond UT’s campus. In her article, Dr. Karen Grumberg, the Center’s Associate Director for Israel Studies, chronicles the Center’s leadership in the study of Israel at UT Austin and the Center’s work to provide nuance and promote respectful conversation about the current Israel-Gaza war. Dr. Suzanne Seriff, the Director of the Jewish Studies Internship program, highlights the transformative ways that students in her Social Justice Internship class bridge their classroom learning about Jewish approaches to social justice with their work interning in a diverse array of museums and other non-profit organizations around Austin and beyond. Dr. Adrien Smith, who teaches Yiddish language and culture, shares about the exciting new instructional collaboration between UT Austin and the Yiddish Book Center that will position UT as a leader in Yiddish instruction. Other articles describe our collaborations with various universities in the region to bring leading scholars on antisemitism to present their research, training for students to conduct oral histories of Jews from Eastern Europe, and our new summer internship opportunity which places students with Diarna, an organization that is pioneering heritage mapping and virtual preservation of historical Jewish sites in the Middle East and North Africa.
Two other pieces highlight the Schusterman Center’s work to provide professional development for instructors teaching about the Holocaust—at the collegiate level in collaboration with the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University and at the secondary-school level with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Finally, you will read articles about two of our undergraduate students who were awarded prestigious awards: a Truman Scholarship and a Fulbright Scholarship. These awards will help them connect their education in Jewish Studies at the Schusterman Center to the wider world and, hopefully, help to change the world for the better.
In addition, this issue of the Schusterman Center Annual will also update you on the fascinating work of our faculty and students, the myriad events we have hosted, and the Jewish Studies courses that have been taught at UT over the last year. Dr. Naomi Lindstrom, the Director of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas, chronicles the speakers the collaborative has brought to UT this academic year as well as preview their plans for 2024–2025. Faculty Q and A will introduce you to two of our newest faculty members: Dr. Avi Blitz, who joined the faculty in January 2024 to teach Hebrew in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and Dr. Jacob Daniels, who will be joining the Schusterman Center’s faculty in Fall 2024 to serve as the Center’s Assistant Director and to teach courses in Jewish Studies and Jewish History.
Truly, it has been a difficult and challenging year on campus and in the world, but it has also been a year of promise and hope for the future.
With all good wishes, Jonathan Kaplan
ISRAEL AT THE FORE
By Dr. Karen Grumberg, Associate Director for Israel Studies at SCJS and Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
To say that this academic year has been a challenge would be an understatement. The terror attacks of October 7, 2023, the lengthy war in Gaza that ensued, and ongoing campus demonstrations have impacted our campus, our communities, and far beyond. For Israel Studies at UT Austin, these events have exposed the urgent need to educate about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Zionism. They have also reaffirmed the necessity of robust programming on the culture and society of Israel, to counter dehumanizing narratives that deny complexity in order to justify and legitimize violence. Critical thinking remains the touchstone of our mission, but critical thinking must be based on a strong foundation of knowledge.
Immediately following the October 7 attacks, we held a poetry reading, where students and faculty came together to share Hebrew poems (in Hebrew or English translation) to try to process their anguish. It was important, at that raw moment, to bypass politics
and ideologies and, through poetry, to feel, remember, and mourn. In the months that have followed, as the war in Gaza has intensified, Israel Studies has worked to provide the UT community with thought-provoking events that speak to the complexity of the conflict and of Israel. We have worked to meet this need in a way that invites members of the campus community to listen and learn with an open mind, regardless of where they stand politically. In February, faculty in Middle Eastern Studies took part in a “Faculty Roundtable on Israel and Palestine,” which brought together faculty with expertise in the region to have a frank conversation about the history of the conflict and key issues in the current conversation about the war. The panel, held on February 8, included six faculty members working on the Middle East in diverse disciplines across the University and attracted around 200 people. In the two weeks leading up to the event, UT students submitted questions to the faculty participants; the questions they submitted were the basis of the discussion. Even with divergent perspectives and disagreements among the faculty, the tone throughout the two-hour event was civil and respectful, and the conversation was substantive and complex. In contrast to politicized
“teach-ins,” our roundtable stands out for having responded to questions on the basis of sound knowledge and experience in the region.
We sponsored and co-sponsored several other events on Israel and Palestine this year. In the fall, our outgoing Israel Studies Graduate Fellow, Atalia Israeli-Nevo, gave a presentation about her current research titled “Queer Utopias, Israeli/German Nationalisms, and Animal Labor.” Also in the fall, our Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Dr. Ahmad Agbaria, hosted a screening of the documentary film Jaffa: The Clockwork’s Orange, directed by Eyal Sivan. In October, Dr. Seraj Assi gave a talk entitled “Strangers in Their Homeland: Palestinian Citizens under Military Rule in Israel (1948-1967).”
The Spring semester included a talk titled “Media Coverage of the War in Gaza” by Andrew Butters, Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Journalism and Media at UT and a former Middle East Correspondent and Beirut Bureau Chief for Time Magazine. Together with UT Libraries, we hosted a screening of the Israeli film A Tale of Four Minorities, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker, David Deri. In March, we organized a dialogue titled “Human Rights in the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict” with Dr. Amit Schejter (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) and Ariel Dulitzky (School of Law and Director of the Human Rights Clinic, UT Austin). Dr. Agbaria organized a talk by Dr. Tamir Sorek (Penn State), titled “Palestine Studies, Israel Studies, and Palestine/Israel Studies.” To round off the academic year, Dr. Ethan Katz (University of California, Berkeley) gave a talk titled “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Rethinking the Question.” Each of these events offered a different lens to think about Israel and to work through current events.
This year, we welcomed a wonderful new Hebrew instructor, Dr. Avi Blitz, to UT. Dr. Blitz will teach Hebrew this summer in our second annual Hebrew Summer Institute (HSI), offered in collaboration with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Together with our veteran Hebrew professor Dr. Esther Raizen, Dr. Blitz is helping to grow and energize our Hebrew language program. Meanwhile, Dr. Agbaria’s class “The Arab-Israeli Conflict” doubled its enrollment this
Spring, a testament to student hunger for knowledge on this charged topic.
We continue to support graduate study of and in Israel. Last summer, Marco Bunge (Ph.D. student, Department of Middle Eastern Studies) was awarded the Israel Studies Supplementary Fellowship, allowing him to advance his study of Hebrew. Michael Leff (Ph.D. student, Department of Middle Eastern Studies) was awarded an Israel Studies Travel Fellowship to conduct research over the summer.
Atalia Israeli-Nevo (Ph.D. student, Department of Anthropology), who in Spring 2023 completed her second year as the holder of the prestigious Israel Studies Graduate Fellowship, was awarded an Israel Studies Travel Fellowship to conduct research for her project on utopia, animal labor, and queer fantasies in Israel and Berlin last summer. Another Israel Studies Travel Fellowship was awarded to Erin Brantmayer (Ph.D. student, Classics), who participated in the excavation of Birsama, the largest unexcavated Roman fort in the Negev Desert.
Looking ahead, two faculty members were recently awarded Faculty Summer Stipends for Research on Israel in Summer 2024: Dr. Pascale Bos for her project “‘Her flesh is branded: ‘For Officers Only’: Sensationalized Sexual Violence and the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust” and Dr. Agbaria, for his article-in-progress titled “The Decline and Fall of the Mukhtar Class in Israel 1948-1967.” Congratulations to both!
These student and faculty fellowships in Israel Studies make an invaluable contribution to the study of Israel, past and present. They benefit our students, our faculty, and our community beyond campus and speak to our investment in fostering understanding of the Hebrew language and of Israeli culture, history, and politics. The study of Israel at American universities is more critical than ever in combatting disinformation, disseminating knowledge, and illuminating the complexities of Israeli culture, history, and society. Now, more than ever, the dynamic presence of Israel Studies at UT Austin is crucial.
INTERNSHIP MAGIC!
By Dr. Suzanne Seriff, Internship Program Director
One of my favorite parts of the internship program is helping students find a ten-hour-a-week internship that matches their interests with an organization’s needs. Long before the semester begins, I meet with each student for a one-on-one brainstorming session to assess what they’re looking for in an internship placement. This includes a thorough list of questions that assess the following:
• the kind of experience they prefer (in-person or virtual, local or out of state, direct client work or office-focused work)
• the resources they have or need (a car, stipend, programmatic requirement)
• the kind of career experience they are looking for (policy, social work, development, philanthropy, advocacy, legislative, research, public relations, museum work, education, etc.)
organizations that meet their criteria and excite their interest. The next step is for them to send a targeted letter of interest and a CV and hopefully get an interview at one or more organizations. By the first week of classes, most of the students have secured an internship and are raring to dig in.
The magic happens a few weeks into the semester, when students start to engage with the real-life clients they serve, the sometimes life-ordeath issues they encounter, or the community of fellow workers of which they begin to feel a part. This Spring, these “aha” moments were shared during our Passover Freedom dinner when students had a chance to reflect on their internship in terms of the larger Passover themes of freedom, exodus, and redemption.
For one student working at an immigration law firm to process a
• the social justice area of interest they would like to explore (health equity, immigration reform, worker’s rights, homelessness, poverty alleviation, criminal justice reform, etc.)
By the time they leave my office, my goal is for each student to have identified at least three potential
complicated asylum claim for an Afghani family escaping the Taliban, the work quickly became personal:
I was enthusiastic in accepting this client because I understand the importance and impact that providing asylum can have. My own family was successful in their flight from danger and oppression
when my parents escaped the Soviet Union and entered this country as refugees, although not before suffering through decades of the brutal life that the Soviet Union had to offer Jews throughout the majority of the twentieth century. . . . The themes that we commemorate during Passover are a celebration of the opportunity for life that my family has been given as well as a reminder to continue the effort for creating refuge which I work towards at my internship.
Another student experienced the trauma of Afghani refugees from the vantage point of middle schoolers newly arrived in this country. Interning for an organization dedicated to serving the needs of Asian families in Austin, she spent four days a week in the schools, helping students address race-based bullying and working with teachers and principals to provide halal lunches, improve prayer spaces, and offer provisions for language support and transportation. For her, too, the work took on a personal meaning:
As a first-generation immigrant who arrived in the United States in 4th grade (much like the kids I have worked with), I know the importance of preventative care. I have struggled with my mental health for over a decade— something I am able to be open about and express as a result of my time with the kids. I remember thinking that I wish someone who looked like me could’ve informed me on things like body image and mental health when I was their age. At the end of the day . . . I felt that if I could do something to change even the smallest interaction for a kid, I would be more than grateful for the opportunity.
While not all the students’ internship experiences touch such a deeply personal note, they are all meaningful. I’ve learned that it’s certainly worth the extra “set up” time to make sure each student finds a social justice internship that meets their academic or career interests and provides a taste of tikkun olam in real time.
ADDRESSING ANTISEMITISM
By Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, SCJS Director
Over the last decade, in the United States and throughout the world, there has been a marked rise in antisemitic rhetoric and acts of violence across all sectors of society. The faculty affiliated with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin are committed to examining and educating about the historical roots and present expressions of antisemitism through cutting-edge research, undergraduate and graduate courses, faculty panel discussions, and public lectures by leading scholars in the field.
In addition to course offerings on the history of antisemitism, the Schusterman Center regularly hosts leading scholars to enrich our understanding of this topic. During the 2023–2024 academic year, the Schusterman Center collaborated with Jewish Studies programs at other universities in the region to host online lectures by leading scholars in the field on different aspects of contemporary antisemitism.
On January 25, 2024, the UT Austin Schusterman Center hosted our annual joint online lecture with the University of Oklahoma’s Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies. Dr. Mara Lee Grayson presented “Antisemitism and the Presumption of Jewish Whiteness.” Dr. Grayson is a scholar who focuses on the rhetorics of racism and antisemitism in higher education and writing studies. Previously a tenured faculty member in the California State University system, she now works as the Director of Content Development for the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International. Grayson’s lecture helped surface the conceptual barriers to challenging antisemitism and equitably including Jewish people in discussions of identity and diversity.
At the end of the academic year, on April 15, 2024, the Schusterman Center partnered with Jewish Studies programs at the University of Houston, Rice University, St. Edward’s University, Texas A&M, and Trinity University to welcome virtually to Texas Dr. Ethan
Katz, Director of the Jewish Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, to present a lecture online entitled “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Rethinking the Question.” Katz explored the multiple meanings of antiZionism and the two major streams that anti-Zionism has taken historically. One of them, negationist anti-Zionism, Katz argued, is by its nature antisemitic.
Both talks were held on Zoom Webinar. The hope in hosting these lectures online was to bring top-notch and accessible scholarship on these important dimensions of antisemitism to people on and beyond UT’s campus. To that end, the lectures were recorded and are available on the Schusterman Center’s YouTube Channel for those interested in viewing them.
PRESERVING “OUR HOMES”
By Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, SCJS Director
In partnership with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies is sponsoring remote summer internship opportunities with Diarna. Diarna (“Our homes” in JudeoArabic) works to digitally preserve the physical remnants of Jewish life and history throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Joining experts and volunteers from around the world as well as student interns from other colleges and universities, UT undergraduate and graduate students will have the opportunity through this partnership to join in Diarna’s
work to capture site data and record place-based oral histories before the memories of these Jewish communities are lost. Diarna employs cutting-edge
digital mapping technology, traditional scholarship, field research, and multimedia documentation to provide virtual access to Jewish historical sites
throughout the region on their website diarna.org. In Summer 2024, one UT Austin undergraduate and one UT Austin graduate student are working as a part of the Diarna team with support from the Schusterman Center and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. This unique internship experience will enable Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies students not only to learn more about the histories of Jewish communities in the region but also to gain important skills and experience in top-notch Digital and Public Humanities scholarship.
NEWEST TRUMAN SCHOLAR BRIDGES THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN DIVIDE
Originally published by UT News
Elijah Kahlenberg, a junior triplemajoring in Government, Middle Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies, is the University of Texas at Austin’s latest Truman scholar.
The federally funded Truman Scholarship provides $30,000 to students pursuing graduate studies in public service fields. The U.S. Congress created the scholarship in 1975 as the official memorial to President Harry S. Truman.
Kahlenberg had an inkling he had won when the head of postgraduate scholarships at UT called and asked him to show up at the Tower in two hours in a suit. “I thought, either I’m being expelled or I’m getting Truman,” he joked. President Jay Hartzell presented him with the award in his office. “I was on the verge of tears,” Kahlenberg said. “It was a surreal experience. I’m still in shock. It seems like a dream.”
Each year, 50 to 60 college juniors are named Truman scholars. The scholarships traditionally have been awarded to one student from each U.S. state. U.S. universities may nominate four students annually.
The prestige is worth much more than the money, but Kahlenberg said he plans to use both to pursue a joint J.D.
and Ph.D. at Columbia University. The J.D. will focus on international law, and the Ph.D. will focus on Middle East studies and government. Columbia has the advantage of being in New York, the hub of most international legal institutions, but he told Hartzell during their meeting he would love to teach at UT one day.
Kahlenberg has been studying the Israeli-Palestinian issue since he was 12. At UT, he is the president and founder of Atidna International, an organization dedicated to bringing together Jews and Arabs to have civil dialogue on “anything and everything” pertaining to Israelis and Palestinians. “It’s my personal belief that Jews and Arabs are cousins. When you look at our culture, our identity, our aspirations, not only do they not conflict, they’re more similar to each other than any other people,” he said.
“It’s not only a fact in and of itself, but viewing yourself as part of one family is a great way to break down a lot of animosity and hatred. We do peace events around that theme,” he said.
Last semester, they held a joint vigil on November 7, the one-month mark of the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, to honor all innocents, Israelis and Palestinians, who had been lost in
the war. “An event like that is a way to get Jews and Arabs in a common space. When you can mourn with each other, that’s when you can solidify that we’re one family.” They also hold dialogue sessions.
“You work really hard, and you may do all the right things and this may never happen. This is great for everyone. Great for students. It’s great for the University. It’s great for the world,” Hartzell said to Kahlenberg of the selectivity of the Truman Scholarship Foundation and Kahlenberg’s founding of Atidna. “It’s a time when that work is needed. When we say what starts here changes the world, we take it seriously.”
He said his career aspiration is to become a professor of international law, and if he had a magic wand, the culmination of his career would be to win the Nobel Peace Prize while working for the U.S. government or an independent organization to bridge the gap between the two peoples.
He is also on the board of an organization called Roots, which he said is the only group in the West Bank to bring together Jews and Arabs in a civil and joint space for mutual understanding and reconciliation. “There might be some inherent tension when we first enter the space, but through organizations like Atidna and Roots, we have a chance to have conversations that reveal that our culture and aspirations and identity are honestly one and the same.”
As evidence, he cites a typical Palestinian garment called a keffiyeh and the Jewish prayer shawl called a tallit. “When you look at the origin of both of those dresses, you find they came from the same exact source, a Canaanite dress from around 4,000 years ago. When we dive into our culture, our ancestry, our roots, it’s one and the same.”
Kahlenberg is the 26th UT student to be named a Truman scholar since the award was established 49 years ago. UT’s first recipient, Carmen Marie Serna, who won the scholarship in 1979, also was a government major.
A COLLABORATION BRINGS YIDDISH INSTRUCTION TO STUDENTS ACROSS THE U.S.
By Dr. Adrien Smith, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Yiddish
Every winter, I have the pleasure of reviewing applications for the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center, where I teach in the summer. In videos and essays, I learn why each student wants to come to the cornfields of western Massachusetts to study Yiddish: one is the grandchild of a Yiddish poet and wants to translate her poetry; another wants to understand the Jewish politics of interwar Poland; still another wants to make puppets in the tradition of modernist Yiddish puppeteers. Common to almost all is the desire to use Yiddish to create community. I glimpse into the Yiddish worlds that they, at eighteen or nineteen or twenty years old, envision from dorm rooms in Iowa or Ohio or Vermont, on campuses where there are no regular Yiddish classes.
the number of schools that teach it has inspired a partnership between the Yiddish Book Center and the University of Texas at Austin. In Fall 2024, UT and the YBC will launch a three-semester sequence of online Yiddish courses. The courses will make college Yiddish accessible during the school year to students beyond the colleges that currently offer it so that more students in more places can make Yiddish part of their academic lives.
Vos heybt zikh on do makht iber di velt
We can only accept a fraction of applicants to the Steiner program. The discrepancy between the number of students that want to take Yiddish and
UT Austin is uniquely suited to expand access to college Yiddish. Founded by Robert King in the 1970s, UT’s Yiddish program was developed by Itzik Gottesman, whose work as a folklorist is known the Yiddish world over. I inherited the enthusiasm for Yiddish that Dr. Gottesman fostered among students, along with the atmosphere of intellectual intimacy that he created. With their cries of nebekh! (poor thing) and cheers of hura! aza yor af mir (Hurrah! May I be so blessed!) at Longhorn football games, the students in my Yiddish class—or our Yiddish mishpokhe (family), as they put it— showed me the liveliness of UT Yiddish.
Like my in-person courses, the online ones will combine UT and YBC traditions. The curriculum has been developed under the long-term mentorship of Dr. Asya Vaisman Schulman, the director of the YBC’s Yiddish Language Institute. Dr. Schulman is the founder of and mastermind behind the Yiddish Pedagogy Fellowship and Practicum, which provide introductory to advanced training in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory and practice to Yiddish instructors. As a fellow of these programs, I found a cohort of teachers from across the U.S. and Europe that continues to exchange ideas and activities. The relatively new marriage between Yiddish and SLA research has meant that our classrooms are laboratories for figuring out how best to engage diverse student populations with Yiddish as a living language.
What starts here changes the world
The UT-YBC Yiddish courses will be offered in Fall 2024, Spring 2025, and Fall 2025. The sequence is designed to help students achieve intermediate proficiency as speakers, readers,
Dr. Smith (R, in blue) teaches Yiddish in person at the Yiddish Book Center. Credit: Ben Barnhart Photography.
listeners, and writers of Yiddish. It will cover two years of material in three semesters, thus fulfilling the language requirement of most colleges. In completing the courses, students will receive full academic credit from UT Austin. The Yiddish Book Center will
provide grants for students who cannot receive tuition support from their home institutions.
When my UT Yiddish students designed a class t-shirt this spring, they chose the phrase “di gantse mishpokhe” (the
whole family) to print across the back. It is in this spirit of community that we are creating the collaborative Yiddish program. By reaching beyond the UT campus, we hope to bring students from across Texas and the country with us into the future of Yiddish.
VOICES FROM THE PAST
Students collect the stories of Jews from the Soviet Union as part of a new oral history initiative
By Dr. Adrien Smith, Assistant Professor of Instruction in Yiddish
One day last fall I visited Maggie RivasRodriguez, the founder of the Voces Oral History Center, to ask her advice on doing an oral history project with my Spring class on “Jews of Eastern Europe.” As a new faculty member, I expected it could take years to prepare for such an undertaking. Instead, she encouraged me to start the project now. She told me that oral history would change my life. As I watch and prepare to archive the interviews my students conducted, I know she was right.
The idea for this project began in Moscow, where I came to Jewish history through the lives of people who grew up in the Soviet Union and Russia. In kitchens, at klezmer concerts, Yiddish translation seminars, and elsewhere, I heard stories so fascinating in their variety that I devoted myself to understanding their context and their power. When I began teaching Jewish folklore at UT, the stories that Morton Meyerson, a Tower Fellow, shared with the class about growing up in a Jewish family in Texas enriched our discussions of Jewish tradition, as did the stories that students recorded for a folklore collecting task.
I wanted students in my EasternEuropean Jewish history class to have access to the kinds of stories and people that engaged me with
Jewish cultural history in the first place. Personal narratives would help us examine the interplay between everyday life in Eastern Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the historical forces that transformed it. They would help students understand how certain individuals have negotiated the challenges and opportunities of these times and places. Scholars like Anna Shternshis and Jeffrey Veidlinger inspired me with their oral histories of Jewish life in the early Soviet Union and during World War II. I wanted my students to create a record of similar nuance that examines the lives of those born at the end of the Soviet Union.
The result is a collection of in-depth interviews that students conducted virtually with people born in the Soviet Union between the 1960s and 1980s. A series of workshops introduced students to interview techniques: students interviewed Sebastian Schulman, a Montreal-based Yiddish translator with ethnographic fieldwork experience in Moldova, who provided feedback on the questions students posed. They spoke with Tatiana Panova, a Hamburg-based oral historian, to develop tools for interviewing Sovietborn narrators. Finally, students conducted collaborative oral histories with class guests who grew up in Moscow and now live in France or the
U.S. Students reflected upon what worked and what didn’t and figured out how to balance openness and specificity in the questions they asked.
Now, researchers can hear and read the narratives of Jewish experience that students recorded in their independent interviews. They include, for example, conversations with the Grammynominated artist Psoy Korolenko and scholar Anna Shternshis, with the Berlin-based cantor Svetlana Kundish and the violinist Mitia Khramtsov, and with the Frankfurt-based writer and scholar Alexandra Polyan. These conversations provide an intimate look at what it was like to grow up in Jewish or partly Jewish families in the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine and how engagements with Jewishness have shaped the lives of the narrators. With the help of UT librarians Colleen Lyon and Uri Kolodney, the interviews are being archived at Texas ScholarWorks, which will provide open access to the collection. This small project, I hope, will be the start of something bigger, as I work with students to find, record, and bring to campus untold stories of people whose lives have been distinctly influenced by Jewishness and the many meanings it can hold.
SCHUSTERMAN CENTER CO-HOSTS HOLOCAUST
PROFESSIONAL
DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP FOR AREA TEACHERS
By Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, SCJS Director
Starting last June, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies began collaborating with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum on hosting an annual professional development workshop for Middle School and High School teachers in the Austin metropolitan area entitled Teaching about the Holocaust.
In both 2023 and 2024, the Schusterman Center welcomed area teachers to UT Austin’s campus for an all-day workshop led by Dr. Charlotte Decoster, Sr. Director of Education at the Ann and Nate Levine Family Center for Education at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Participants in the workshop included educators from Austin Independent School District (ISD), Eanes ISD, and Round Rock ISD.
Participants in the workshops joined virtual field trips of the Holocaust/ Shoah Wing of the Museum, received and discussed internationally recognized recommendations and guidelines for teaching Holocaust history, and introduced participants to the Museum’s Be Your Own
Curator lesson. Dr. J. E. Wolfson, State Coordinator of Education at the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, shared with participants about the work of the commission and ways for the commission to support teachers’ work. The participants also learned about the Schusterman Center’s public and
academic programs in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Antisemitism. All participants were enriched by this professional development opportunity and look forward to bringing the lessons that they learned to their Central Texas classrooms.
Top: Dr. Charlotte Decoster leading the “Teaching about the Holocaust” professional development workshop. Credit: Jonathan Kaplan. Middle: Flyer for the June 17 workshop.
This annual workshop for secondary school educators on UT Austin’s campus is one of several professional development events that museum educators from the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum conduct throughout the region. For example, the Schusterman Center’s sister center at the University of Oklahoma, OU’s Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies, hosts annual professional development events jointly with the Museum for secondary school educators in Oklahoma. UT’s Schusterman Center and the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum plan to continue their collaboration in future years by holding other professional development workshops for secondary school educators from the area on UT Austin’s campus.
Professional development workshops like these are important because they equip local educators with resources that are essential for bringing education about the Holocaust, genocide, antisemitism, and Jewish history and cultures into local schools in ways that conform to the Texas Education and Knowledge Standards (TEKS).
Sponsoring these professional development opportunities on UT Austin’s campus enables the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies not only to support this important work but also to fulfill, in part, our mission to serve “as a hub for faculty, students, staff, and members of the public— from Texas, the Americas, and across the globe—who join in collaborative, interdisciplinary study of Judaism and Jewish cultures, histories, and societies.”
NEW DIRECTIONS IN HOLOCAUST PEDOGOGY
By Dr. Tatjana Lichtenstein (The University of Texas at Austin) and Dr. Edward Westermann (Texas A&M University, San Antonio)
“An inspiring weekend” was the common refrain from Regional Institute participants and workshop leaders as our two-day program wrapped up on a sunny Monday afternoon. Co-organized by Edward Westermann, Texas A&M University, San Antonio, and Tatjana Lichtenstein, University of Texas at Austin, the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s Regional Institute made its Texas debut on February 18-19 on the Forty Acres. The institute included 28 participants from 11 states and one scholar from Kharkiv, Ukraine with faculty representing liberal arts and community colleges as well as large public research universities. While most participants were historians, we had a wide range of disciplines represented, such as art history, performance studies, literature, and religious studies. The HEFNU Regional Institutes are held regularly around the country to offer professional development workshops for faculty, graduate students, and museum professionals and aim to expand participants’ knowledge and classroom teaching skills of various aspects of history, memory, representation, and the contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. UT Austin and SJCS are now part of an emerging southwest regional circuit (including Arizona State University, Tempe) that will host Regional Institutes regularly.
David Crew (UT Austin) kicked off the program with “Photographing the Holocaust,” discussing strategies for using photographs in the classroom. His examples from Nazi Germany sparked an especially lively debate, putting into practice a didactic approach aimed at promoting students’s engagement with images. The second session, “Blurred Boundaries: Sex, Sexual Barter, and Sexual Violence during the Holocaust,” was led by Pascale Bos (UT Austin),
who discussed the development of the field and strategies for how to use this difficult material in the classroom. After lunch, Jason Johnson (Trinity University) and Adam Seipp (Texas A&M, College Station) demonstrated how one might encourage students to think deeply about the significance of shifting borders and displacement before, during, and after WWII in their session, “Borders, Border Changes, and Survivor Experiences.” The afternoon concluded with a keynote by Dr. William “Billy” Kiser (Texas A&M, San Antonio), entitled “The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare, Conquest, and Genocide across North America.” Kiser explored nineteenthcentury US-Mexico borderlands, where state-sponsored colonial conquest relied on private contractors— attracted by a bounty system paying cash rewards for Indian slaves and body parts—using extreme violence against the Southern Apache and Comanche tribes. Dr. Kiser highlighted the ways in which violence and mutilation were normalized in the Southwest Borderlands, for example, through church-sponsored rituals celebrating the raids. Dr. Kiser’s public keynote was sponsored by Humanities Texas.
On the second morning of the Institute, Vicki Aarons’ (Trinity University) session “Borders and Spaces of Memory in Holocaust Graphic Narratives” took us on a fascinating journey through works created by artists, who are children and grandchildren of survivors, as well as self-reflective collaborations between survivors and illustrators. In “Blurred Borders: “Racial Mixing” and the Holocaust,” Tatjana Lichtenstein provided an example of the ways in which humanizing Holocaust history can provide us with insights into individual and familial loss. She explored the strategies intermarried
families used to mitigate anti-Jewish persecution, suggesting that their stories can serve to write the Holocaust into non-Jews’ wartime experience as well as the intermarried into the history of the Holocaust. Our last session, organized with UT’s Institute for Historical Studies, was led by Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine) and Levi Westerveld (Norwegian Coastal Authority & Arctic Permafrost Atlas). “Mapping Trauma: A Workshop on Space and Memory” explored testimonies through a spatial lens. We discussed how topographical maps deepen our understanding of events and practiced how one might integrate mapping in the classroom.
While our two days were “packed,” the Regional Institute was a great opportunity to interact with colleagues from across the region—half of the participants were from Texas, and many were meeting each other for the first time—and to equip our pedagogical toolkits with a wealth of new materials and approaches as well as concrete ideas for how to share what we have learned with our students.
A special thanks to Vanda Rajcan from HEFNU; Deborah Pardo-Kaplan; and Emily Pietrowski of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies for bringing their expertise to our first Regional Institute. We are grateful to our local sponsors for their enthusiasm and generosity which allowed us to host the event in Austin. They are Humanities Texas; University of Texas at Austin’s Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Institute for Historical Studies, Center for European Studies, and the Department of Germanic Studies; and the Department of History, Philosophy, and Geography, Texas A&M, San Antonio.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. SINGER!
Isaac Bashevis Singer turns 120—our birthday party honored his legacy
In collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center and the Department of Germanic Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies hosted an event on November 11 to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Yiddish author and Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer’s papers are held at the Ransom Center and anchor the university’s Yiddish collection.
The event, titled “Isaac Bashevis Singer at 120!,” brought together a diverse community to honor his enduring legacy and to learn more about Singer and his work. The highlight of the evening was the screening of Bruce Davidson’s acclaimed 1973 short film, “Isaac Singer’s Nightmare and Mrs. Pupko’s Beard.” The film, known for its insightful portrayal of Singer’s unique perspective and imaginative storytelling, charmed the audience and provided a glimpse into the mind of the Nobel Laureate.
Following the screening, Schusterman Center faculty affiliates and Yiddish scholars Dr. Itzik Gottesman and Dr. Adrien Smith discussed the film and the legacy of Isaac Bashevis Singer on a panel moderated by Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, Director of the Schusterman Center. The engaging Q&A session that followed allowed guests to delve deeper into the nuances of Singer’s life and literary works.
The catered reception after the screening provided an opportunity for guests from the campus and the Austin community to mingle and share their appreciation for Singer’s work. Conversations flowed as participants exchanged thoughts
on Yiddish literature and culture. Austin’s own Klezmer band, Mazel Tov Kocktail Hour, took stage to enliven the celebration with their soulful and joyous performance of Yiddish songs.
As the night concluded, the celebration wished all present a long and fulfilling life, echoing the sentiment of the Yiddish saying “Biz hundert un tsvantsik”—until 120.
Background image: A birthday spread at the SCJS celebration of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Credit: Pete Smith.
NEW AVENUES OF RESEARCH ON JEWISH LIFE IN THE AMERICAS
Gale Collaborative rethinks Maurice Sendak, Jewish humor
By Dr. Naomi
Lindstrom, Director of the Gale Collaborative and Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
In recent semesters, the activities of the Gale Collaborative have been coordinated by a committee consisting of Naomi Lindstrom (director, Gale Collaborative), Suzanne K. Seriff (Anthropology/Schusterman Center), and Julia Mickenberg (American Studies).
On Wednesday, September 6, 2023, we hosted the lecture “Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas” by Dr. Stephanie Pridgeon of Bates College. This event was notable as our first collaboration with the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), which co-sponsored Dr. Pridgeon’s lecture. The talk was attended by the Director of NAIS and students from the program.
For the second lecture in the series, Dr. Golan Moskowitz of Tulane University presented “Wild Outside in the Night: Queer Jewishness and Childhood Liminality in the Picture-Books of Maurice Sendak” on Wednesday September 27, 2023. This lecture was co-sponsored by the Departments of English and of Women’s and Gender Studies as well as the Program in Comparative Literature. This lecture was especially successful, and a number of graduate students and faculty were able to join Professor Moskowitz for meals or coffee.
On February 7, 2024, Dr. Jennifer Caplan of the University of Cincinnati gave a talk entitled “The More Things Change: Funny Jews from Then to Now.” This excellent talk on Jewish
comedy and comic performers was followed by a lively question and answer session.
Dr. Misha Klein of the University of Oklahoma offered the lecture “Philosemitism without Jews: Brazilian Political Uses of the Imaginary Jew” on April 17, 2024. Professor Klein’s talk attracted, in addition to our customary audiences, a number of Austin-area Brazilians, including the Director of the Brazil Center and the Director of the Portuguese Language Program at UT. As well as drawing in audience members who had never before visited the Schusterman Center, this lecture was one of several recent events that have helped strengthen ties between the Schusterman Center at UT Austin and the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of
Oklahoma, where Professor Klein is a faculty member.
Events for 2024-2025 have been scheduled. The fall speakers are the Argentine poet and activist Alicia Partnoy and Norman Ravvin, a Canadian literary critic and novelist. Spring 2025 will bring a talk on Jews and the Left with the historian Tony Michels and a special event celebrating Judeo-Spanish/Ladino language and Sephardic culture. The latter will feature the Mexican writer Myriam Moscona, a leading figure in the use of Ladino as a contemporary literary language.
Flyer for event with Golan Moskowitz.
SENIOR JEWISH STUDIES MAJOR SELECTED FOR THE FULBRIGHT PROGRAM
Simon Gerst to recover the history of Kyrgyzstan's Jewish community
Simon Gerst, a senior triple-major in Jewish Studies, German, and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, has been selected for a Fulbright award to study in Kyrgyzstan for the 20242025 academic year.
While in Kyrgyzstan, Simon will undertake research on a project entitled “No One is Forgotten: Rediscovering Kyrgyzstan’s Lost Jewish Émigrés.” He will be a visiting scholar at the Central Asian Studies Institute at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. Simon will bring to this project strong language skills in Russian, prior experience living and studying in Kyrgyzstan, and important background conducting original historical research on topics related both to Jewish Studies during the twentieth century and to national security.
The Fulbright Program, established in 1946, aims to foster mutual understanding between the people of the United States and those of other countries. It provides participants with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad, promoting cultural exchange and global cooperation.
Congratulations, Simon, on this important achievement!
Top: The American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. The new campus was opened in 2015 and boasts a sustainable geothermal system that maintains the building’s temperature in an environmentally friendly way. Middle: UT graduating senior Simon Gerst. Bottom: The main forum of the American University of Central Asia campus.
CELEBRATING OUR GRADUATES
Undergraduate Students
Simon Gerst graduated with a triple major in Jewish Studies, German, and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Simon received a 2024 Dean’s Distinguished Graduate Honorable Mention from the College of Liberal Arts. After graduation, Simon will be moving to Kyrgyzstan to begin a fellowship supported by a Fulbright award from the U.S. State Department.
Mia Hay graduated in Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. In their time with the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, Mia completed an undergraduate thesis centered on Judaism in trans fiction and graduated with High Honors. After working
with Dr. Suzanne Seriff on the university-wide Commemoration and Contextualization Initiative through the Jewish Studies Internship, Mia hopes to attend graduate school for a Master’s in Library Science with a focus on archival work. They are endlessly grateful to the Schusterman Center for its care, support, and belief in them throughout their time at UT.
Graduate Students
Isabelle Headrick defended her dissertation in June and will graduate in August with a Ph.D. in History. Isabelle’s dissertation is entitled, “A Family in Iran: Networks of Love, Learning and Labor in the Alliance Israélite Universelle [AIU], 1908-1978.” It focuses on a family of French-Jewish educators of which three generations worked for the AIU in Iran. Their experiences and those of their friends and colleagues give insight into social
2023-2024 AWARD RECIPIENTS
Todd and Dawn Aaron Endowed Presidential Scholarship
Lila Katz was awarded the Todd and Dawn Aaron Endowed Presidential Scholarship. Lila will be named an “Aaron Scholar” at the Schusterman Center during the 2024–25 academic year. Lila is a Jewish Studies and Humanities Honors double major.
Graduate Fellowships
Jewish Studies Supplementary
Graduate Fellowship Lara-Sophie Boleslawsky, Michael Leff
Appleman Graduate Fellowship Michal Calo, Karine Macarez, John Mellison, Tyler Moser
Undergraduate Scholarships
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Minor Scholarship from the David M. Rosenberg Scholarship Fund Parker Aguilera, Nicholas Blitshtein
Henry Weiss Scholarship for Jewish Studies Majors Mia Hay
Jewish Studies Internship Program
Scholarship from the David M. Rosenberg Scholarship Fund Nicholas
transformations in Iran over the course of the twentieth century, including for Jews and women. In 2024-2025, Isabelle will be a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History at UT.
Scott Spicer is graduating this summer with a Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics. His dissertation, "Roots, Templates and the Interaction of Their Meaning: The Case in Modern Hebrew," assesses the extent to which the Hebrew morphological binyan, or template, contributes regular meaning to the Hebrew verb and concludes that binyanim with more morphological complexity create verbs with more specific meanings. Upon graduating, Scott will continue his instructional design work with UT's Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Service as their Postgraduate Associate for Academic Integrity.
Blitshtein, Ragini Khullar, Lynda Sandoval, Donovan Spann
Jewish Studies Internship Program
Scholarship from the Harry Weiss Scholarship Fund Megan Thrutchley, Charity West
Jewish Studies Internship Program
Scholarship from the Aaron Excellence Endowment Parker Aguilera, Ebi Arhewoh, Margaret Cragar, Lily Deitelzweig, Alexa Renee Ornelas, Caroline Parnell, Oren Rauch
Jewish Studies Internship Program
Scholarship Tzu Yu Liming Chao
STUDENT NEWS
Graduates, undergraduates present their research across the US
Graduate Students
Michael Leff (Middle Eastern Studies) presented two papers at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in San Antonio on the topics of agency and liability in the ancient Near East and the incense altar and the composition of Exodus 30:1-10. He also presented a paper on debt servitude in Late Bronze Age Emar at the American Oriental Society Meeting in Chicago. Leff co-organized the New Generations conference at UT Austin, a graduate student conference that featured presenters from UT and across the globe. With the support of an Israel Studies Travel Fellowship, he spent Summer 2023 at Tel Shimron and is set to return to the site for another enriching excavation season.
Karine Macarez (French and Italian) received the Appleman Graduate Fellowship award from SCJS and a Travel Grant from the Sidney Stern Memorial Trust to support participation in the Annual Conference of the Association of Jewish Studies in
San Francisco in 2023. She presented a paper entitled “Palimpsestic Popular Imagery and Memory during the Dreyfus Affair: Postcards and Trading Cards.”
Tyler Moser (Middle Eastern Studies) presented two papers at the Society of Biblical Literature national conference in November. His paper, “Wisdom and the Intellect,” explored cognitive disability in the book of Proverbs, and “Oblates with Obligation” argued that the netînîm, a class of temple personnel that appears in post-exilic Israelite literature, were modeled on a class of temple functionary in Neo-Babylonian temple complexes. In the spring Tyler won the MES department’s best graduate paper award for his essay, “What Child is This?,” which reads the “birthing the wind” metaphor found in Isaiah 26:18 in light of Mesopotamian birth omen texts that employ the same imagery to project future calamity.
John Mellison (Middle Eastern Studies) presented a paper at the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting
on land and house dedications in Leviticus 27. His participation was generously supported by an Appleman Fellowship from SCJS. John also gave presentations at the regional Society of Biblical and Related Literature’s meeting (“Disposal of Impurity in Judges 19”) and at the annual American Oriental Society’s meeting (“How Legal Mechanisms Were Adapted and Expanded in the ANE”).
Dylan T. Smith (Middle Eastern Studies) presented two papers this spring, both dealing with the book of Jonah. The first paper compared the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) to the Jonah Psalm (Jonah 2) and was presented at the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies Conference in Dallas. The other paper was delivered at the New Generations Graduate Student Conference at UT Austin and examined conceptions of divinity in the Jonah narrative.
Undergraduate Students
Elijah Kahlenberg, a Jewish Studies triple major, has been hard at work this academic year leading Atidna International. Atidna is the only organization operating on college campuses with the intention of bringing together Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians for dialogue and peace-building. Elijah has led the original Atidna chapter at UT since April 2022. Since October 7, Elijah has ramped up Atidna’s efforts. Elijah’s peace-building and dialogue initiatives have been covered in various outlets including ABC News, CNN, The Forward, and others. He was awarded prestigious accolades, including the Truman Scholarship and UT’s PalMake-A-Difference Award, for his efforts in bringing unity and mutual understanding to campuses.
Lila Katz, a Jewish Studies/Humanities Honors double major, was appointed to the boards of the Texas Jewish Historical Society, Texas Hillel, Shalom Austin, and as a member of the Jewish Family Service Committee. She was also named a Jewish Changemakers Fellow. She was also named as the 2024-2025 Aaron Scholar.
Kahlenberg (L) with Jadd Hashem, his co-leader at Atidna International. Photo courtesy of Elijah Kahlenberg.
FACING THE FUTURE
Fighting
Hatred in the Heartland: Hubert Humphrey’s Battles Against Antisemitism and Extremism in Mid-Century Middle America
Samuel G. Freedman
Award-winning author, New York Times columnist, and Columbia University professor Samuel G. Freedman explores Hubert Humphrey’s approach to combatting antisemitism during his tenure as mayor of Minneapolis, decades before Humphrey became a national hero as Lyndon Johnson’s vital ally in pushing through landmark civil rights legislation. Minneapolis, though known today as a liberal stronghold, was in the 1940s one of the most racist and antisemitic cities in America. As its mayor, Humphrey took on both the bigoted extremists and their mainstream enablers, transforming Minneapolis into a national model of forward progress on human rights. His brave battles then lend historical perspective to the struggle for inclusive democracy still being waged today.
September 26, 2024 | 7:00 pm Quadrangle Room, Texas Union
Jewish Demography and World Jewish Identity After October 7, 2023
Dr. Sergio DellaPergola
Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Hebrew University’s Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry (ICJ) and of its Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics Sergio DellaPergola will explore the main lines of development of Jewish demography and Jewish identity across the global Jewish people from the period after World War II to the aftermath of October 7, 2023, stressing similarities and differences, convergences and divergences. The lecture will discuss the implications of the events of October 7 for the position of Israel in Jewish global perceptions, as well as for the position of world Jewish communities and the possible influences of the Middle East crisis for the future course of Jewish demography and identity.
March 6, 2025 | 7:00 pm Prothro Theater, Harry Ransom Center
JEWISH STUDIES ALUM TURNED ADVOCATE
Public Affairs officer at the Houston Jewish Federation reflects on how her degree impacts her work today
Erica Winsor is a 2010 graduate of UT Austin with a BA in Jewish Studies and Psychology. She is currently the Public Affairs Officer at the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston. We recently caught up with Erica to talk about the impact of her education at UT on her career and current work.
Can you describe your career path after graduating from UT Austin with a degree in Jewish Studies?
After graduating from UT Austin with a degree in Jewish Studies, I attended law school at South Texas College of Law Houston. I began my career as an Assistant District Attorney in Harris County, where I practiced for almost ten years. During that time, I handled thousands of misdemeanor and felony offenses, where I specialized in cases
where the offender had a significant mental health diagnosis.
How did your time at UT Austin and your degree in Jewish Studies influence your position today and, specifically, your role as the Public Affairs Officer at the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston?
My time at UT Austin and my degree in Jewish Studies were instrumental to where I am today. I focused my studies on the physical movement of the Jewish people throughout history. With that came a deep understanding of the history of antisemitism and the conflicts that forced diaspora Jewry into the corners of the world. There has never been a time where my degree is more relevant than today.
Are there specific Jewish Studies courses or professors that you still remember and who had an impact on you?
While I was a student in the Jewish Studies program, I worked with the then director of the program, Dr. Robert Abzug. I had the unique opportunity to travel with him to Houston and Dallas to meet with supporters of the program and share my experience as a student. This was my first experience with professional advocacy, which was tremendously helpful in both my career as a courtroom attorney and now as an advocate for the Houston Jewish community.
What do you think a college-level education in Jewish Studies has to offer? Why is it important?
A college-level education in Jewish Studies allowed me to form opinions based on a deep and varied understanding of Jewish history. I graduated from the program with the ability to speak to others beyond talking points and with broad perspectives informing my views.
What do you find most challenging and most rewarding about working with the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston?
The biggest challenge and the biggest reward of working with the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston are one and the same. The Houston Jewish community is as diverse as the City of Houston itself. It is both a great privilege and a great responsibility to advocate on behalf of a community that has such a variety of types of religious practice, geographic locations, socioeconomic statuses, needs, and challenges.
While navigating these differences can be challenging, it is our Judaism that ties this community together, and that is a bond that I have a deep understanding of because of my Jewish Studies major from UT Austin.
I spent ten years advocating for other people, and now I can use the skills I gained in the courtroom coupled with my Jewish Studies degree to proudly advocate for my own community.
Erica Winsor, Public Affairs Officer, Jewish Federation of Greater Houston
SUPPORT JEWISH STUDIES AT UT
WAYS TO SUPPORT SCJS
We are grateful to our many supporters who have helped consolidate Jewish Studies at UT Austin and ensured that we can fund students and teaching in Jewish Studies.
If you would like to learn more about how to help, please get in touch. You can contact the Director, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, by email at jonathan.kaplan@austin.utexas.edu or by phone at (512)-475-6178.
You may also speak directly to Stacy Clark, Executive Director of Development at the College of Liberal Arts. Stacy can be reached by email at sclark@austin.utexas.edu or by phone at (512) 471-8861.
You can also visit UT Austin’s Online Giving Page; choose Gift Designation “Liberal Arts, College” & Areas of Need: “Jewish Studies, Schusterman Center for.”
BECOME A FRIEND OF SCJS
Become a Friend of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies by making an annual contribution of $180 or more. For your annual membership ($180), you will receive a Schusterman Center Annual and special invitations to events such as the Gale Family Foundation Annual Lectureship in Jewish Studies, the Kasman Family Lecture Series on Eastern European Jewish Life and Culture, the Israel in Context Lecture Series, and Tarbut: Hebrew Arts & Culture Lecture Series.
Please get in touch with us or visit our website to learn more about the friends’ circle. Use the QR code below to visit our Giving page.
IN MEMORIAM
Founding faculty member of Jewish Studies Program Bob King passed away on July 6,
By Dr. Robert Abzug
Robert “Bob” D. King, Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus and Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, died on July 6, 2023. The following tribute was written by Robert Abzug, Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus and Founding Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies.
To say that Bob King contributed mightily to the growth of Jewish Studies at UT Austin is to engage in serious understatement for, in addition to all his other scholarly and administrative accomplishments, Bob
helped to nurture Jewish Studies at UT Austin well before there was a Schusterman Center, before there was a major, when there were disparate courses that spanned the Liberal Arts and its faculty, especially in Linguistics, Germanic Languages, and Department of Oriental and African Languages and Literatures (DOALL), but no institution that forged Jewish Studies links across disciplines. Bob himself was hired for his work in historical linguistics and
2023
especially German, but his passion for Yiddish in all its linguistic, communal, and cultural aspects led him to champion a broader vision for studying Jewish life. When he became Dean of the new College of Liberal Arts, he aided various departments which, though hiring new faculty to teach other topics, became instrumental in building a presence, a new visibility, for matters Jewish. Two examples will suffice. French and Italian brought Seth Wolitz to UT for his work on Proust and French literature. Yet Seth’s love of Yiddish and especially Eastern European Jewish culture became central to his teaching and scholarship. Richard LaRiviere, hired in DOALL to teach Sanskrit and the culture of South Asia, had a prior and continuing interest in Jewish languages and culture that informed his career as an administrator and ultimately as Dean of Liberal Arts. Indeed, he initiated the negotiations with the Schusterman Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma for the grant that established the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies in 2007.
Nor was this Bob King’s only foray into fundraising for Jewish Studies. He befriended and sought support from two Texas Jewish families of note, the Gales—Edwin and Rebecca—of Beaumont and the Rapoports—Bernard and Audre—of Waco. These families provided Jewish Studies support in the form of chairs, professorships, and funding for public events that remain, along with the Schusterman grant, the financial backbone for what has been the Center’s expansion of Jewish Studies on campus. Seth Wolitz inaugurated an unmatched series of Gale Lectures featuring some of the most important figures in Jewish intellectual and artistic life. Using endowment funds from their chairs, both Wolitz and King made possible the
acquisition of countless Jewish texts for the University of Texas Libraries by its intrepid bibliographer, the late Nathan Snyder. And, indeed, Bob had
Goodbye Chomsky, and Other Essays on Language, Bob King’s final book, published in 2021.
a great deal to do with bringing the complete archive of the great writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, to this campus and making the Harry Ransom Center an essential stop for any scholar interested in Yiddish.
One could go on highlighting Bob’s prods, proposals, and connections that helped to found and build the Center. They stand as a counterpoint to his well-earned reputation for occasional bluntness and bluster. He was simply the kind of singular, brilliant personality who these days all too rarely ends up in academia. He followed his passions, those about which he felt deeply and that were a part of his life on and off campus. And he counted among them the study of Jewish life and culture in all its aspects.
Robert “Bob” D. King
FROM NY TO EDIRNE TO AUSTIN
Our new assistant director on his winding path into academia
Dr. Jacob Daniels, new Assistant Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and a new member of the Jewish Studies faculty, shares about his journey into academia.
What has been your journey to becoming an academic?
My path to academia was full of twists and turns. I spent my twenties in the New York area, going from one industry to another. Meanwhile, I started learning Turkish so I could speak to my wife’s family in Turkey. At some point, I realized that the only work that truly satisfied me was intellectual work— especially the study of history. And then it occurred to me that my language skills—Turkish, Spanish, Hebrew—were perfect for studying Ottoman-Jewish history. As I read up on the topic, I grew especially interested in the work of Aron Rodrigue, at Stanford. I applied to be his Ph.D. student, and, miraculously, I was accepted! That was in 2015.
Tell us a little about your research.
My current book project is about the Jews of Edirne—a region in northwestern Turkey, by the border with Greece and Bulgaria. I start by looking at this Sephardi community in the early twentieth century, when Edirne was an important—and very diverse—province in the Ottoman Empire. From there, I follow these people through one revolution, two foreign occupations, three wars, and a tragic series of ethnic cleansings that mostly targeted local Muslims and Christians. I close by studying the community’s fate in the Turkish Republic, which was founded in 1923. I’m especially interested in how Edirne’s position as a borderland shaped outcomes and outlooks for these Jews, and how they managed to survive for so long in this contested region.
Jacob Daniels, Assistant Director of SCJS
What are you looking forward to teaching at UT?
I’m especially excited to teach a series of classes that I’ve been slowly crafting here at Stanford. This fall, I will teach—among other things—a class called “History of Sephardi Jews.” It will run from the medieval to the modern periods, covering a geographical area that stretches from the Middle East to Western Europe to the Americas. In the spring, one of my courses will be “Religions in the Ottoman Empire.” This topic, I think, is indispensable for understanding much of our world today. In the future, I also hope to teach a modern history of refugees and migrants.
What is one place in Texas that you want to visit? Why?
This August and September, I plan to visit as many bodies of water as possible: Barton Springs Pool, Lake Travis, and other swimming holes I’ve heard about. There’s really nothing better than a cold swim on a hot day. I’d be curious to learn about people’s favorite spots!
Grand Synagogue of Edirne, Turkey, Construction began in 1906, and the building was restored in 2015.
RAPOPORT FELLOWS CONVENE FOR COLLOQUIUM
Second cohort demonstrates breadth of Jewish Studies research at UT
Approximately 30 faculty and student affiliates of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies gathered at the Glickman Conference Center in the afternoon on Friday, April 12 for the 2023-2024 Rapoport Fellows Colloquium.
The Rapoport Fellows Program was inaugurated in the 2022–2023 academic year with funding provided by the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies. The Rapoport Fellows Program is intended to support a wide variety of scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies. Faculty appointed as Rapoport Fellows are released from teaching up to two courses during the academic year. While fellows in this program, they conduct research on a topic related to Jewish Studies using the time afforded by the fellowship to advance their research.
This year’s fellows and their projects were:
Dr. Tony Keddie, Associate Professor, Department of Religion Studies, “Ancient Jewish Perspectives on Religion at Work”
Dr. Tatjana Lichtenstein, Associate Professor, Department of History, “Contesting Racial Status during the Holocaust: A Survival Strategy?”
Dr. Rebecca Rossen, Associate Professor, Department of Theater and Dance, “Moving Memories: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Dance”
At the Colloquium, each fellow presented a 20-minute report on some aspect of the research they conducted in the 2023–2024 academic year followed by questions from the audience. The projects pursued by this year’s class of fellows attest to the breadth, depth, and vigor of Jewish Studies at UT.
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE INCOMING FELLOWS!
The 2024–25 Rapoport Fellows at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin have been announced. The names of the fellows and their projects are:
Dr. John T. Bengson
Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts
“Religious and Ethical Understanding: Maimonides, Buber, Levinas, and Wiesel”
Dr. Hervé Picherit
Department of French and Italian, College of Liberal Arts
“Poetic Collaborators: Literary Fascism in Occupied France 19401944”
Dr. Anat Schechtman
Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts
“Ontic Infinity: Infinity and Perfection in Modern Philosophy”
The Rapoport Fellows Program is supported with funds from the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair in Jewish Studies.
Congratulations to the 2024-25 Rapoport Fellows!
Image: Tatjana Lichtenstein presents her research at this year’s Rapoport Fellows Colloquium. Credit: Jonathan Kaplan.
Dr. Avi Blitz joined the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Schusterman Center as an Assistant Professor of Instruction in January 2024. We caught up with Dr. Blitz to learn more about his teaching and research.
How did you become interested in Hebrew?
My connection with Hebrew goes back to my childhood. Though I grew up in the UK, my family always had ties to Israel, home to many friends and relatives. One of my earliest memories—I was perhaps ten years old—is visiting my great uncle Stanley Broza in Tel Aviv and hearing his stories about life in British Mandate Palestine. I studied Hebrew at the University of Oxford, and I fell in love with the language, its labyrinths of meaning, the scaffolding of root letters, the semantic jigsaw puzzles that often reveal new ways of seeing.
Who is your favorite Hebrew author and why?
S. Y. Agnon, a writer who preserves that aspect of Yiddishkeit that much of early Zionism sought to erase. Many scholars have noted the prominent Yiddish bones beneath the Hebrew derma of Agnon’s writing. Indeed, in later years, amid the Hebrew triumphalism of the 1960s, Agnon expressly wished for his writing to be translated into Yiddish. As someone with a deep interest in Jewish bilingualism, this aspect of Agnon exerts a powerful pull.
A COMMUNITY THROUGH HEBREW
New Hebrew Professor relies on language to build community and foster compassion at UT
Agnon’s Hebrew is extremely challenging, a palace of biblical allusions. I was fortunate to have a good cicerone, Professor Stephen Katz, in graduate school at Indiana University. That experience prepared me to teach Agnon’s short stories on many occasions, inspiring deep and complicated responses from my students.
Tell us a little bit about your research.
Both old and new Hebrew literature as well as Israeli culture are integral parts of my intellectual and emotional experience. At the same time, centuries of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew creativity, along with modern Yiddish culture, are important focus points in my scholarship.
My research in Comparative Literature was on the Tsenerene, a work that is sometimes called the “Women’s Bible.” The Tsenerene is a seventeenth-century anthology that mixes fragments of biblical Hebrew with Yiddish translations of midrash, commentary, and folklore. In a single passage, readers might discover a line of Torah in Hebrew, the learned interpretation of a sage translated into Yiddish, and a remedy for illness that includes the use of herbs or precious stones.
Editorial changes throughout the Tsenerene’s long history illuminate historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects in the evolution of Jewish life in Europe. I am interested in the text’s use of Hebrew sources and in how this popular anthology changes as Judaism encounters the challenges of modernity.
What has teaching Hebrew at UT Austin been like?
Teaching Hebrew at UT has been a nourishing experience of intellectual challenge and deep communion with our students. One student told me (in Hebrew), “Had I not studied Hebrew, I wouldn’t have met so many new friends. . . . I wouldn’t have had this place to go, a place where I see . . . great people every day. I can’t wait to see where Hebrew takes me.” Another made gentle reference to the political strains of this academic year: “The class is like a family. . . . The world is difficult at the moment, and this was a special place for us.”
It is a privilege to teach Hebrew at UT Austin and to be part of the supportive Middle Eastern Studies faculty. The class is very intensive, and students advance rapidly. They also discover a lot about one another. We share memories as we explore the past tense; we talk about hopes as we learn the future. This semester, we have all been deeply affected by the present, and we have sometimes had to grapple with difficult questions together. We improvise, we laugh, we mime, and occasionally there are sighs of exasperation when I utter the words “Ivrit be-vakasha—Keep the conversation in Hebrew!”
My Hebrew classes have challenged me, delighted me, and reminded me of the Talmudic dictum:
“Much have I learned from my teachers, more from my friends—and most from my students.” It is an honor to be part of the UT Austin community.
FACULTY NEWS
Robert Abzug, History, aided the Chinese translators of his latest book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May, scheduled to be published in Beijing in Fall 2024 with permission of Oxford UP. As series editor of Exploring Jewish Arts and Culture for UT Press, he secured for publication in January 2024 Borrowed Time, a book of oral history and photographs of survivors of Terezin by Dennis Darling, professor emeritus on photojournalism at UT. The volume includes a short history of Terezin in the context of the Holocaust by former SCJS director Tatjana Lichtenstein.
Avi Blitz, Middle Eastern Studies, presented the talk, “The Tsenerene: The Most Popular Yiddish Book in History,” through the Jewish Civilization Lecture Series at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He translated two collections of Yiddish poetry, by Chaim Krul and Dovid Zitman, which appeared in a book in November. He published a translation of a short story by Chilean-
Jewish writer Elisheva Rabinovitsh in the Yiddish Book Center’s series on Yiddish in Latin America. Blitz’s translation of a second short story, by Mexican-Jewish writer Moshe Rubinstein, has been accepted for publication in the same series and will appear in the summer.
Pascale Bos, Germanic Studies, coauthored with Insa Eschebach and Regina Mühlhäuser the article “’Das größte Bordell des Dritten Reiches’: Zur Geschichte der Sexualisierung des Frauen-Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück und dem Fall von Fermina Canaveras Roman El Barracón de las mujeres,” which was published in the May 2024 issue of Zeitschrift für Geschichts-wissenschaft, and with Insa Eschebach, “Cómo transformar el horror del campo nazi de Ravensbrück en ‘el mayor burdel del III Reich’” in the “Tribuna” section of the March 23, 2024 issue of El Confidencial. She gave the lecture and teaching workshop “Blurred Boundaries: Sex, Sexual Barter, and Sexual Violence during the Holocaust” at the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s Regional Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at UT.
and early Jewish liturgy. Second, she is looking at the development of rabbinical sermon writing across the careers of several prominent American rabbis. She is giving talks on these topics at upcoming conferences in rhetoric, Biblical Studies, and Jewish Studies and has a forthcoming article in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.
Heath D. Dewrell, Middle Eastern Studies, published “Kingship and Political Power in the Book of Hosea” in The Oxford Handbook of Hosea and presented a paper entitled “Is Isaiah a Pesher? Rethinking ‘Redaction’ in the Biblical Prophetic Corpus” at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. He served as lead organizer for the colloquium “Prophecy, Divination, and Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East.” He is currently writing his second monograph, which is an exploration of the historical development of ancient prophecy from the early second millennium until the turn of the era.
Davida Charney, Rhetoric, retired from the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the end of 20222023. She moved to Philadelphia where she is pursuing two projects. First, she is exploring the relationship between psalms and prayer in the Hebrew Bible
David Eaton, LBJ School, participated in the February 8 Middle Eastern Studies Faculty Roundtable on Israel and Palestine as one of six faculty connected to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and SCJS. David Eaton supervised five UT Austin students on summer internships in Israel under Texas Global’s Global Career LaunchIsrael program to address issues related to improving shared society and Palestinian opportunities within Israel. Intern Justin Rogers worked with Tsofen to facilitate PalestinianIsraeli employment in high-tech industries, and interns Samuel Weiss and Mia Weissbluth worked with Israeli attorneys Laster and Gouldman to prepare a report on the successes, shortcomings, and opportunities to improve the Kidron/Wadi Nar Basin Project, a joint Palestinian-Israeli water quality improvement project in the Jerusalem region. Intern Katrina Liebsch worked with the Mossawa Center in Haifa, promoting improved services and fiscal allocations for
Steven Seegel is awarded the Vega Medal by King Carl XVI Gustav at the Royal Castle of Sweden. Photo courtesy of Steven Seegel.
Palestinian communities in Israel. Intern Tanya Raghu worked in Jerusalem with the Jerusalem Press Club as an independent journalist preparing news stories on Palestinian arts, culture, and society.
In Middle Eastern Studies, Karen Grumberg’s edited volume Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past (University of Wales Press) received Honorable Mention in the Modern Language Association Edited Volume Prize. It was also longlisted for the International Gothic Association’s Justin D. Edwards Memorial Prize for an Edited Collection of Gothic Criticism. She published “Queer Gothic Narratives of Israel/Palestine in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani and Ayman Sikseck’s Tishrin” in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. She presented on “Difference as Ethics: A Case for Language and Area Studies in Comparative Gothic” at the IGA Gothic-Without-Borders conference. She published a review essay of Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center, by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi. With Dr. Ilana Szobel (Brandeis), she is translating the Hebrew poetry of Tsvia Litevsky. This summer, she will present papers on The Egyptian Novel by Orly Castel-Bloom (Cambridge, UK) and the poetry of Anton Shammas (Seattle).
Geraldine Heng, English, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Kendrick-CARA award by the Medieval Academy of America for distinguished contributions to Medieval Studies; published “Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” in the open access Cambridge University Press volume, Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, eds. Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee; and finished writing a new book, Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures (Cambridge UP).
Jonathan Kaplan, Middle Eastern Studies, published “Leviticus and the Rewriting of the Torah in 1QWords of Moses (1Q22)” in Torah in Early Jewish and Christian Imaginations (Mohr Siebeck). He presented papers at the Society for Utopian Studies, the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical
Literature, and the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies.
Tony Keddie, Religious Studies, published a co-edited volume with Nathan Leach and Daniel Charles Smith called Revelation and Material Religion in the Roman East: Essays in Honor of Steven J. Friesen (Routledge), including his chapter, “Blood Sacrifice in Revelation and Roman Asia: Encoding and Decoding Embodied Experience.” He published “Poor Subjects of the Hodayot: Apocalyptic Class Subjectivities in Practice” in Reimagining Apocalypticism (SBL). As a Rapoport Fellow, he co-organized a conference at UT with Dr. Martha Newman on “Religion and Work in the Late-Antique Mediterranean and Beyond,” the papers from which they are currently preparing for publication.
In Arts and Entertainment Technologies, Yuliya Lanina’s animation “Gefilte Fish” won Best International Short Film at the Tamuz Shomron Film Festival (Israel) and an Honorable Mention at the Female Eye Film Festival (Canada). This year solo shows include Artpace (San Antonio), Rabotaroom (Milan), Central Public Library (Austin), Sara Nightingale Gallery (Sag Harbor, NY) and Elisabet Ney Museum (Austin). Lanina’s work was reviewed in The Austin Chronicle, where Lanina was also featured on the cover, San Marcos Record (San Marcos, TX), and Our Texas (Houston).
Tatjana Lichtenstein, History, was a Rapaport Research Fellow at the SCJS this year in which she published two articles from her research project on intermarried families during the Holocaust. The articles on the persecuted’s legal strategies to change their racial status and the significance of social networks for mitigating persecution appeared in Judaica
Bohemiae and Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. With support from SCJS and other units across COLA, she co-organized a Regional Institute for college Holocaust educators with the Texas A&M University, San Antonio and the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University. She delivered the 11th Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture at Texas A&M in San Antonio.
Naomi Lindstrom, Spanish and Portuguese, published “Prophets and Sinners in the 1970s Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky” in Refocus: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky and “The Prophet, the Warrior, and the Guru in the Incal Saga of Alejandro Jodorowsky” in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics She participated in the conferences of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, and Jews in the Americas: A Hybrid Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Kansas. She was appointed to the Academic Advisory Council of the Jewish Women’s Archive.
Tracie Matysik, History, published two articles: “Ursus Sacer: Sovereignty and Bear Life in Heine’s Atta Troll” appeared in the 63rd volume of the Heine Jahrbuch, and “How Spinoza Became a
Image: Yuliya Lanina appears on the cover of The Austin Chronicle. Credit: Jana Birchum. Design: Zeke Barbaro.
Dialectical Materialist: Developments in German Social Democracy” is due out this summer in an edited volume with Oxford University Press on Spinoza’s thought in nineteenth-century German philosophy and politics. She is working with Bernardo Bianchi on a translation of Karl Marx’s detailed 1841 transcriptions from Spinoza’s works to be published with the University of Chicago Press. She presented her work at the Zentrum für Literatur in Berlin, the Centre Marc Bloch/Humboldt University, at Princeton University, and at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association in Montreal.
Julia Mickenberg, American Studies, published an article in Ms. Magazine about the writer Eve Merriam and her connection to Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were Merriam is the subject of Mickenberg’s current book project, which was supported last year by a Rapoport Fellowship. Mickenberg’s article, “Corresponding Stories: Theodore Dreiser’s Red Typewriter in Russia, Ruth Epperson Kennell,” was published in the journal American Literary Realism. Mickenberg presented a talk at the American Studies Association on the kids’ liberation movement of the 1970s.
Esther Raizen, Middle Eastern Studies, delivered the talk “Karashindo the Gnome as Imaginary Friend, Go-between, and Trainer” at the annual meeting of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew (Tel Aviv University). She published two papers: “Terrible Noise: Jean-Claude Pecker on Loss, Remembrance, and Silence” in Shofar, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies and “On Mischievousness, Intertextuality and Current Events in Three Plays by Anda Amir-Pinkerfeld” in Hebrew Higher Education.
In Theatre and Dance, Rebecca Rossen’s “Bodily Transfigurations and Transgenerational Trauma in the Multimedia Art of Yuliya Lanina” is being published in the Spring 2024 issue of the journal Feminist Studies. The essay includes eight pages of images of Lanina’s work.
Anat Schechtman, Philosophy, published “Modern” in the Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy and the essay “Modality and Essence in Early Modern Philosophy” in Modality: A Conceptual History (Oxford UP) and gave a lecture in the Herbert Family University Lecture series at the Undergraduate College at UT Austin in the spring. In Summer 2024, she will hold a Senior fellowship at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Hamburg.
Jonathan Schofer, Religious Studies, published “Ethics and the Public Reading of Scripture: B. Megillah 30b-31a on the Haftarot for the Annual Holidays” in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Textual Reasoning and “Substitutes for Sacrifice, Community Stewardship, and Rabbinic Paideia: Tractates Tithes and Second Tithe of the Mishnah” in Jewish Culture and Creativity (Academic Studies Press). He presented “Peace, The Transmission of Midrashic Traditions, and Substitutes for Sacrifice: Leviticus Rabbah 9:9” at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio.
Steven Seegel , Slavic and Eurasian Studies, was awarded the Vega Medal on April 22, Earth Day, for his books
and scholarly publications on Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the fields of human geography, the history of earth sciences, and critical cartography. He received the award in Stockholm from King Carl XVI Gustav at the Royal Castle of Sweden. A symposium was hosted in his honor by the Swedish Association for Geography and Anthropology, which issues the award every three years.
Suzanne Seriff, Anthropology/ SCJS, was the valedictorian of the first graduating class of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this May. In anticipation of the event, Seriff organized a national panel of folklorists at the annual American Folklore Society meetings in October who were all products of an arts-based public education. This spring, she developed and taught a new Expressive Culture class in the Department of Anthropology that draws on her career as a public and academic folklorist to explore the role that vernacular arts play in building community, strengthening identity, encouraging cross-cultural conversations, honoring the wisdom of our elders, and more.
Bruce Wells, Middle Eastern Studies, served as the editor of the newly published Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible and authored one of the book’s chapters (“The Nature of the Collections”). He published “Loyalty, Cooperation, and Integrity in the Deuteronomic Code,” a paper in the edited volume, Die Entdeckung des Politischen im Alten Testament. He presented, “Divorce and Demotion of Wives in the NeoBabylonian Period,” at the AOS national meeting, and he gave an invited presentation in Rome at the conference, “Divine Laws in the Ancient World: A Comparative Approach.”
Steven Seegel at the 2024 Vega Symposium held in his honor. Photo courtesy of Steven Seegel.
2023-2024 EVENTS
September
September 1
“Queer Utopias, Israeli/German Nationalisms and Animal Labor” Atalia Israeli-Nevo, UT Austin
September 6
“Absorption Narratives: Jewishness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the Cultural Imaginary of the Americas” Dr. Stephanie Pridgeon, Bates College
“Enoch Seminar Colloquium: A Discussion of The Mishnah and its Place in History”
September 7
Back-to-School Reception
September 27
“Wild Outside in the Night: Queer Jewishness and Childhood Liminality in the Picture-Books of Maurice Sendak” Dr. Golan Moskowitz, Tulane University
September 28
Film screening: “Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork” by Eyal Sivan
October
October 5
“Strangers in their Homeland: Palestinian Citizens under Military Rule in Israel (1948-1967)” Dr. Seraj Assi, Georgetown University
October 23
“It’s complicated! Network analysis and Jewish-Christian relationships in the Babylonian Talmud” Dr. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Ben Gurion University
October 24–25
Conference: Religion and Work in the Late-Antique Mediterranean and Beyond
November
November 5
Gale Family Foundation Fall 2023
Lecture: “Can the Poetic Imagination Save Jerusalem from Itself?” Dr. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
November 9
“Affinity against the Will?: Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School” Dr. Philipp Lenhard, University of California, Berkeley
November 11
“Isaac Bashevis Singer at 120!”
November 13
“Atrocity Prevention as a Core National Security Interest and Core Moral Responsibility: Where Does U.S. Action Stand?” Andrea Gittleman, Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Museum
November 13
“Data Management in the Imperial Period, Or: How Were Ancient Encyclopedias and other Erudite Compilations Made?” Dr. Monika Amsler, Universität Bern
November 16
Conference: Prophecy, Divination, and Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East
November 27
Faculty Workshop: “Teaching in Times of Crisis”
January
January 22
“The Jericho Labyrinth: Image and Interpretation in a Jewish-Christian Visual Motif” Dr. Daniel Stein Kokin, Arizona State University
January 25
“Antisemitism and the Presumption of Jewish Whiteness” Dr. Mara Lee Grayson, Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International
January 29
“Philosophy as Apologetics in Fourteenth-Century Jewish Thought” Dr. Yonatan Shemesh, Yale University
February
February 1
“Blue Aphrodite: Expanding the Conversation About Color in Late Antiquity” Dr. Katherine Taronas, UT Austin
“Media Coverage of the War in Gaza” Andrew Lee Butters, UT Austin
February 5
“A Sephardi Community at the Border: The Jews of Edirne from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early Turkish Republic” Dr. Jacob Daniels, Stanford University
February 6
“A Tale of Four Minorities” Film Screening, Discussion, and Q&A with Director David Deri
February 7
“The More Things Change: Funny Jews from Then to Now” Dr. Jennifer Caplan, University of Cincinnati
“Erasing the Individual: The Question of the Self in Palestinian Poetry and Critique” Dr. Adey Almohsen, Georgetown University
February 8
“Middle Eastern Studies Faculty Roundtable on Israel and Palestine”
February 12
“Toward a Theory of Islamic Philosemitism by Way of Jewish Cultural Heritage” Dr. Emily Gottreich, University of California at Berkeley
February 13
“The Alliance Israelite Universelle in Iran: Networks of Love, Learning, Labor and Liberation, 1898-1978” Isabelle S. Headrick, UT Austin
February 18
“The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare, Conquest, and Genocide across North America” Dr. William Kiser, Texas A&M San Antonio
February 18–19
Conference: Holocaust Educational Foundation/ Northwestern University’s Regional Institute
February 20
“Seeking Revenge and Justice after the Holocaust in the Soviet Union” Dr. Diana Dumitru, Georgetown University
February 23–24
Conference: Redefining Arabic: New Approaches to the Study of Arabic’s Past and Present
February 25
Gale Family Foundation Spring 2024 Lecture: “Child of Two Genocides: From Holocaust to Reservation in My Parents’ Two Americas”
Dr. David Treuer, University of Southern California
February 28
“Ancient Truth, Modern Controversy”
Dr. Joshua Katz, American Enterprise
Institute
March
March 5
“Human Rights in the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict” Amit Schejter, Ben-Gurion University, and Ariel Dulitzky, UT Austin Law School
March 6
A Conversation with Peter Beinart City University of New York
March 18
“Palestine Studies, Israel Studies, and Palestine/Israel Studies” Dr. Tamir Sorek, Pennsylvania State University
March 20
“Public Exegesis in Late Antiquity through the Lens of the Qur’an” Dr. Reyhan Durmaz, University of Pennsylvania
April
April 12
2023–2024 Rapoport Fellows Colloquium
April 15
“Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Rethinking the Question” Dr. Ethan Katz, University of California, Berkeley
April 16
Ice Cream Social
April 17
“Philosemitism without Jews: Brazilian Political Uses of the Imaginary Jews” Dr. Misha Klein, University of Oklahoma
Top: Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi delivers the Gale Family Foundation Fall 2023 Lecture. Bottom: William Kiser presents his research on February 18 at SCJS. Credit for both images: Jonathan Kaplan.
2023-2024 COURSES
Fall 2023
Jewish Folklore Adrien Smith
Jewish Civilization: Beginning to 1492 Jonathan Schofer
The Rise of Christianity Katherine Taronas
Introduction to Holocaust and Genocide Studies Tatjana Lichtenstein
Introduction to the Old Testament Bruce Wells
History of Israel Ahmad Agbaria
Law and Justice in the Hebrew Bible Bruce Wells
Arab Citizens of Israel Ahmad Agbaria
Austin Jews in the Civil Rights Era
Suzanne Seriff
Jerusalem Jonathan Kaplan
Internship in Jewish Studies
Suzanne Seriff
Independent Research in Jewish Studies Jonathan Kaplan
Intensive Hebrew I Esther Raizen and Rina Kreitman
Hebrew through the Media Rina Kreitman
Accelerated First-Year Yiddish Adrien Smith
Spring 2024
Jews of Eastern Europe Adrien Smith
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Naila Razzaq
Comparative Religious Ethics Jonathan Schofer
Women and the Holocaust Pascale Bos
Anti-Semitism in History and Literature John Hoberman
Arab-Israeli Conflict Ahmad Agbaria
Levant: Colonial/Coexistence Ahmad Agbaria
Internship in Jewish Studies Suzanne Seriff
Legends of the Jews Esther Raizen
Accelerated Second-Year Yiddish Adrien Smith
Intensive Hebrew II Avi Blitz
Innovation and Technology in Israel (taught in Hebrew) Esther Raizen
Independent Research in Jewish Studies Adrien Smith
Conference Course in Hebrew Language and Literature
Esther Raizen
We offered 30 courses.
We provided $43,000+ in student support. We sponsored 42 events and 3 conferences.
More than 1798 people attended our events.
We taught 729 students. We had 36 affiliated faculty members.
SCHUSTERMAN CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES
The University of Texas at Austin Patton Hall (RLP) 2.402
305 E 23rd St B3600
Austin, Texas 78712
512-475-6178
liberalarts.utexas.edu/scjs
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan | Director
Dr. Karen Grumberg | Associate Director for Israel Studies
Dr. Naomi Lindstrom | Director, Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas
Dr. Suzanne Seriff | Director, Internship Program in Jewish Studies
Emily Pietrowski | Administrative Associate
Michelle D. Escalante | Academic Advisor
Michelle W. Fandrich | Senior Course Scheduler
Uri Kolodney | Hebrew, Jewish, and Israel Studies Liaison Librarian
Dr. Lindsay Alissa King | Annual Editor
