Center for Jewish Studies
“Transmitting and transforming Jewish scholarship for over 40 years�
Annual Magazine
Fall 2018
From the Director Welcome to the start of the 2018-2019 academic year! This has been an exceptional year of growth at the Center for Jewish Studies. First and foremost, the addition of the position of Associate Director, held by Dr. Natan Paradise, has helped the Center take on a number of new initiatives. Among his many duties, Dr. Paradise now serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies and has been working tirelessly to create an even stronger and more visible program for our students. Dr. Paradise has also brought in a greatly increased number of new Jewish Studies majors and minors and has been teaching two core courses for Jewish Studies. I am also delighted to welcome our most recent additions to the Jewish Studies faculty: Rabbi Ryan Dulkin and James Ron (Humphrey School; Political Science), as well as our visiting faculty this year: Prof. Natalie Belsky from the Duluth campus, and Dr. Katya Oicherman. This past year has also been shaped by the path-breaking exhibit, “A Campus Divided,” curated by former CJS Director, Professor Emerita Riv-Ellen Prell. The discussions about the history of racism and antisemitism sparked by the exhibit have been significant. We plan to build on these important conversations this year and to continue to build bridges between Jewish studies and other fields of scholarly inquiry, in particular focusing on the interrelations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. To that end, as we continue our service to the community and commit to a broader understanding of what is meant by community, this coming year we will host—for the first time--one of our annual lectures in the Community Lecture Series at Westminster Presbyterian Church. Thanks to the initiative of Jewish Studies Advisory board member Rev. Gary Reierson, the Center will launch its 2018-19 Community Lecture Series at Westminster with a talk entitled “Sharing Sacred Spaces in Jerusalem: Between Contestation and Tolerance,” by visiting scholar Yitzhak Reiter. Some of you may remember Yitzhak, whom the Center for Jewish Studies had the pleasure of hosting as a Schusterman Visiting Israel Scholar in 2004-05. As many of you know, Westminster is the premier location in the Twin Cities for interfaith events that engage a broad public. The Center has always held outreach to the broader community as a centerpiece of our mission; with this talk at Westminster, we truly are making the “community” in our Community Lecture Series take on a new meaning. I also want to thank Stuart Bear for his wise and dedicated leadership during his many years serving as chair of the CJS Advisory Board. I am enormously grateful to Allan Baumgarten, who has graciously taken over as chair of the board, and I look forward to working closely with Allan and with the rest of the advisory board as we move the Center forward. My gratitude goes as well to the Deans of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota for their support of our mission to bring cutting-edge research and teaching in the field of Jewish Studies to the students at the University of Minnesota, and to the broader public. We look forward to seeing you at this year’s Community Lecture Series and at the many events we are hosting on campus. One highlight: faculty members Bruno Chaouat, Daniel Schroeter, and Melissa Sellew 1 Letter from the Director are organizing a scholarly conference on the topic of “The Hyphenated Jew” that will take place in April, 2 Report from the Associate Director 2019. Please visit our website, jwst.umn.edu, to find Undergraduate Feature: History and Tourism in Spain 3 a listing of our events, and where you will also find a link to the CJS YouTube channel where you may watch 4 Undergraduate Feature: Erasures of Jewish Identity lectures you have missed. 5 Recent Grad at The Leo Baeck Institute Finally, please let me or Natan know if you 5-6 have any ideas or thoughts about how you would like Graduate Student Spotlights the Center to grow. We welcome your input. 7-9 Faculty News & Notes
In this edition:
With best wishes, Leslie Morris Dirctor, Center for Jewish Studies Professor, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch
Update on “A Campus Divided” CJS Scholarship Winners Faculty Year in Review CJS Donors Welcome Visiting Scholars
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Cover image: Excerpt from a manuscript by Ber Borochov, n.d. First page of an undated manuscript of an outline for a work on Yiddish and other Jewish languages by Ber Borochov. Overlaid with Jewish-themed stamps from Belarus, Germany, the town of Luboml, Poland, and Romania.
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Report From the Associate Director & Director of Undergraduate Studies
I write having now completed my first year as Associate Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, a new position made possible with the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts, as well as the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and the Department of English. I should begin by saying that taking on this role has been a little bit like going into the family business. As you may know, my father, Jonathan Paradise, taught Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, and I have spent my entire life being told by complete strangers that they took a class from my father, and that he was the best teacher they ever had. My goal in the classroom is to live up to that reputation. Of the many things I learned this first year in the CJS, the most important is that students are hungry for the education we provide. Our students are a diverse group and take courses in Jewish Studies for equally diverse reasons. Some are Jewish; most are not. Some want to learn more about what they consider their heritage. Others take our courses because they are students of religion, history, literature, culture, or politics, or because they have a Jewish friend and want to learn more, or they have heard things in the news and want more context, or because their religious identity makes our curriculum relevant to them. Some want to learn more about the Holocaust. Still others take our courses simply because they fulfill a general education requirement and sound interesting, or because they have heard a particular course is fascinating or a professor truly excellent. Some students take one course and get sucked in. Of all the motivators, there is one in particular that we currently are not adequately fulfilling: students want to learn more about Israel, its history, culture, and politics, and we do not have an Israel studies scholar on our faculty. This need came home to me when students from MN Hillel asked for help in responding to BDS initiatives on campus. The Center for Jewish Studies is not an advocacy organization, but as an academic center it is part of our role to provide educational programming to the campus community. Since students were particularly concerned about a sign being used by BDS proponents, I offered to prepare a lecture on the complex challenges in creating accurate visual representations of the changing demographics and landuse history from Ottoman Palestine until today, and how those representational challenges play out in the context of a political conflict. In delivering this lecture, it became clear how little the students in attendance knew about Israel and its history. We occasionally are able to offer relevant courses, and as it happens this coming fall we are offering two, taught by CJS faculty members Daniel Schroeter and James Ron, but we have identified it as a high priority need that we establish a faculty position in Israel studies, which will ensure that such courses are regularly available to students. Funding such a position, however, will require the generous support of donors who are committed to the educational mission of the Center for Jewish Studies. In a related initiative, we are looking to build on our already established ties with Hebrew University and the University of Haifa in order to create a scholarship fund such that all students in our program will be able to spend at least one semester studying in Israel. Currently, tuition and fees for our programs in Israel are only a little bit more than what it costs students for a semester here. With just a little support, we can make it cheaper for students to study in Israel for a semester than to stay here, which will greatly increase participation in these study abroad programs that critically advance students’ Hebrew skills and knowledge of Israel. If you are interested in supporting either of these initiatives, please contact me or Center Director, Leslie Morris. With gratitude and best wishes, Natan Paradise Associate Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies
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Undergraduate Feature: Reconciling History and Tourism – An Analysis of the Sefarad Zachor Markers of Seville, Spain
Considering that the history of Spanish Jewry goes back at least 2000 years, and that Spanish Jews for a time lived in one of the largest, most influential, and most prosperous Jewish communities in the world, it is not surprising that Noah Farber (Management Information Systems, minor in Jewish studies) thought to combine his Learning Abroad experience in Spain with his Jewish studies minor. But last fall when he approached the Center’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, Natan Paradise, to ask if any of the courses from his Learning Abroad program in Madrid could count toward the Jewish studies minor, it turned out none of the courses offered were relevant. Paradise instead advised Noah to put together a directed study supervised, long distance, by CJS faculty member Daniel Schroeter. And in the end, Noah’s project turned out to be much more original and important than anything Paradise or Schroeter could have anticipated in their initial conversations. Noah first studied the history of the Jews of Spain and then applied what he had learned to a critical analysis of the “Sefarad Zachor” (Remember Sefarad) markers placed in Seville by an organization called the “Network of Jewish Quarters in Spain – Routes of Sefarad” or Red de Juderias. Noah writes that Red de Juderias was founded in 1995 “when a few Spanish cities decided to gather into an association focused on promoting Jewish heritage. The goal was to present ‘Jewish Spain’ in a consistent way throughout these cities, to establish a uniform marker of Jewish sites and method for land marking these sites, and to ultimately Noah Farber (right) market these Jewish sites to tourists.” The original initiative was funded by the Spanish gov- and his local inforernment (along with funds from the U.S. and Israel). But with the help of local informant mant, Moises HassánMoises Hassán-Amsélem of Seville, whom Noah recruited to help him and the only Jewish Amsélem, in Seville. member of the committee empowered to place “Sepharad Zachor” markers in Seville, Noah learned that as additional Spanish cities joined the association and had to pay fees to be part of the initiative, it became a source of revenue—with a subsequent decline in standards of historical accuracy. Noah notes of his research project, “I don’t want this to be read as a general criticism of my experience in Spain, but rather as a specific criticism of the challenge that Spain has in telling the history of the Jews of their country, and how I came to understand that the official government story of that history leaves out some ‘inconvenient truths.’” His analysis of the markers of “Sepharad Zachor” shows that “there is much to be learned from these markers, they do show part of the story. What is more challenging is to understand what is missing.” As he observes: the only way to understand why a marker is placed where it is placed is to access the explanations on the redjuderias.org website. This website becomes an incredibly important source of information. In my analysis, this website is actually the official Spanish Government’s perspective of the Jewish history of Spain. It is the source of “truth,” the connection between the physical places a tourist visits and the history of that place. How then, is this history represented? Knowing the complex history of the Jews of Spain, can a tourist following the “Routes of Sefarad” gain insight into this complexity? Noah goes on to explain, “the Caminos de Sefarad website offers no citations for their assertions so it is basically impossible to ‘fact check’ without doing original research yourself. This is such a high expectation for any tourist that I assume virtually no one questions what is written by Caminos de Sefarad. Therefore, I took the time over my 5 months in Spain to conduct this research and analysis.” Noah’s analysis shows that the website is often accurate, and it at times presents what he terms “the darkest parts of their own history” with considerable sensitivity and honesty, but it also has significant omissions or even perpetuates myths, including some of the very myths that played into the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. For example, Noah points out that the website perpetuates the historical canard that the Jews conspired with the Arabs who conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, while also repeating an anti-Semitic slur about Jewish influence and money: “During the conquest of Spain by the Arabs, the Jews who had contributed to the invasion were respected and treated generously by the Moslems and they settled in the cities taken, enjoying great influence in the new society, partly thanks to their financial clout.” (Cont. page 4)
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Noah plans to follow up on his research project by transforming scholarship into practice. He intends to write the organization Red de Juderias to report on his research and to ask them to make specific changes to the information they provide so that it is more historically accurate. And finally, he has pointed the way for future students to continue the work: I have been thinking about how enriching this research project has been to my overall experience as a student in Spain. Additionally, I think that there are opportunities for other Jewish studies students to have similarly enriching experiences. As big as a project as this was for me, in reality, I barely scratched the surface of this topic. “Routes of Sefarad” has 19 cities with “Sefard Zachor” markers in Spain - 523 markers in Spain alone. I found issues with 10% of the markers as well as some of the official government website’s analysis of the sites in Seville. This leads me to believe that there is a great opportunity for future students to engage in similar analysis on these other sites in Spain. The “Network of Jewish Quarters of Spain - Routes of Sefarad” is a part of the European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage (AEPJ) which strives to preserve, appreciate and promote Jewish culture in Europe. The AEPJ also has “European Routes of Jewish Heritage”. I have not done any research about these sites, but I do think that it might be worthwhile for them to be analyzed as well. Noah in this has made an excellent suggestion, and the Center for Jewish Studies will explore whether funding might be available to help other students continue the work he has begun.
Undergraduate Feature: Responding to Erasures of Jewish Identity: Undergraduate Rena Fedorova Takes a Stand When junior Rena Fedorova (political science; minor in Jewish studies) took Jewish American Literature with Natan Paradise this past spring, one of the assignments was to read poetry by Maxine Kumin, along with Kumin’s biography on the poetryfoundation.org website. Students read poems such as “Sisyphus” (1962) in which the poet relates a childhood experience pushing a man in a wheelchair up a hill:
Up past the sisters of Saint Joe I pushed my stone so God would know. And he, who could not genuflect on seamy stumps, stitched his respect with fingers in the air. He called me a perfect Christian child. One day I said I was a Jew. I wished I had. I wanted to.
“I really am grateful for the Jewish Studies program! Everything I’ve learned in your classes … has inspired me to pursue these opportunities and to educate others on Jewish history and culture. I’m so excited to see everything I can do with this minor!” Rena Fedorova
After reading this and similar poems, and after learning that Kumin countered a reviewer’s claim that in her first collection Judaism is a ‘mere biographical detail’ by insisting, “My Jewish consciousness is present in a goodly number of poems from that first book onward,” Rena was astonished that the Poetry Foundation made absolutely no mention of Kumin’s Jewish identity, nor did the website feature any of Kumin’s many poems about her experiences as a Jew. Rena decided to take her learning out of the classroom and do something with it. As she wrote her professor, “After our last class, I was really upset about Maxine Kumin’s bio on the Poetry Foundation’s website, so I emailed them about it. I wrote to them about the erasure of Jewish identity in literary and philosophical figures, like we discussed, and cited the poems we read for class by Kumin.” In response, the Poetry Foundation, one of the largest literary foundations in the world, agreed to revise their website content and to contact the estate of Maxine Kumin to request permission to include some of the additional poems Rena directed them to. And Rena, for her part, discovered that she can take what she learns in her Jewish studies courses and make a difference in the world. This summer Rena continued her commitment to taking her learning outside of the classroom as the first student to participate in our newly established internship partnership with St. Paul Jewish Family Service. She will be applying what she learned in JWST 3729 “Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Europe” as she interviews Russian-speaking Holocaust survivors and translates their stories into English.
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Recent Graduate Derek Wiebke to Conduct Research at The Leo Baeck Institute in Berlin When spring 2018 graduate Derek Wiebke (BA German, Scandinavian, and Dutch) first came to the University of Minnesota, he was primarily interested in running for the Gopher’s track and field team and majoring in something that complemented his interest in sports—perhaps kinesiology. He began taking German, however, because he thought it would be fun to learn a second language, and as he progressed through the German curriculum he discovered an evolving intellectual passion. His interests led him to CJS Director Leslie Morris’s class on Jewish writers, and his experience in that class--combined with the impact of hearing Susan Faludi’s lectures as part of the CJS 2017-2018 Community Lecture Series--pointed him toward future research in Jewish studies with comparative interests in both German-Jewish literature and American-Jewish literature. Derek begins his graduate studies this fall at the University of Washington in the Department of Germanics, where he will focus on his literary interests while also pursuing an affiliation with the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at Washington. He reports that “the core of my research interests consists of questions of identity, mostly but not limited to personal, national and existential (Jewish) identification within and outside of twentieth-century literature.” Yet even before beginning his graduate coursework, Derek has successfully applied—at Leslie Morris’s urging—to conduct research at the Leo Baeck Institute in Berlin through its 2018 Summer University in Jewish Studies. Named after Rabbi Leo Baeck, prominent liberal theologian, the last leader of the German Jewish community under the Nazis, and most famously known as the “Rabbi of Theresienstadt,” the Leo Baeck Institute was founded in New York, London, and Jerusalem in 1955 by leading GermanJewish intellectuals including Martin Buber, Max Grunewald, Hannah Arendt, and Robert Weltsch. It is devoted to researching the history of German Jewry since the Enlightenment, and the Berlin branch provides access in Germany to one of the largest archives on German-Jewish history. The theme of this year’s Summer University is “Jewish Studies and Gender Research,” and Derek’s project proposes “a comparative study of German- and American-Jewish writers of the twentieth century who showcase the boundaries of Jewish and queer identities.” Authors in the project include Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan. Derek reports that “in addition to refining my ideas for this project, I look forward to receiving valuable feedback from other participants and world-renown scholars in the fields of German, Jewish, queer, and cultural studies.” Derek has also landed an internship with TC Jewfolk (tcjewfolk.com), the Twin Cities’ online media hub devoted to engaging, informing, and connecting the Twin Cities Jewish community. Derek will be the editorial intern, producing content for the website in addition to managing the weekly newsletter. We in the Center for Jewish Studies look forward to seeing the fruit of Derek’s scholarship and other contributions in the coming years, and we also congratulate him on his achievements as the ideal scholar-athlete. This past spring Derek, who won the 2017 Big Ten Indoor Mile Championship by running a brilliantly strategic race in 4:01.85 (the fourth fastest time in University of Minnesota history), was awarded the prestigious Big Ten Conference Medal of Honor while also being inducted into the University of Minnesota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Well done, Derek!
Graduate Student Spotlights
Meyer Weinshel (PhD candidate, Germanic Studies) grew up “with little or no knowledge of German-
Jewish culture and its complexities,” and his background in Yiddish language and culture was similarly spare “beyond works by Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer in translation.” All this began to change after he studied in Berlin and Vienna as an undergraduate and then returned to Vienna the year after receiving his BA in German (with minors in history and classics) from Macalester. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and especially after CJS Director Leslie Morris encouraged him to study Yiddish to satisfy the PhD second language requirement, Meyer found himself gravitating toward Jewish studies. He spent three summers--two in New York City at YIVO and one in Lithuania--learning Yiddish and studying Yiddish-speaking cultures, past and present. Consequently, Meyer (Cont. page 6)
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Meyer Weinshel
reports, “Yiddish has become central to my project, and to my professional and pedagogical trajectory.” His dissertation, “Contiguities of Translation: German-Language Poetry and the Creation of Modern Jewish Cultures in Habsburg Austria,” traces the ways German-language poetry in translation influenced major writers of Yiddish and Hebrew Modernism in Habsburg Central Europe, and how multilingualism and multiple literatures existed simultaneously for many Jewish writers in the early twentieth century. Meyer insists, “acts of translation are central to the study of Jewish history and cultures, and in the modern age many works of translation from/into German, Yiddish, and Hebrew in Central Europe attest to this process, especially how Jewish writers sought to position themselves culturally and politically across these different divides.” With support from the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, and under the auspices of the Jerusalem Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Austrian Studies at the Hebrew University, Meyer will be conducting research this coming year at the National Library of Israel, researching translation projects completed by Yiddish writers from Habsburg and East Central Europe (Melech Ravitch and Itzik Manger to name two notable writers). Meyer’s academic journey has been personal, too. As he explains, “I met someone in my first Yiddish class at YIVO who had grown up in Milwaukee with my great-grandparents and their siblings, and they and her father had performed in Yiddish theater productions together.” Thanks to his classmate and Meyer’s research skills, he discovered materials in the YIVO archive, donated by his own great-great uncle, that chronicled six decades of Yiddish theater in Milwaukee. Not only were there photos, playbooks, and other memorabilia, but also included in the personal documents was his great-great grandfather’s Polish passport that he used to emigrate, along with theater programs from the ancestral shtetl. In other archives, Meyer found photos of family members, including a picture of the Weinshel family house taken during the Austrian occupation of the town in World War I. Meyer concludes, “these are just some examples of how Yiddish opened up an entirely new world--in addition to it strengthening my academic work.”
•••••• •••••• •••••• •••••• Noam Sienna (PhD Candidate, History) compares working with fragments from the Cairo Genizah to “putting together half a
million different puzzles that have been all jumbled together, and with half the pieces missing.” Recently, however, he succeeded in joining together two fragments that had only been studied separately. The fragment catalogued in Oxford as Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25-28 has long been identified as one of the earliest examples of an illuminated ketubbah. The second fragment, T-S K10.4, is in Cambridge, and it was first thought to be from an illuminated bible. It was not recognized as a ketubbah fragment until the 1970s. Both fragments have been studied in detail. In preparing a lecture on Hebrew micrography, however, Noam saw what others had not. As he reports his discovery, “I looked for an image of a Geniza ketubbah with micrography and found pictures of both the Oxford and Cambridge ketubbot. Arranging them on the slide, it occurred to me that they were quite similar. I inched them closer and closer to each other. Not almost — they did match up perfectly.” The join was confirmed on closer inspection by the micrographic decoration of the piyyut “Yefefiyya veḥamuda” by the eleventh-century poet Yinnon bar Ṣemaḥ, which is continuous from one fragment to the other. According to Sienna, joining the fragments now allows the reconstruction of one of the largest illuminated medieval kebubbot from the Genizah. He argues, moreover, that the newly-joined ketubbah demonstrates a clear relationship between the decoration of ketubbot and the carpet pages of Masoretic Bibles, and that the similarities between the kettubah and luxury bibles like the Leningrad Codex (the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, dated 1009), suggest that the same artists and illuminators who adorned such bibles may have also been commissioned to produce ketubbot. Congratulations to Noam on his discovery! Readers who are interested in learning more about the Cairo Genizah are invited to attend the upcoming Community Lecture Series presentation by renowned Genizah expert Marina Rustow, February 27 at Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights.
Cambridge University Library T-S K10.4 (right) joined up with Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25 (right: reproduced by the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; right; reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). Digital image prepared by Aaron Hodge Silver.
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Faculty News and Notes Daniel Schroeter Wins Shaul Ben Simhon Prize for the Study of North African Jewry Daniel Schroeter has been awarded the Shaul Ben Simhon Prize for the Study of North African Jewry by BenGurion University of the Negev. He received the prize at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva on June 6, 2018 at an award ceremony accompanied by a symposium on North African Jewry, complete with performances of North African music. Schroeter is only the second scholar to win this annual award, which was established last year by Ben-Gurion University and the World Organization of North African Jews, and which goes to a “leading scholar” in the field. The World Organization of North African Jews has been active for more than forty years in supporting contact between North African Jews worldwide – among themselves and with the Jewish Maghrebi community in Israel. It also promotes North African Jewish heritage and encourages its creativeness in all fields. The prize is named after Shaul Ben Simhon, a Moroccan Jew and founding member of the World Organization of North African Jews, as well as its leader for thirty years. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 1948, and as a consequence of his union leadership at the port of Ashdod, he became a high-ranking member of the Histadrut, the organization representing Israel’s trade unions. Shaul Ben Simhon played a leading role in increasing recognition for the Moroccan Jewish community in Israel. As part of his advocacy on behalf of his community, in 1968 Ben Simhon held the first public Mimouna ceremony in Lod. Mimouna is a Moroccan Jewish celebration that begins immediately upon the conclusion of Passover. Since Jews in Morocco would have emptied their homes of flour and all other chametz before Passover, at the end of the holiday Muslim neighbors would come over with flour as well as honey, butter, yeast, and other chametz ingredients needed to prepare festive sweets. Jewish families would throw open their doors, and Jew and Muslim alike would travel from home to home partaking of sweet delicacies and celebrating together. Mimouna thereby became synonymous with good neighborly relations between Jewish and Muslim communities. In 1969 Shaul Ben Simhon moved his public Mimouna celebration to Jerusalem, where it attracted over 5.000 attendees. It has since grown to an annual event held in Sacher Park in Jerusalem that regularly draws over 100,000 attendees, and its observance has spread beyond the Moroccan Jewish community and is widely celebrated in Israel the day after Passover in the form of barbecues and picnics in city parks. It has also become a political event, giving politicians an opportunity to show their respect to North African Jewish communities. Shaul Ben Simhon, though ailing, was present last year at the inaugural awarding of the prize named in his honor, as was Daniel Schroeter, who attended as an invited speaker. Ben Simhon died about a month later. The Shaul Ben Simhon Prize, however, helps ensure that his commitment to the preservation of North African Jewish history and culture will be carried forward, and the Center for Jewish Studies is proud to see Schroeter’s work publicly linked, through the awarding of this prize, to the promotion of scholarship on Maghrebi Jewry.
Above left and right: Daniel Schroeter Speaks at the award ceremony.
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Scholarship in Progress: Spotlight on Patricia Ahearne-Kroll
There are two reconstructed texts of Joseph and Aseneth, the subject of Ahearne-Kroll’s book. Joseph and Aseneth, often characterized as a novel or romance, expands on Genesis 41:45 to tell the tale of how Joseph and Aseneth met and married, how Joseph Patricia Ahearne-Kroll (Assistant Professor, Classical ultimately became king over Egypt, and how Aseneth turned away and Near Eastern Studies) is working on a book-length manufrom her Egyptian gods to the God of Israel. In examining the two script, A Jewish Novel from Egypt: A Case for the Composition reconstructed texts, Ahearne-Kroll explains, “my book outlines of “Joseph and Aseneth.” In this study Ahearne-Kroll tackles a the problems of each and proposes a new fundamental challenge in Pseudepigrapha way to hypothesize the initial story while studies: positing the significance of a piece also making transparent the variations of the of literature when it was first composed. story that exist in the manuscript evidence.” Determining when a pseudoepiThere are 91 manuscripts in seven languages graphic text was “first composed” is itself preserving Joseph and Aseneth, so any such a complicated undertaking fraught with analysis represents a monumentally complilinguistic, historic, and hermeneutical cated undertaking, and Ahearne-Kroll relies challenges. Pseudepigraphic texts such as on multiple editions to keep track of the tex“The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs” tual variants. (which purports to record the deathbed ex In making her argument about the sigPatricia Ahearne-Kroll hortations of the twelve sons of Jacob, and nificance of the text for its earliest audience, which has been variously characterized as Ahearne-Kroll says, “I depend on the concept of the ‘fabula’ from an early Jewish work, a Jewish work retouched by Christians, or Russian formalism, and I describe the significance of the story for fundamentally a Christian composition) and the “Psalms of SolJews in Hellenistic Egypt between 100 B.C.E. and 100 C.E.” Ultiomon” (a group of eighteen psalms that are not part of any scripmately, Ahearne-Kroll argues that her analysis demonstrates how tural canon) have mostly been preserved by Christian scribes Joseph and Aseneth’s narrative expansion of the Joseph novella in in late antiquity. As Ahearne-Kroll explains, scholars typically Genesis “fits with other Jewish expansions of biblical literature at rereate a hypothetical ‘first text’ (called the “reconstructed text”) that time, as especially evident in the fragments of Artapanus, a by combing through all the later, manuscript evidence. Hellenistic Jewish author.”
Hebrew Language Coordinator Renana
that failure to comply with this Pledge may result in my expulsion. Schneller Invited to Teach at Prestigious This ban against using any language other than Hebrew during the Middlebury Language Schools program extends not only to the classroom, but to the students’ entire time within the program. All listening, reading, writing, as Renana Schneller, who has been teaching Hebrew at well as speaking must be done in Hebrew. This means that newsthe University of Minnesota for 19 years (since papers and books must be in Hebrew, all internet 1999) joined the summer faculty of Middlebury browsing must be done in Hebrew, and the School Language Schools at Middlebury College in Verprovides televisions in the common spaces with mont. Students, have no fear: Renana will continsatellite programming in Hebrew. Watching TV ue to teach you here during the regular academic or other media in any language other than Hebrew year. violates the pledge. Dr. Schneller was invited to teach at In yet another recognition of Schneller’s exMiddlebury School of Hebrew in recognition not pertise in Hebrew language pedagogy, she (along only of her expertise in Hebrew language but in with two colleagues from the University of MichiHebrew language pedagogy. Middlebury Langan and the University of Maryland) has also been guage Schools have been considered the gold awarded the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Grant Renana Schneller standard in language instruction for 100 years, for Less Commonly Taught Languages. This grant and the School of Hebrew uses an immersion will support the development of materials for the methodology “to allow teachers of Hebrew as a second language teaching of Modern Hebrew entirely online. Once Schneller and to advance in their own teaching and to professionalize their her colleagues complete their work, the course they have created field.” Schneller will be teaching courses as part of the Middle- will be available at all Big Ten universities. bury Master of Arts in Teaching Hebrew as a Second Language. Knowledge of Hebrew (biblical or modern) is a core re A signature element of Middlebury’s program is that quirement within our undergraduate major, and The Center for students must sign the following pledge: Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota is pleased to adver In signing this Language Pledge®, I agree to use Hebrew tise that students in our program benefit from modern Hebrew as my only language of communication while attend- instruction in classrooms conducted by an instructor who has obing the Middlebury Language Schools. I understand tained this level of national recognition.
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Bruno Chaouat at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism CJS faculty member Bruno Chaouat served this year as a Visiting Scholar Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Center, established in 1982, “is primarily interested in providing a high-level platform within academia for understanding the historical and contemporary contexts of antisemitic prejudice, its occurrences, and its mechanisms, including comparative perspectives on other forms of discrimination and racism.” SICSA invited Chaouat to apply to the position, after which a committee selected him from an international pool of distinguished scholars. While serving as a Visiting Scholar Fellow, Chaouat lectured to both academic and general audiences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Topics include “Emmanuel Levinas: A Moderate Radical,” and “Jews Bruno Chaouat in French Thought: From Postwar to Current Challenges.” Chaouat also lectured on “Georges Bataille’s Gnostic Existentialism” at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, and his essay on Georges Bataille will appear in Yale French Studies in a special issue on existentialism. He has also completed an essay on Levinas as reader of Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew, to be published by Brill as part of the proceedings of a Hebrew University conference on Sartre’s influential book. To cap off Chaouat’s productive semester, Hebrew University hosted an event in June centered on his recent book, Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Reflecting on his experience as a Visiting Scholar Fellow and representative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Jewish Studies, Chaouat observes, “It has been eye-opening to work and live in Jerusalem for six months and benefit from the vibrant intellectual life at the Hebrew University campus, as well as other campuses such as Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan. Most extraordinary for American and European scholars is the ongoing dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem--since so many students and researchers work at the crossroads between European thought and the Jewish tradition, in the venerable tradition of Levinas, Buber, Rosenzweig and Benjamin.”
Gary Cohen Awarded Prize by Czech Academy of Sciences Gary Cohen (Professor Emeritus, History) has been awarded the František Palacký Medal for Excellence in Historical Studies by the Czech Academy of Sciences. This award was established in 1965 by the then Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences for accomplishments in historical research, whether by historians, philosophers, legal scholars, or sociologists. It is named for the mid-nineteenth century Czech historian and national leader, František Palacký, known as the “Father of the Czech Nation,” and who is considered the founder of Czech historiography. Cohen has published extensively on Czech society, culture, and nation-building, and on Jewish and German-speaking minorities in Czech lands; his book The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton University Press, 1981; revised, second edition, Purdue University Press, 2006) appeared in Czech translation as Němci v Praze, 1861-1914. He has also published articles in Czech historical journals. Cohen will be traveling to Prague to receive the award.
František Palacký on a Czech Banknote
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Gary Cohen
An Update on “A Campus Divided”
When Riv-Ellen Prell (Professor Emerita, American Studies, and past director of the CJS) retired last year, her scholarship and service to the University community did not end. Her exhibit, “A Campus Divided: Progressives, AntiCommunists, and Anti-Semitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1944,” co-curated with Sarah Atwood-Hoffman (PhD candidate, American Studies), had an extended run at the Elmer L. Andersen Library last fall and has had a profound impact on the University community. The exhibit documents the ways in which student activists fought against discrimination, even as University of Minnesota presidents, deans, and other administrators subjected students and faculty to surveillance, attacked progressive student activism, and used their Riv-Ellen Prell power to create a racially segregated campus that excluded African Americans and Jews. As part of the exhibit, visitors were invited to reflect on their experience viewing “A Campus Divided” by recording their thoughts on Post-It Notes (see photo), which then became part of the exhibition. There were over 450 comments, all of which have been archived at the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives in Elmer L. Andersen Library. As part of his response to the exhibit and the attention it garnered, University President Eric Kaler appointed a committee of historians, faculty, students, representatives from University Services, and alumni to examine the University’s history as documented in the exhibit and come up with recommendations for appropriate responses. In announcing the committee, President Kaler wrote, “As an institution of learning and respect, we must acknowledge our past and commit each and every day to our mission of education and progress for all Minnesotans.” The most visible issues before the committee: the campus student union is named after one of the offending presidents, Lotus Coffman, Viewer comments become part of and the building which the exhibit houses the Center for Jewish Studies, Nicholson Hall, is named after the offending dean, Edward E. Nicholson. The Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Leslie Morris, serves on this committee, as does CJS faculty member and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Alejandro Baer. A digital version of the exhibit, “A Campus Divided” is available online: http://acampusdivided.umn.edu/ There is also a webpage devoted to the work of the President’s and Provost’s Advisory Committee on University History: http://campushistory.umn.edu/
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Jewish Studies Scholarship Winners Central to our mission is the support of our excellent cohort of undergraduate and graduate students. Congratulations to our 2018 prize winners! Goldenberg Prize for Outstanding Essays in Jewish Studies Undergraduate Prize: Cassidy Mosity, Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, & Biblical Studies. Paper title: ‘Blessed are you, O Lord, who did not make me a woman’: Trans Women Finding Themselves in Jewish Tradition Graduate Prize: Eva Cohen, Religions in Antiquity. Paper title: Jewish, Samaritan, or Polytheist?: Considering the Literary and Inscriptional Evidence for Religiously Locating the Ancient Delos “Synagogue” Jonathan Paradise Modern Hebrew Study Prize Leigh Bojan, Hebrew minor The Leo and Lillian Gross Scholarship in Jewish Studies Kate Renwick, Jewish Studies The Jerome L. Joss Graduate Student Research Grant Jon Ji Sol, PhD candidate in English. Her dissertation is titled “From the Merchant of Venice to Harrington: The Romantic Child Reader and the Politics of Genre.” The Theresa and Nathan Berman Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies Adey Almohsen, PhD candidate in History. Adey is writing a dissertation titled “Nation-Writing and Canon-Making: An Intellectual History of Palestinian Critiques in/of Exile 1948-67.” Meyer Weinshel, PhD candidate in the Germanic Studies program. Meyer is writing on “Contiguities of Translation: German-Language Poetry and the Creation of Modern Jewish Cultures in Habsburg Austria." Professor Riv-Ellen Prell Research in the Study of Jewish Cultures Moritz Meutzner, PhD candidate in the Germanic Studies program. He is writing a dissertation titled “Erich Auerbach: Antihero of Cultural Criticism.” Noam Sienna, PhD candidate in History. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Making and Reading Jewish Books in Early Modern North Africa.” Kathryn Huether, Musicology. Kathryn’s principal area of research focuses on Holocaust and memory studies through the lens of sound studies and sonic affect. Jazmine Contreras, PhD candidate in History. Her dissertation analyzes the controversies over memory of the Second World War in order to make sense of the Dutch memorial landscape. *** If you would like to contribute to any of these established scholarship funds or create a fund of your own, please contact Mary Hicks, 612-625-5541 or hicks002@umn.edu ***
Jeffrey Cross (PhD candidate, Religions of Antiquity, with a focus on Second Temple Judaism) received funding last year from the Center for Jewish Studies to support research at the Morgan Library in New York on ancient papyrus manuscripts. Jeff this year has subsequently won the Jeremias Prize for Biblical Studies, nominated by CJS faculty member Bernard Levinson and awarded by the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, for a revised version of the essay he wrote under the direction of CJS faculty member Melissa Sellew: “Amuletic Enigmas: Identifying P.Amh. GR. I 3.” Jeff was also invited to present this paper at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society, which was held May 26 - May 28 at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, in conjunction with the Canada Jeffrey Cross Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The paper represents an effort to determine the secondary use of an ancient document featuring excerpts from the book of Genesis in two different Greek translations and one excerpt from the book of Hebrews.
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Faculty Year in Review 2017-2018
Our faculty members come from a broad range of departments, and in any given year not all of their research and other activities necessarily relate to the field of Jewish Studies. We include here a sampling of faculty accomplishments that may be of interest to supporters of the Center for Jewish Studies. Patricia Ahearne-Kroll (Assistant Professor, Classical and Near Eastern Studies) is working on her book, A Jewish Novel from Egypt: A Case for the Composition of “Joseph and Aseneth (see “Scholarship in Progress” feature, above). In addition, she is an invited contributor to a special volume commemorating the fiftieth year of the Society of Biblical Literature Pseudoepigrapha Section. Her essay, “The History of the Study of Pseudepigrapha” will appear in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL, eds. Matthias Henze and Liv Ingeborg Lied. This past year, Ahearne-Kroll taught “Advanced Classical Hebrew: Biblical Poetry,” “Post-Biblical Hebrew: Second Temple Period (Haggai/ Zechariah),” “Bible: Context and Interpretation,” and “Apocalypticism, Cosmic Warfare, and the Maccabees: Jewish Strategies of Resistance in Antiquity.” Alejandro Baer (Associate Prof., Sociology. Stephen C. Feinstein Chair & Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies) published a review of The Sins of the Fathers. Germany, Memory, Method by Jeffrey Olick. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016, in European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, vol 4(4): 494-497. He also has an essay forthcoming, with co-author Correa Pedro, titled “Spain and the Holocaust: Contested Past. Contested Present,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Holocaust, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (London: Wiley-Blackwell). In addition, Baer is the principal investigator of the research project Transitional (In)Justice and Collective Memory in Minnesota (18622017), funded through the UMN Human Rights Lab. Bruno Chaouat (Professor, French & Italian) served as a Visiting Scholar Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (see feature article, above). His many lectures this year include “Emmanuel Levinas: A Moderate Radical,” “Jews in French Thought: From Postwar to Current Challenges,” and “Georges Bataille’s Gnostic Existentialism.” His essay on Georges Bataille will appear in Yale French Studies in a special issue on existentialism, and he has completed an essay on Levinas to be published by Brill as part of the proceedings of a Hebrew University conference on Sartre’s influential book, Antisemite and Jew. Hebrew University hosted an event in June centered on Chaouat’s recent book, Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Michelle Hamilton (Professor, Spanish & Portuguese) was a featured speaker in the CJS Community Lecture Series, giving a talk on “Sephardic Food and Identity in Medieval Spain” at Temple of Aaron Synagogue, February 7, 2018. In addition, she was invited to be the plenary speaker at the UCLA Symposium/ Workshop: Unveiling Judeo-Spanish Texts: A Hebrew Aljamiado Workshop, February 22, 2018, where she delivered a lecture, “The Hebrew Aljamiado Versions of Ms. Parma 2666 and Their Cultural Significance: Danza de la muerte, Visión delectable.” This year Hamilton also published an article comparing how a converso and a Muslim alfaqui use mysticism to find common ground within a shared discursive space: “Two Iberian Cases of Intellectual Mysticism,” English Language Notes 56.1 (2018). Bernard Levinson (Professor, Classical and Near Eastern Studies) participated this past February in an international conference in Vienna, Austria, entitled “An End to Anti-Semitism!” The conference was distinctive for the way it brought together international elected government officials, religious leaders of all faiths, United Nations and NGO members, and academics, as well as for its significant public engagement. Pope Francis sent a three page letter of support to the conference, delivered by a Papal ambassador. This major initiative represented the international collaboration of the University of Vienna, the University of Tel Aviv, and New York University. Prof. Levinson shared his work on the intellectual history of the discipline of biblical studies, lecturing on “The Impact of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Discovery of the “Original” Version of the Ten Commandments upon Biblical Scholarship: The Myth of Jewish Particularism and German Universalism.” In his current work, Professor Levinson is in the last stages of preparing an extensive co-edited volume on comparative disciplin-
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ary history: The Betrayal of the Humanities: The Transformation of the University under National Socialism (1934–1945). Also of note: subsequent to the publication of the last CJS newsletter, Levinson co-edited The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Discourses of Europe, Israel, and North America. Co-edited with Jan Christian Gertz, Konrad Schmid, and Dalit Rom-Shiloni. FAT 111. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Pp. xi + 1204. This past year, he taught “Biblical Law and Jewish Ethics,” Biblical Hebrew, and a freshman seminar titled “Silencing the Gods: Divine and Human in Hebrew Bible.” Hanne Loeland Levinson (Assistant Professor, Classical and Near Eastern Studies) gave the Keynote Lecture in honor of the 60th birthday of Professor Irmtraud Fischer and the 65th birthday of Professor Adriana Valerio, the two initiators of The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural History. The encyclopedia is a multi-volume, international endeavor (21 volumes are planned, 6 in print thus far), with each volume being released simultaneously in Spanish, Italian, German, and English. Loeland Levinson delivered her lecture, „Die nie aufhörende Suche nach Gottes weiblicher Seite. Weibliche Aspekte im Gottesbild der Prophetie.” during the Research Colloquium: Prophecy Bible and Women at the University of Graz, June 8-10, 2017. The lecture will be published in revised version in Spanish, Italian, German, and English, consistent with the publication practices of the Encyclopaedia. The contribution Loeland Levinson is most proud of from this past year, however, is a contribution to a new commentary on Food in the Torah: “Va-yera [He appeared]” in From Forbidden Fruit to Milk and Honey: A Commentary on Food in the Torah. Ed. Diana Lipton, Urim Publications, 2018. Alex Lubet (Professor, School of Music) received a $20K Grant-in-Aid to record an album of music on Jewish and Asian themes for mountain dulcimer. The album features his own compositions and works written for him by Asian composers. In addition, he received an Imagine Grant to host Kurdish-Canadian musician Shahriyar Jamshidi in an artist residency. Together, Lubet and Jamshidi comprise the One World Ensemble, whose repertoire is based on traditional Kurdish and Jewish melodies. Lubet also performed a solo recital of Asian and Jewish music for mountain dulcimer in the “Around the World” music series in Kent, Ohio. In addition, Lubet traveled around the world himself to lecture on American musical theatre, with an emphasis on Jewish contributions, at the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, China. Finally, he co-authored an article with Professor Steven Lubet of Northwestern University on the royal wedding performance of “Stand by Me,” a song co-authored by Ben E. King and the Jewish songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The article appeared May 22, 2018 on the CNN website: https://www.cnn. com/2018/05/22/opinions/royal-wedding-stand-by-me-perfect-song-lubet/index.html. Leslie Morris (Professor, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch) has a new book forthcoming in September 2018: The Translated Jew: German-Jewish Writing Outside the Margins. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), and published “Lesort/Ortslese: Zur Lyrik Paul Celans” in a volume on Paul Celan that appeared in Germany. In 2017 and 2018 she received an Imagine Fund Grants for her new project, “She Did Not Speak,” a hybrid-experimental memoir that moves between prose poetry, memoir, and philosophical inquiry, and has at its center an extended rumination on loss, memory, narrative, knowledge and family secrets. Along with Co-PI. Mary Jo Maynes (History), Morris was awarded a UMN Institute for Advanced Study Research Collaborative for Narrative/Medicine (2017-2018), and a College of Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop grant for a workshop in August, 2018 on “Narrative Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice.” Morris gave readings from “She Did Not Speak” at the Humanities in Medicine Conference, October 28, 2017, held at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and again at the Examined Life Conference, Oct. 14, 2017, University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, IA. At the German Studies Association Conference in October 2017, Morris organized and chaired a series of panels on ““Czernowitz as a Center of Austrian Jewish Culture;” she is now co-editing a special issue on Czernowitz of the Journal of Austrian Studies. Morris continues to serve as the CJS Director, and this past year she taught “The Holocaust: Narrative, History, Memory” and a course on Jewish writers. Rick McCormick (Professor, Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch) has been awarded an Imagine Fund Grant for final manuscript preparation of his book project, “Sex, Politics, & Comedy: The Transnational Jewish Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch--from Berlin to Hollywood” (under consideration, Indiana University Press). This past year he taught “Introduction to German Cinema,” a 5xxx-level seminar titled “Emigre Cinema: From Hitler to Hollywood,” and a Freshman Seminar Abroad in Spring 2017, in which students studied German film and political history, culminating with a trip to Berlin over spring break with a group of 19 first-year students. While in Germany, students participated in McCormick’s regular pilgrimage to the house in which German Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch lived from 1896 to 1919, which also housed his father’s garment business. Karen Painter (Associate Professor, School of Music) is working on her new book, Music for Fallen Soldiers: Politics and Loss in Germany, 1914 to 1945. In addition, she was awarded an International Teaching Fellowship from the USC Shoah Foundation to work in the visual history archives, and she delivered an invited lecture, “Jewish Music and Nazis Mourning: Authenticity and Ideology” on July 31 at Dartmouth College. Painter’s freshman seminar, “Mu-
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sic in Nazi Germany,” has garnered a new kind of interest in light of political developments in recent years, and her freshman seminar and associated research was featured on Paul Metsa’s radio program, “Wall of Power Radio Hour” (July 21, 2018). James Ron (Associate Professor, Political Science and Humphrey School of Public Affairs) joined the faculty of the Center for Jewish Studies in 2018. In fall 2017 he taught “Social Change in Israel & Palestine,” which was open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates and was offered through the University of Minnesota’s Masters of Human Rights Program. The course was to include a field visit in December and January, featuring stays in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, as well as visits to other villages and towns in Israel and the West Bank. Unfortunately, the field visit had to be canceled in light of the volatile security situation subsequent to President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. embassy would be moved to Jerusalem. Along with faculty member Ron Krebs (Professor, Political Science), James Ron published “Why Countries Should Welcome, Not Fear, Foreign Funding of NGOs” in Lawfare, an online forum dedicated to national and international security issues (May 13, 2018), and a version of this article appeared in Hebrew translation in Ynet, one of Israel’s most popular internet portals (May 21, 2018). In this article he and Ron Krebs argue for the democratic legitimacy of foreign funding of NGOs in Israel. Daniel Schroeter (Professor, History) was awarded the Shaul Ben Simhon Prize for the Study of North African Jewry by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received the prize at an award ceremony at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva on June 6, 2018 (see feature article, above). This past year he also published “Philo-Sephardism, Anti-Semitism and Arab Nationalism: Muslims and Jews in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco during the Period of the Third Reich,” in Nazism, the Holocaust and the Middle East: Arab and Turkish Responses, ed. Frank Nicosia and Boĝaç Ergene (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 179-215. Schroeter also delivered invited lectures in the U.S. and internationally, beginning with “The Moroccan Monarchy and the Jews during Vichy in History and Memory,” a joint paper with Aomar Boum for a workshop on Colonial Morocco Revisited, at the Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat, Morocco, July 11-13, 2017. He then gave the keynote address, “Reflections on the Exceptionality of Moroccan-Jewish History,” delivered at the conference, “The Long History of the Jews from the Countries of Islam in Israel,” honoring the retirement of Yaron Tsur, Tel-Aviv University, July 17-19, 2017. At Harvard University, he spoke on “French Colonialism, Zionism, and the Arabs in 1917” as part of a symposium on “The Balfour Declaration in Jewish History,” November 5-6, 2017. This past academic year Schroeter taught the following courses in Jewish studies: “History of Modern Israel/Palestine: Society, Culture, Politics,” “Muslims and Jews: Conflict and Co-existence in the Middle East and North Africa since 1700,” and “Jerusalem: Jews, Christians, & Muslims in the Contested City, Ancient to Modern Times.”
Center for Jewish Studies Donors Award winners. International scholars. All of the conributions that you are enjoying in this newsletter would not be possible without our donors. They form the core of our growing community and have our enduring gratitude. Allan Baumgarten & Marilyn Levi-Baumgarten, Rabbi Morris Allen, Stuart Bear & Marsha Schoenkin, Bruno Chaouat, Rabbi Norman Cohen, Steven Cohen, Professor Emerita Sara Evans, Phillip & Susan Fantle, The Fantle Family Charitable Fund, Lila Foldes, Livia Foldes, Frank & Toby Berman Family Fund, Samuel Freedman, Neal Gale, Susan Goldenberg, Margaret Goldwater, Greenberg and Silverwater Fund at Fidelity, Dr. Anna Hampton, Mary Hicks, Erwin & Miriam Kelen, Lee & Barbara Bearmon Family Charitable Fund, Dr. Richard Lentz, Dr. Gloria Levin, Sheldon Levin, Joyce Levitan, Louis Newman Charitable Trust, Professor Elaine Tyler May, Professor Deborah Dash Moore, Professor Leslie Morris, Music Finance Co., Barbara Noble, Rabbi George Nudell, Dr. Jonathan Paradise, Dr. Natan Paradise, Beth Pearlman, Joel Prell, Dr. Riv-Ellen Prell, Rev. Dr. Gary & Pamela Reierson, Peter Rozga, Samuel & Sylvia Kaplan, Thomas & Sheva Sanders, Stephen & Sharon Segal, Dr. Miriam Segall, Laura Silver, Rabbi Adam & Cantor Rachel Stock Spilker, Ettenberg Memorial Fund, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, Temple Israel, Rev. Alice V. Tobler, Shirley Ungar, Mary Ann Barrow Wark & Dr. David Wark, Rachel Weiss, Carol Weitz, Beth Wenger.
We regret if any name has been left out of this list inadvertently. Please contact us if that is the case.
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University of Minnesota Center for Jewish Studies College of Liberal Arts 251 Nicholson Hall 216 Pillsbury Drive S.E. Minneapolis, MN 55455 jwst@umn.edu 612-624-4914
Staff Leslie Morris, Professor and Director Natan Paradise, Associate Director & Director of Undergraduate Studies Marial Coulter, Outreach Coordinator
Newsletter Credits
Editors: Marial Coulter, Natan Paradise Designer: Gabe Sinner
Welcome 2018-2019 Visiting Scholars
Advisory Board
Center Director: Leslie Morris Board Chair: Allan Baumgarten Sally Abrams Maryls Badzin Stuart Bear Frank Berman Bruno Chaouat Holly Brod Farber Bernard Goldblatt Steven Hunegs Erwin Kelen Ronald Krebs Steve Lieberman Riv-Ellen Prell Rev. Dr. Gary Reierson Tom Sanders Dr. Miriam Segall Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker Ruth Usem Mary Ann Wark
ex officio:
Rabbi Morris Allen Rabbi Alexander Davis Rabbi Max Davis Rabbi Jeremy Fine Rabbi Tamar Grimm Rabbi Harold Kravitz Rabbi Michael Latz Rabbi Sharon Stiefel Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman © 2015 Regents of the University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
Natalie Belsky is on the faculty at The University of Minnesota Duluth but will be on the Twin Cities campus as a Residential Fellow in the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr. Belsky received her doctorate in Russian history from the University of Chicago in 2014. Her current project focuses on internal population displacement in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Her research interests include migration, minority politics in the USSR, Soviet citizenship, and East European Jewish history, and she has conducted research in Russia, Kazakhstan, Israel and the United States. She has taught courses on modern Natalie Belsky Europe, Russian history, modern Jewish history, and world history, and next spring she will be leading an undergraduate study-abroad program in Poland, “Jews & Poles: Entangled Lives.” Katya Oicherman earned degrees in textile design and art at the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art in Ramat Gan as well as at Goldsmiths College, London, completed her M.A. in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds, and a PhD in Textile Culture and Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her dissertation examined nineteenth-century German Torah binders and their relevance in contemporary art practice. Dr. Katya Oicherman Oicherman has worked as a textile artist, produced and exhibited conceptual textile work and installations, taught textile practice, theory and history, and was head of the department of Textile Design at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art. Dr. Oicherman is currently writing on memory and identity as linked to the material and specifically textile world.
