FACULTY YEAR IN REVIEW 2019-2020
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) co-presented with Stephen Ahearne-Kroll, “Jesus in His Context: Some Common Misunderstandings about Jesus in the First Century,” at the Philippine Minnesotan Medical Association Annual Clinical Conference (August 2019). She contributed the chapter, “A History of the Study of Pseudepigrapha” to a commemorative volume celebrating the work of scholars in the fields of Second Temple Judaism, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament studies, and Late Antique Judaism and Christianity: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL, edited by Matthias Henze and Liv Ingeborg Lied (SBL Press, 2019). In addition, her monograph, Aseneth of Egypt: The Composition of a Jewish Narrative, is forthcoming in Fall 2020 (Early Judaism and Its Literature series, SBL Press), and at the upcoming SBL Annual Meeting in November 2020 a scheduled panel will use her monograph as a springboard for discussing broader issues in the field (see feature article, above). This past year Patricia Ahearne-Kroll Ahearne-Kroll created a new graduate course, “Religion and Power in the Ptolemaic and Seleukid Empires,” which examines the interplay of religious practice and power, and which includes the evidence for and literature about the Maccabean revolt. She also taught Advanced Classical Hebrew (Book of Lamentations), “Sex, Murder, and Bodily Discharges: Purity and Pollution in the Ancient World,” and “Ancient Greece: Alexander and the East.” Shir Alon (Assistant Professor, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies) presented a paper at the Association of Jewish Studies 51st Annual Conference in San Diego, “Middle Class Elegy: Mizrahi Literature in Precarious Times,” on Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom’s novel The Egyptian Novel (2015). Her article on Jewish memory in Polish art, “A Specter Is Haunting Poland: Art, Absence, and the European Union,” was published in boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 47, no. 1 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-7999520.
Shir Alon Alejandro Baer (Associate Professor, Sociology; Stephen C. Feinstein Chair & Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies) presented “‘Not only do we not apologize’… The Columbus Myth and Neo-Imperialist Identity Politics in Spain” at the Social Science History Association Conference in Chicago (November 2019). He was also a featured speaker and project team member at the international, interdisciplinary workshop, “Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Arts and Science,” hosted by the University of Minnesota with the support of the Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (College of Liberal Arts), the Institute of Advanced Study Collaborative, and the Imagine Fund; he spoke on “The Trauma Metaphor. A Sociological Perspective” (October 2019). Baer published three opinion pieces: “La lección de Auschwitz en España” in El País (January 27th, 2020); “The Pox of Vox. The Spread of Far-Right Populism in Spain” (Minnpost, November 18th, 2019) and “Europe’s Last Monument to Fascism and Spain’s Memory Problem,” (Minnpost, October Alejandro Baer 23, 2019). In addition, he published “Spain and the Holocaust. Contested Past. Contested Present,” co-authored with Pedro Correa, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Holocaust, edited by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020); and “From ‘No Pasarán’ to ‘Nunca Más, The Holocaust and the Revisiting of Spain’s Legacy of Mass Violence,” ’co-authored with Natan Sznaider, in Spain, World War II, and the Holocaust: History and Representation, edited by Sara Brenneis and Gina Herrmann (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Finally, under his direction and with the support of CHGS outreach coordinator. Joseph Eggers, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies was awarded an inaugural CLA Community Engagement Hub grant for the project, Bridges of Memory. The aim of the project is to bring communities impacted by genocide and mass violence together and create a better conduit between them and the University. In summer 2020 CHGS hosted a series of community dialogues and virtual educator workshops to learn about genocides from the experiences and perspectives of local survivors and survivor-descendant communities. This past year Baer taught “Never Again. Memory and Politics after Genocide.”
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