The presentation explores the marriage patterns of the Sephardi Jewish communities, paying special attention to when Sephardim began marrying Ashkenazi Jews, thereby giving birth to a new type of Jewish identity, neither fully Ashkenazi nor fully Sephardi, but Argentine. Although initially Sephardim respected the boundaries of their communities of origin, and usually married ‘within’, as […]

Please join former and current staff members of Leviathan in a celebration of the student publication's 40th anniversary. Leviathan is one of the longest-running university student publications devoted to Jewish themes in the United States. Over the years, its articles and artwork have explored contemporary questions of Jewish identity, the role of Israel, local Jewish […]

For most Americans, the phrase "Jewish education" summons images of Hebrew School. But, Hebrew School, or even what we might call "formal Jewish education" amounts to only a very small percentage of where and how people learn to be Jewish. The landscape of Jewish learning might include those sites, but it certainly includes a much […]

Debarati Sanyal is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (John Hopkins University Press, 2006) and a forthcoming book titled Dangerous Intersections: Complicity, Trauma and Holocaust Memory. She has recently published articles on Alain Resnaiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert […]

Please join us for a celebration of two recently published books: The Coming of the Holocaust: From Anti-Semitism to Genocide by Peter Kenez, and The Jewish Street: The City and Modern Jewish Writing by Murray Baumgarten and Lee Jaffe. The authors will discuss their books, copies of which will be available for sale and signing. […]

The Ottoman-Jewish story has long been told as a romance between Jews and the empire. The prevailing view is that Ottoman Jews were protected and privileged by imperial policies and in return offered their unflagging devotion to the imperial government over many centuries. In this talk, Julia Phillips Cohen offers a corrective, arguing that Jewish […]

The Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies presents: Steven J. Zipperstein: "How the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom Changed Jewish History" Kishinev’s 1903 pogrom was the first instance when an event in Russian Jewish life received wide hearing. The riot, leaving 49 dead, in an obscure border town, dominated headlines in the western world […]