The Duke Center for Jewish Studies is an inter-departmental program that sponsors a wide variety of cultural events, offers educational programs, and fosters academic research and scholarly exchange of ideas. Over the past several decades, the Center for Jewish Studies has confirmed its commitment to fostering global academic engagement through the acquisition of resource materials in conjunction with Duke Library, as well as the continued presence of a wide variety of specialists in the field of Jewish studies through a series of endowed lectures, conferences, reading groups, seminars, and talks. The following events were offered in the 2021-2022 academic year by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies to students, faculty, staff, community members, and beyond.
August 29, 2021
The North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar (NCJSS) welcomes its first fall ‘21 guest, Pratima Gopalakrishnan, to discuss her paper “Structuring Labor Relationships in the Ancient Jewish Household.”
The concept of mezonot (often translated as “maintenance”) in rabbinic texts refers to the food allowance provided to household members labeled as dependents. Although mezonot later becomes synonymous with a form of benevolent support, this paper explores the earlier legacy of this concept as a non-monetary compensation provided in the context of domestic labor exchange, whether between husband and wife, father and child, or employer and laborer.
Pratima Gopalakrishnan is the Perilman Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Studies at Duke University.
The NCJSS is a collaborative partnership of Duke, NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest University
September 1, 2021
Liora Halperin: “The Oldest Guard: Landowners, Local Memory, and the Making of the Zionist Settler Past”
In this talk, Liora Halperin tells the story of Zionist memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) that were established in late 19th-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries in British mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the "first wave" (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded-and disregarded-in the history of Zionism as sites of conservatism, lack of ideological commitment, and resistance to Labor Zionist politics and institutions.
Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of International Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, and the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
This lecture is part of the Eli N. Evans Distinguished Lecture Series in Jewish Studies at Carolina.
September 12, 2021
This seminar will explore the unique case of the maskil Isaac Satanov (1732-1804) and his harmonious combination between Jewish tradition, natural sciences and kabbalistic ideas as exemplified in his treatise Imre Bina (Words of Understanding), printed in Berlin in 1784. We will discuss the variety of his sources, his hermeneutical strategies in interweaving the different corpora as well as his intellectual and pedagogic aims. Complex figures like Satanow and his contemporary Salomon Maimon challenge our widespread perception of the Jews’ entrance into modernity via rationalism, assimilation and secularization. Therefore, we will also have to questions those parameters and chose our methodological approach(es) with great care.
Elke Morlok is currently Lilli and Michael Sommerfreund Visiting Professor at the Hochschule fuer Juedische Studien in Heidelberg. She has completed her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Moshe Idel at the Hebrew University Jerusalem on “Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics” (published in 2011 with Mohr Siebeck). Her habilitation (second book) at Frankfurt University on “Kabbala and Haskala. Isaac Satanov (1732-1804) between Jewish erudition, modern physics and Berlin Haskala” will be published November 2021 with De Gruyter. She has published various articles on Jewish mysticism, Christian Kabbalah, gender issues in Jewish studies, Gershom Scholem and Jewish Enlightenment.
September 14, 2021
What is Jewish Modernism?
Please join the Global Jewish Modernism Lab for the first event in our What is… Dialogue Series!
What is Jewish Modernism?
Beth Holmgren, Duke University
Priscilla Layne, UNC Chapel Hill
Allison Schachter, Vanderbilt University
The goal of this lab is to explore and expand the role of modern Jewish culture in the humanities today. “Global Jewish Modernism” will focus on the particularly rich terrains of Jewish literature, film, and art in relation to other humanities disciplines, approaches, and theories. We are also committed to exploring the global significance of Jewish Studies. One way to do this is to expand research beyond the typical sites of Jewish life and culture in Europe, North America, and Israel/Palestine. Rather than assume that a given work belongs in the category “Jewish” or “modernist,” we are interested in exploring these designations as fluid, malleable, aspirational, and ideological.
October 13, 2021
Convivencia Lecture Series with Ellen D. Haskell: “In the Palace of Images”
The Convivencia Lecture Series welcomes Ellen Haskell, the Herman and Zelda Bernard Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Greensboro to discuss architecture "In the Palace of Images."
Ellen Haskell is Director of Jewish Studies and the Herman & Zelda Bernard Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at UNCG. Educated at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the University of Michigan, her field of expertise is the study of Jewish mysticism, with special emphasis on classical Kabbalah and Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor). She is the author of two monographs, Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar's Conversations with Christianity (Oxford, 2016) and Suckling at My Mother's Breasts: The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism (SUNY, 2012). Haskell received an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship to develop Mystical Resistance. Her research interests include Jewish mysticism's relationship to its cultural environments, Jewish responses to Christianity, and Jewish religious imagery, especially that which incorporates gender and teachings on the human body.
October 18, 2021
Convivencia Lecture Series with Michele Lamprakos: “Convivencia, Art, and Architecture”
The Convivencia Lecture series welcomes Michele Lamprakos, Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation from the University of Maryland to discuss architecture and "The Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba."
Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Michele Lamprakos specializes in the early modern/modern Arab-Islamic world and critical heritage studies. Her research focuses on two main themes: the lives and layers of buildings and sites; and contacts between faith-cultures in the Mediterranean.
She is author of Building a World Heritage City: Sanaa Yemen, the first book on urban heritage to be recognized by the Society of Architectural Historians' Spiro Kostof Award (Honorable Mention, 2018). She has been named a Fellow at the National Humanities Center for 2019-2020 to advance her second book, Memento Mauri: the Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Lamprakos lectures widely and has organized scholarly symposia, including "Heritage and the Arab Spring" (Freer Gallery of Art, 2014, with Nancy Um) which explored the role of cultural heritage in a new and shifting Middle East.
October 27, 2021
The Convivencia Lecture Series welcomes Sarah Abrevaya Stein, the Viterbi Family Endowed Chain in Mediterranean Jewish Studies and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA, to discuss her book "Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century."
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is author or editor of nine books. Her most recent book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: Macmillman, 2019), explores the intertwined histories of a single family, Sephardic Jewry, and the dramatic ruptures that transformed southeastern Europe and the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. This book also traces the history of a collection, reflecting on how one family archive came to be built and preserved, and how it knit together a family even as the historic Sephardi heartland of southeastern Europe was unraveling. In a review of Family Papers, The New York Times writes: "Stein, a UCLA historian, has ferocious research talents [...] and a writing voice that is admirably light and human... All of this has produced a superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people." The Economist named Family Papers a Best Book of 2019, while the New York Times Book Review selected it as an Editors' Choice Book. Family Papers was also named a National Jewish Book Prize Finalist (2019).
Sponsored by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, The Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and Romance Studies.
November 3, 2021
The Convivencia Lecture Series welcomes Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, to discuss her book, "The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue."
Marina Rustow is an American historian and the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University. She is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. Her work focuses on the study of Judeo-Arabic documents found in the Cairo geniza and the history of Jews in the Fatimid Caliphate. Rustow received a B.A. (1990) from Yale University and two master's degrees (1998), an M.Phil. (1999), and a Ph.D. (2004) from Columbia University. She taught at Emory University (2003-2010) and Johns Hopkins University (2010-2015) prior to joining the faculty of Princeton University, where she is currently a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. She is the co-editor of Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (2011) and has published scholarly articles in such journals as Past & Present, Jewish History, al-Qantara, Mamlūk Studies Review, and Ginzei Qedem: Geniza Research Annual.
The Convivencia Lecture Series is convened by Professor Ellen McLarney as part of her undergraduate course “Clash of Civilizations: In the Heart of Europe.” This series is cosponsored by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Asian & Middle Easter Studies, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center and Romance Studies.
Sunday, November 2, 2021
Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron Prize for Outstanding First Book in Jewish Studies); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). She has published articles in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Jewish Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Ancient Judaism, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, AJS Review, and Biblical Interpretation. Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include critical animal studies, Jewish difference, and Bible reception history. She is currently working on a project entitled What Animals Teach Us about Families: A Study of Four Biblical Laws and Their Afterlives that brings together critical kinship and animal studies with Jewish studies to offer an interpretive history of the four “animal family” laws of the Pentateuch.
November 22, 2021
The 1609 Spanish expulsion of the “moriscos,” communities of Arab-speaking Christians who had chosen to convert and stay in Spain in 1492, was a turning point in European statecraft. The expulsion of populations, typically Jews, on the grounds of religious difference had occasionally occurred in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. While these expulsions were politically motivated and sometimes condemned by the established Church, they categorically excluded Christians with non-Christian ancestors. The expulsion of moriscos, by contrast, relied on a heuristic of suspicion, on an unproven assumption of crypto-Islamizing: the fact that the moriscos did not assimilate culturally, in terms of language and dress, was taken as proof that they had not assimilated religiously. This talk examines several arguments for and against the expulsion of moriscos, revealing the factors that led to a religious expulsion which was in fact a racial expulsion: millenarianism, reason of state, systems of forced labor in the Old and New World, purity of blood and the rise of modern racism.
Elsa is an intellectual historian concentrating on Spain and its possessions in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Her dissertation explores how changes in the definition of public happiness accompanied the rise of absolutism in Spain. Originally from Chicago, Elsa has a BA in Latin American studies from Bennington College and an MA in Ibero-American history from Duke. She has published or presented papers on all these topics. Her dissertation research took her to Madrid and to Mexico City on a Fulbright-Hays grant, and she is now Bass instructional fellow and Capper fellow at Duke.
Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), Duke Islamic Studies Center, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, The Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and Romance Studies.
December 2, 2021
Bari Weiss: How to Fight Antisemitism
For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a total shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh raised a question Americans can no longer avoid: Could it happen here?
No longer the exclusive province of the far right, the far left, and assorted religious bigots, anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics and the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. A hatred that was, until recently, reliably taboo, anti-Semitism is migrating toward the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens us all.
From 2017 until 2020, Bari Weiss was a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times. Before joining the Times, Ms. Weiss was an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal and an associate book review editor there. For two years, she was a senior editor at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish news, politics, and culture, where she edited the site's political and news coverage. She regularly appears on shows like The View, Morning Joe and Real Time with Bill Maher.
Ms. Weiss is a proud Pittsburgh native and a graduate of Columbia University. She is the winner of the Reason Foundation's 2018 Bastiat Prize, which annually honors writing that "best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence."
December 5, 2021
The NCJSS welcomes three papers from 2021-2022 Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows cohort:
"In Search of Belonging: Galician Jewish Immigrants Between New York and Eastern Europe, 1890–1938“
Oskar Czendze is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and a TEP Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. In 2021-22, he is a graduate fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of Jews in East Central Europe and the United States, Jewish migration and questions of memory, belonging and place in the modern era. Among his recent publications is “Between Loss and Invention: Landsmanshaftn and American Jewish Memory in the Interwar Era,” Dubnow Institute Yearbook 17 (2018): 35-56.“
"The Levant Fair and the Promotion of Tel Aviv as an “All-Jewish” City in the Interwar Period”
Semih Gökatalay is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is a political and economic history of the modern Middle East during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation-states. It explores the development of private and indigenous interest groups in the Middle East vis-à-vis state authorities and international capitalist classes.
“Signals in the Noise: Girona Bookbinding Fragments as Unique Codicological Units”
Leor Jacobi is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Bar-Ilan University. Leor’s interdisciplinary research interests, publications and talks range over Rabbinic Literature and Medieval Art and he has given presentations in Europe, America, Israel, and Abu Dhabi. He is currently the recipient of a Humboldt Stiftung Fellowship at University of Mainz, Germany, researching Manuscript fragments extracted from Medieval book- bindings in Girona, Catalonia. Leor is based in Jerusalem and can often be found loitering at the National Library of Israel.
The Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows honor Emeritus Smart Professor Joseph Shatzmiller, who taught at Duke University from 1994 to 2010. Among his many publications, he is best known for Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. Fellowships offer advanced graduate students the opportunity to engage with prominent national and international scholars in Jewish Studies visiting the seminar and to connect with the Jewish Studies faculty active in the seminar.
January 23, 2022
Omer Bartov gives the annual Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies. His talk, entitled "The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz: What do we Learn from a Local History of the Holocaust?" explores his recent book, "Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz," (2018) a microhistory of ethnic coexistence and violence. The book received the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, among others, and has been translated into several languages.
This event is co-sponsored by Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES); Coalition for Preserving Memory (CPM); Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI); Jewish Life at Duke
January 14, 2022
Using Digital Methods to Analyze Humanities Sources: The Case of Nazi-Occupied Krakow
Join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning faculty speaker series, tgiFHI! On Friday January 14, the series will feature Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History and German Studies, Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, and Chair of the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department.
This presentation takes on one of the fundamental questions of Holocaust Studies argument by rethinking the “integrated approach” to perpetrator and victim histories.
Paul B. Jaskot is Professor of Art History and German Studies, Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, and chair of the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies; the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies; the Department of German Studies; and the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.
January 23, 2022
In July 1942, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) published the first of five separately themed Zionist songbooks produced for an American Jewish audience, under the title Classified Palestine Songs. The songbooks were published following the historic 1942 Biltmore Conference, which offered the first consensus platform for defining communal American Jewish efforts to help Zionists in Palestine and were part of a greater body of JNF propaganda, educational and fundraising materials developed for American Jewry during the Yishuv period.This paper explores the use of Hebrew music from Palestine in the JNF’s greater efforts to build a robust donor base and spheres of support amongst American Jewish communities during the during the pre-1948period, both crucial to the success of the Zionist enterprise in the later years of the British Mandate. By the conclusion of WWII—contrasting the decimation of Europe, European Jewry and the associated fundraising markets—American Jewry donated to the JNF at higher rates than the rest of the Jewish diaspora combined. Simultaneously, the JNF contributed to the development of Hebrew national culture and transnational Zionist engagement in America during the decades prior to Israel’s establishment and beyond. The JNF were central in establishing still operational frameworks for American Jewish engagement with Zionist institutions during the pre-1948 period, in part through activities like singing Hebrew songs and donating to Zionist land interests in Palestine.
Eli Sperling has traveled and conducted research extensively throughout the Middle East, spending significant periods of time in Israel, Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University and received his PhD from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in September 2019. From 2012-2020, Eli served as the Senior Academic Research Coordinator at Emory University’s Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, where he also taught as a guest lecturer at the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies in 2019-2020. His current research focuses on the proliferation and use of Hebrew music from Palestine in the American Jewish community between in the pre-1948 period. He investigates how this music played a role in a greater process through which varying aspects of Zionist though, engagement and national culture became enmeshed in American Jewish life. Since June 2020, Eli has served as a Postdoctoral Associate in Duke University’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Center for Jewish studies.
February 3, 2022
The second event in the Global Jewish Modernism Lab’s “What is…?” series. Each dialogue involves the examination of one term and its representation and use in diverse geographical and historical contexts. Each conversation will involve at least two scholars, one from Duke and one from another institution. Our Fall 2021 dialogue was “What is Jewish Modernism?” and our Spring 2022 dialogue is “What is a ghetto?”
Speakers:
Paul B. Jaskot (Duke)
Karen Auerbach (UNC Chapel Hill)
Shaul Bassi (Ca’ Foscari, Venice)
February 13, 2022
The North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar welcomes David Koffman (York University), to discuss his paper: "No Better Home? The History of Canadian Jews' Intersections with First Nations History."
David S. Koffman is a cultural and social historian of Canadian and U.S. Jewries. He holds the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry and an associate professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto. His first book, The Jews' Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America, won a 2020 Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. His newest book project, an edited volume entitled No Better Home?: Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging, was published by the University of Toronto Press in early 2021. He serves as the Associate Director of York's Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, and as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.
February 22, 2022
My Friend Abe: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story
You are invited to a screening of “My Friend Abe,” presented by Steve Goldberg (T’90, MAT ’95).
Abe Piasek’s powerful story of survival during the Holocaust saw him taken from his family in Poland at age 13. He never saw his mother, father, or younger sister again. Abe toiled in three slave labor camps from 1942-45. When he was liberated in 1945 at age 16, he weighed under 80 pounds. Abe did not speak about what happened to him for nearly 50 years. He finally did start telling his story, with more than 10,000 people throughout North Carolina having heard Abe’s story over the last decade of his life. Though it was painful to keep telling his story, he kept on telling it because he felt the world had to know what happened to him and what can happen when hate and dehumanization go unchecked.
Abe passed away at age 91 in January of 2020, and Steve Goldberg is now telling Abe’s story. Steve is a double Duke graduate (BA 1990, MAT 1995) and a veteran high school teacher who also has a law degree from Georgetown Law School. Steve became friends with Abe after hearing his story and traveling with Abe to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Steve has extensively researched Abe’s life and is now telling the story of “My Friend Abe” by weaving together Abe’s videotaped testimony with maps and images to bring Abe’s story to life.
March 13, 2022
Samuel Hayim Brody is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His research is in modern Jewish thought and its many and varied interactions with philosophy, political thought, and economic thought. His first book, Martin Buber's Theopolitics (Indiana University Press, 2018), was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and the winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association of Jewish Studies. He holds an MA from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
March 21, 2022
Film Screening: East and West w/ Kata Gellen & Malachi Hacohen
Screening of “East and West” (1923, silent with English and Yiddish intertitles), with a discussion lead by Professor Kata Gellen (Duke University), expert on German-Jewish literature and Weimar cinema, and Professor Malachi Hacohen (Duke University), expert on interwar Vienna and Central European Jewish History.
March 21, 2022
The Abraham Accords: Shaping a New Middle East
History is happening! The Abraham Accords, between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain, opened the door to a new era of cooperation and friendship. Join representatives from Sharaka for a panel discussion covering the exciting developments in the changing landscape of the Middle East.
Sharaka is a grassroots NGO comprised of this generation’s thought leaders, innovators, change makers and social entrepreneurs from throughout the Arab Gulf and the Middle East, all of whom are devoted to Shaping A New Middle East - Together.
March 22, 2022
Peace Tree Planting Ceremony
The Consulate General of Israel to the Southeast and Delegates from Sharaka invite you to a Peace Tree Planting Ceremony to promote The Abraham Accords and People to People Diplomacy, with opening remarks by Mayor Pro Tempore Mark-Anthony Middleton.