Month: April 2019

On April 15, Sarah Imhoff, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, delivered the Fifth Annual Jeremy Zwelling lecture. The presentation was entitled Manliness and Its Opposites: A Brief History of American Jewish Gender. The animated presentation was delivered to a full house with a diverse audience consisting of students across the curriculum, Wesleyan faculty, people from the community and prospective students, all were intrigued by the subject matter.

The Center for Jewish Studies hosted last night the Annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture. Professor Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, where he directs the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, the largest repository of digital Ladino texts in the world, delivered a fascinating and animated presentation entitled The Rise and Fall of Salonica, the Jerusalem of the Balkans. Following the presentation there was an extensive Q/A session. To learn more about the subject check out Professor Naar’s book , Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, which won a National Jewish Book Award and the grand prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association.

On behalf of the Center for Jewish Studies, I am delighted to announce that a committee consisting of Jewish Studies faculty members has chosen Sivan Basha Piatigorsky-Roth’s paper “Need More Love: On Unlikable Self-Representation in The Jewish American Female Autobiographical Comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb” as the winner of the Best Student Paper in Jewish Studies Award. Members of the committee were impressed by  the “nuanced reading of a complex, sensitive, timely matter”.

The award will be presented to Sivan at the Annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial lecture on Thursday, April 11 at 8pm at Daniels Family Commons. At that time, a lecture entitled “The Rise and Fall of Salonica, the Jerusalem of the Balkans” will be presented by Professor Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington.