Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholars Endowed Fund

Can Jewish text and tradition offer resources for navigating the emotional terrain of climate change? In her presentation, Prof. Watts Belser examined ancient and contemporary stories about Jonah, the biblical prophet who famously turned away from God’s call. Alternating between flight and fatalism, Jonah eventually fixates on a prophesy of doom—one that shares striking similarities to contemporary American responses to climate crisis. Participants probed classical Jewish texts about the cruel city, examining how the rabbinic stories can illuminate both the realities of pervasive structural violence and the possibility of resistance. But while biblical stories about widespread social crisis often end in cataclysm, Prof. Watts Belser's talk argued against cultural tropes of widespread destruction and inevitable doom. Instead, the embodied ethics of contemporary queer disability communities on the frontlines of climate disruption was lifted up, showing how disability practices of collective care offer persistent possibilities for the practice of fierce and tender hope.

 

Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, as well as core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program and a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, and disability in rabbinic literature, as well as queer feminist Jewish ethics. She directs an initiative on Disability and Climate Change, which brings together disability activists, artists, policy makers, and academics to address how disability communities are disproportionately affected by environmental risk and climate disruption. Her work brings ancient texts into conversation with disability studies, queer theory, feminist thought, and environmental ethics. She is the author of Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Power, Ethics, and Ecology: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has held faculty fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her forthcoming book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole is available for pre-order.

A rabbi and a longtime advocate for disability and gender justice, Belser writes queer feminist Jewish theology and brings disability arts and culture into conversation with Jewish tradition. She co-authored an international Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities (Hesperian Foundation, 2007), developed in collaboration with disability activists from 42 countries and translated into 14 languages, designed to help challenge the root causes of poverty, gender violence, and disability discrimination. She’s an avid wheelchair hiker, a lover of wild places, and a passionate supporter of disability dance.

When did ancient Jews begin to write about demons, angels, and the afterlife? Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls now allows us to answer this question anew. This program explores a forgotten moment in Jewish cultural history when Jewish scribes claimed totalizing knowledge about the cosmos and its cycles, spanning astronomy, fallen angels, demons, and the End of Time.

 

Annette Yoshiko Reed is currently a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. Her research spans ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and their reception in the intertwined histories of Jews and Christians. Among her books are Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (2005), Jewish-Christiainity and the History of Judaism (2018), and Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (2020). She is currently working on a book on forgetting.

Bruce D. Haynes (PhD, City University of New York, 1995) As a scholar of racial and ethnic relations and urban communities, Haynes' work seeks to understand the processes of Racialization and the consequences of racial classification for creating communities boundaries, particularly within an urban context. His work crosses disciplinary boundaries of American Studies, Community and Urban Sociology, Race and Ethnic Relations, Religion, and Jewish Studies while it remains embedded squarely in traditional historical and qualitative methodologies of Sociology.

Haynes was born in Harlem, New York. After receiving his B.A. in Sociology from Manhattanville College, he conducted applied research, under sociologist and jury expert Jay Schulman, selecting juries for trials throughout New York State. After earning his doctorate in sociology from the City University of New York (1995) he was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Yale University in 1995. In 2001, Professor Haynes joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis, as a Professor of Sociology. In addition, He is a Senior Fellow in the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University.

His most recent book, The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (New York University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions. The work offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa. 

David S. Koffman (PhD, NYU, 2011) is a cultural and social historian of the American and Canadian Jewish life. He holds the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, and is an associate professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, where he teaches courses on Canadian Jewish history, religion in American life, the meanings of money, genealogy as history, modern antisemitism, and religion & capitalism. His first monograph, The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (Rutgers University Press, 2019), explores the American Jewish encounter with Native America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His published work has appeared in several volumes of collected essays, and in journals including The Journal of American Ethnic History, The Journal of Jewish Education, Contemporary Jewry, and Canadian Jewish Studies. His newest book project, an edited volume entitled, No Better Place? Canada, Its Jews, and the Idea of Home, will be published by the University of Toronto Press in spring 2020. 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. 

Irena Klepfisz is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and teacher. She is serving as Jewish Studies’ 2019 Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar and will be in residence at CU Boulder February 20-21, 2019. Klepfisz recently retired after teaching women’s studies at Barnard College for 22 years and in the college program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a women's maximum-security prison, as well as other universities. She immigrated to the U.S. when she was 8 and was raised among Yiddish-speaking, Jewish Labor Bundist (socialist) Holocaust survivors in the Bronx. She was an activist during the Second Wave, particularly in the lesbian/feminist movement, and addressed issues of anti-Semitism, Israeli/Palestinian peace, Jewish identity, and veltlekhe yidishkayt/secular Yiddish culture.

Klepfisz received her doctorate from the University of Chicago, and later did post-doctoral work in Yiddish at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She has an extensive publication and performance record, and in 2017, was awarded the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Fellowship. Salon Veltlekhe yidishkayt/Secular Yiddish Culture Lost and Found Irena Klepfisz was already in her early 40s when she first realized that Yiddish was important to her. Though she’d gone to Yiddish shules (schools) way into her teens and had later done post-graduate work in Yiddish at YIVO's Max Weinreich Center, it took an encounter in the early 1980s with a Chicana lesbian writer from Texas and her first trip to Poland with her mother to before she began to consider the role of Yiddish in her life. The demands of other feminists and gays pushed her even further. Klepfisz’s life with Yiddish is a complicated history of chance, circumstances, and an initially reluctant commitment to veltlekhe yidishkayt/secular Yiddish culture. Colloquium The Artist Manqué Four Yiddish Stories by Four Women Writers In this colloquium, Irena Klepfisz, will explore the short stories of four Yiddish women writers, Fradel Schtok, Yente Serdatzky, Brokhes, and Celia Dropkin. The writers vary in background and their stories are situated on different continents and communities, secular and observant. Yet directly and indirectly all four stories address the aspirations and the challenges Jewish women face in their ordinary lives.

A bilingual reader will be provided 2-3 weeks beforehand. Lunch: Thursday Feb. 21 Talk Yiddish, English or Maybe Both: The Evolution of an "Yidea" In her public lecture, poet and professor Irena Klepfisz will describe some of the issues she faced when she began trying to incorporate Yiddish into her English poetry and prose. What seemed easy enough (just put it in! use it!) turned out to be more difficult and raised questions about appropriateness, intelligibility, and, perhaps most importantly her purpose. Klepfisz will illustrate her literary process and evolution through readings of her own work and the writings of other Yiddish women writers. Evening: Thursday Feb. 21

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies, the Boulder Jewish Community Center (JCC), and cosponsors welcomed reknown photographer, Laurence Salzmann, as the Program in Jewish Studies’ 2018 Annual Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar.

When photographer Laurence Salzmann and anthropologist Ayse Gürsan-Salzmann received an invitation from the Beth Hatfutsot Museum in Tel Aviv and the Quincentennial Foundation of Istanbul to document Jewish monuments in Turkey, a three-month stay became a five-year visit. From 1984-1989, the Salzmanns photographed and chronicled the lives of Turkey’s Sephardic Jewish community, in their first year alone visiting over 25 sites where Jews have lived for over 500 years. Twenty-five years later, on a return trip to Turkey from 2012-2013, the Salzmanns revisited the Jewish communities of Antakaya, Istanbul and Izmir, taking additional photos and videos of Turkish Jewish life.

In his public lecture, In Search of Turkey's Jews, Salzmann explored the Sephardic communities of Turkey, using his extensive collection of photographs and notes about the people the Salzmanns met, places they visited, and lessons they learned along the way. A selection of Salzmann’s photographs from his exhibit, Turkey’s Jews Revisited (1984-2012), were on display at the Boulder Jewish Community Center from April 9 – May 18, 2018. Salzmann also lead a lunchtime walk-through of this exhibition at the Boulder JCC.

Laurence Salzmann is a native of Philadelphia who has worked as a photographer and filmmaker since the early 1960s. His projects document the lives of little known groups in America and abroad. He looks at the lives of people ranging from occupants of single room occupancy hotels in New York City to transhumant shepherds in Transylvania, residents of a Mexican village, and Philadelphia mummers. His photographic study of a nearly extinct Jewish community in Romania was published as The Last Jews of Radauti by Dial/Doubleday in 1983, with text by Ayse Gürsan-Salzmann. Supported by a Fulbright grant, Salzmann is currently working in Peru on a new project titled Misk'l Kachi // Sweet Salt (2016-2018). 

Salzmann's photographic method is deeply informed by his background in anthropology and involves long-term participation in and observation of groups or events. His work illustrates how lives and events are shaped by the environments and conditions in which people live. Salzmann has won multiple awards for his work and has been featured in museums and galleries throughout the world.

In his 2017 Bender lecture at the CU Boulder, Professor Matt Goldish focusd on three enormous events that occurred in Spain during 1492: the end of the centuries-long war to end Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula; the voyage of Christopher Columbus; and the expulsion of the Jews. These events are intimately connected, and their intersection runs directly through Spanish expectations about the messiah. Is it possible that we did not learn everything there is to know about Columbus in school? Attendees found out from a Columbus resident.

Matt Goldish is a Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Ohio State University and holds the Melton Chair in Jewish History. He was the Program in Jewish Studies' fifth annual Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar. Professor Goldish's research interests focus on the Western Sepharadi Diaspora and the Portuguese Conversos of Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg. His book, The Sabbatean Prophets, deals with the role of prophecy in the great messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, which swept the Jewish world in 1665-1666. Additionally, he works on the seventeenth century, and his monograph, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, revolves around the impact of Jewish ideas and literature on European intellectuals at the dawn of the Enlightenment. His latest book is Jewish Questions: Response on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (2008).

Seidman's scholarship focuses on contemporary Jewish thought, gender and sexuality, and modern Jewish literature and literary theory. In her public lecture at CU-Boulder, Seidman argued that the usual reading of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye stories as well as the musical based on them, Fiddler on the Roof, as a staging of the triumph of modern romance over traditional marriage fails to take account of Tevye's dream, which demonstrates the haunting of Jewish modernity by the remembered and invented traditional past. In addition to her public lecture, Professor Seidman presented a graduate student and faculty colloquium and served as a guest lecturer in a Jewish Studies course.

Seidman received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California Berkeley (1995) and was the former director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, where she has taught since 1995. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (University of California Press, 1997), examines the ways that Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, and Yiddish, the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, came to represent the masculine and feminine faces, respectively, of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. Her sophisticated history is the first book-length exploration of the sexual politics underlying the "marriage" of Hebrew and Yiddish, and it has profound implications for understanding the centrality of language choices and ideologies in the construction of modern Jewish identity.

Her second book, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2006), reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference and, conversely, views Jewish–Christian difference as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, the book explores how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West.

Her third book, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press this spring 2016. She is also presently working on a book about the founding of the Bais Yaakov girls' school system in interwar Poland.

Stein is one of the most important authors and scholars of her generation. Her most recent book, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores the history of a small community of Jews who lived in the M’zab valley in colonial French Algeria. Joshua Schreier, of Vassar College, describes Saharan Jews, as “fascinating…extremely well-researched book, and imaginative.”  Benjamin C. Brower, from the University of Texas at Austin, writes that “this wonderfully told story breaks new ground in the history of North Africa  . . . and like the very best work of historians it gives rise to a critical interrogation of the present.”  In 2014, Stein and co-editor Julia Phillips Cohen published Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2014), which won a 2014 National Jewish Book Award, the most prestigious and largest prize for Jewish literature. Stein’s previous books include A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi (Stanford University Press, 2012), co-edited with Aron Rodrigue and translated by Isaac Jerushalmi; Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008), 52nd Annual New England Book Show Winner and Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press,  2004), winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003 and Koret Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2004.

Stein, an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research, received her A.B. from Brown University in 1993 and her doctorate from Stanford University in 1999. Her scholarship has ranged across the Yiddish and Ladino speaking diasporas and the British and French imperial, Russian, American, Ottoman and wider Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African settings, but is always engaged with the reasons for and manifestations of Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period.

Shaul Magid, Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington served as the 2014 Sondra D. Bender Visiting Scholar, giving a lecture entitled “After Multiculturalism: Postethnicity and Judaism in America” March 6, 2014 on the CU-Boulder campus. The lecture opened with words from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and was followed by roundtable conversation with Elias Sacks, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Deborah Whitehead, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, and Rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Naropa University. Magid’s lecture, based on his book American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society, explored contemporary American Jewish life and Jewish Renewal.

“Shaul Magid's point is that the old paradigms for thinking about Jews and Judaism--specifically the ethnically inflected, assimilation-phobic, chosen/one God model--are dead. But all is not lost. He is optimistic that if Jews redefine the terms of Jewish survival, they will see just how much they have gained in these transformations.” ~Lila Corwin Berman, Temple University

Shaul Magid is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Chair, Jewish Studies in Modern Judaism at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the editor of God's Voice from the Void: Old and New Essays on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, co-editor of Beginning Again: Toward a Hermeneutic of Jewish Texts and author of Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism. His book From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala was awarded the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best textual studies book in religion. Magid is also a regular contributor to Tikkun Magazine, Zeek Magazine, Religion Dispatches, and Occasional Religion. His current research explores the work of Meir Kahane, a American Jewish religious and Israeli nationalist activist who founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL).

We are excited to have welcomed Deborah E. Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, as the Sondra. D. Bender Inaugural Visiting Scholar. Professor Lipstadt presented her keynote lecture, “The Impact of the Eichmann Trial: A Perspective after 50 Years,” as part of CU”s Holocaust Awareness Week on Friday, January 25, 2013 at 9:30AM on the Boulder Campus in UMC 235.  Her award-winning book, The Eichmann Trial, was called by Publisher’s Weekly, “a penetrating and authoritative dissection of a landmark case and its after effects.” The book was first finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award.

Lipstadt's keynote lecture examined the impact of the Eichmann Trial.  Fifty years ago, Israel shocked the world when it announced that it had captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Final Solution. His trial in Jerusalem is considered to have caused a major change in the world’s knowledge of the Holocaust. How much of an impact did it really have? Did it really get survivors to speak about their experiences in a way that they had never spoken about before? Does it have relevance for us today in terms of war crimes and the punishment of their perpetrators?

In addition to her vast scholarship, Lipstadt is known widely as the defendant in the David Irving vs. Penguin Books/Deborah Lipstadt case. Following the publication of her critically acclaimed 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, the first full length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust, Lipstadt and her British publisher were sued by David Irving for identifying him as a Holocaust denier. The judge found David Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist, and anti-Semite. According to the New York Times, the trial “put an end to the pretense that Mr. Irving is anything but a self-promoting apologist for Hitler.” Her 2006 book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with A Holocaust Denier, is the story of that trial. The book won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award and was first runner up for the Koret Award.