Making waves in the field of Judaic Studies, is a recent discovery by State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni and Professor Stuart Miller in Old Chesterfield, CT. Read about what they uncovered.The mikveh barely existed in 19th century American, where Jewish immigrants turned against religion. But one has been found in Connecticut, and it is more similar those in Israel than in the US. Nicholas Bellantoni, state archeologist, left, Stuart Miller, professor of Hebrew, history and Judaic studies look down into the site of a old US mikveh (Photo Credit: Peter Morenus/UConn Photo) Researchers in Connecticut have unearthed in a old farming community a 19th century mikveh that has totally changed view of Jewish history in the United States. Read more
Faculty News
UConn Celebrates Primo Levi
Posted by CindyMindell on February 27, 2013 in CT News,
STORRS – A quarter-century after his passing, Italian-Jewish philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is the subject of a year-long academic series, a collaboration between the University of Connecticut’s Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages and its Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life.
The program is organized by Dr. Philip Balma, who straddles the two academic foci, as both assistant professor of Italian Literary and Cultural Studies, and affiliated faculty member of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. Balma credits a high-school teacher for inspiring his admiration for the Italian-Jewish philosopher. “I must acknowledge, first and foremost, the efforts of the late Carla Serram,” he says. “She was my literature professor in the Italian public school system in the 1980s in Florence, Italy, and she was the person who introduced me to Primo Levi’s first autobiographical book, If This Is a Man, also known in English translation as Survival in Auschwitz. Prof. Serra planted a seed that, many years later, has grown into a much larger initiative on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the flagship campus of UConn in Storrs.” Read full story
A Thinker Who Works Out Philosophical Problems Through Writing
For a long time, Lewis Gordon did not describe himself as a philosopher. Instead, he thought of himself as a writer working out the answers to problems through his writing. “For me every true thinker is always a thinker and something else,” says Gordon, who will arrive in Storrs next summer from Temple University, where he is a renowned philosophy professor and director of both the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought.He will join the UConn faculty as part of the University’s initiative to hire up to 500 new professors over four years, to strengthen the academic core. Click here to read more>>
Q & A with Prof. Stuart S. Miller: UConn’s Judaic Studies program enters new phase
Posted by CindyMindell on July 11, 2012 in CT News
The Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life recently announced several developments, including the appointment of a new chair. Recently, Professor Miller spoke with the Ledger about these changes, as well as his work at the university and how his own role is changing. Click here to read more
Dr. Susan Einbinder Hired as Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Susan Einbinder has been hired as Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. Dr. Einbinder holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and was formerly Professor of Hebrew Literature at HUC-JIR/Cincinnati.
She has published two monographs on medieval Judaism, entitled No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (U of Pennsylvania P, 2009) and Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton UP, 2002); and she is currently in progress on a third, entitled Detours and Delays: On Medieval Jewish History and Literature. A 2004 recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed her to pursue research on her second book, Dr. Einbinder has also received a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, School of Historical Studies, as well as a grant from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. http://medievalstudies.uconn.edu/newsevents/recent-events/
Counting Jewish Communities
Counting the Jewish population in the U.S. and uncovering previously unknown Jewish communities has become an annual project for Arnold Dashefsky, his graduate students, and his colleagues. Dashefsky, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, and his colleague Ira Sheskin, a human geographer at the University of Miami, recently found that there are about 6.6 million Jews in the U.S., a figure 20 percent higher than the one reported in a 2000 National Jewish Population Survey.
The exact figure is hard to establish – defining who is a Jew is one elusive feature of a population count – but Dashefsky and Sheskin have been refining their project for five years. Each year, they are discovering new, previously unreported Jewish communities.“People who follow this issue are intrigued by it,” says Dashefsky, a sociologist who is director of the North American Jewish Data Bank, which is housed at UConn.
Population report: More Jews live in the US than in Israel
A 2010 population report from the University of Miami and the University of Connecticut releases new estimates on American Jewish Population
CORAL GABLES, FL (October 21, 2010)–Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) and the University of Connecticut (UConn) have published a 2010 report on the American Jewish population, as part of a new North American Jewish Data Bank Report series.
Poetry Reading by Joan Seliger Sidney at UConn Coop Storrs Center on 4/28/14 at 7pm
As good fortune would have it, following the Holocaust Convocation our colleague, Joan Seliger Sidney, will be launching her latest book of poetry, Bereft and Blessed, at the UConn Bookstore. Why not join us for both events!
Apr 28 2014 7:00 pm, at UConn Co-op Bookstore at Storrs Center, One Royce Circle, Unit 101, Storrs
Jennifer Sidney Silva, a flautist with the Elm City Winds, will open the evening.
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Joan Seliger Sidney’s new book from Antrim House, Bereft and Blessed. Joan Seliger Sidney’s Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir was published by CavanKerry Press. Her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jewish Currents, Caduceus, Theodate, and elsewhere. Joan has received individual artist’s poetry fellowships from Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, also a Visiting Faculty Fellowship from Yale. She’s writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. In addition, she facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult workshop.
North American Jewish Data Bank Calls UConn Home
Abridged Reprint: Advance, Monday, February 7, 2005, Volume 23 No.19, By David Bauman
How many of America’s 5.2 million Jews are married to non-Jews? And how many of this nation’s Jewish adults attend religious services monthly?
Data that provide answers to such questions concerning the social and demographic characteristics of the American Jewish community are now available at an interactive website administered by UConn’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Life, in collaboration with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and supported by United Jewish Communities (UJC). The website, www.jewishdatabank.org, is available to all for non-commercial use.
“The website contains the most advanced database of social scientific studies of North American Jewry and allows researchers to better understand the size and composition of different Jewish populations in the United States,” says Arnold Dashefsky, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. “Individuals can now download data from the archive over the web and conduct their own analysis of it.”
The website is the result of a new partnership between the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life and UJC, a New York-based philanthropic organization representing 155 Jewish community federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America.
Over two decades, the UJC has amassed the largest archive of social scientific and demographic studies of North American Jewry in an effort to promote understanding of changes within the Jewish Community. This archive, the Mandell L. Berman Institute — North American Jewish Data Bank, is now the principal repository of social scientific and demographic studies of the North American Jewish community. Included among its holdings are national surveys of the U.S. Jewish populations in 1971 and 1990, more than 90 local Jewish community studies from the 1960s to the present, and the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001 reflecting the most recently collected data as well as studies of Canadian Jewry.
The archive, established in 1986 by one of the UJC’s predecessor organizations, the Council of Jewish Federations, originally was based at the City Unversity of New York’s Center for Jewish Studies. In 2004, the Data Bank was moved from Brandeis University, its second home, to UConn, under the auspices of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. The UJC is also providing a three-year grant of $240,000 to support promotion of the Data Bank archive.
“We are so pleased to form this new partnership with the University of Connecticut,” says Mandell Berman, founder of the North American Jewish Data Bank. “University scholars, such as Dr. Arnold Dashefsky, will be able to effectively analyze the information housed in the Data Bank.” A critical link is UConn’s Institute for Social Inquiry or Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, the largest and oldest archive of public opinion data in the world. “This collection represents a valuable set of topical data for the broader social science community,” says Lois Timms-Ferrara, Associate Director of the Roper Center. “The attentiveness of the UJC to these data is evident in their decision to archive these studies at the Roper Center, where the application of contemporary archiving standards assure these data will be preserved in perpetuity.”