The Captive Sea - Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (2018) by UConn Associate Professor, Daniel Hershenzon, was recently published in Hebrew translation by the Hebrew University Magnes Press.
Learn more and get your copy [here]
Congratulations to our faculty member, Susan Einbinder, who has her newest book, Writing Plague - Jewish Responses to the Great Italian Plague out, published University of Pennsylvania Press.
Learn more and order your copy here: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512822878/writing-plague/
Center Director Prof. Avinoam Patt is co-editor of the new Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust, together with Prof. Laura Hilton (Muskingum University).
The volume includes 20 chapters on the challenges and necessity of the teaching the Holocaust in the 21st century, including chapters devoted to teaching specific content, as well as chapters for teaching with specific sources, methods, and media. Among the contributors are UConn faculty member Prof. Alan Marcus (on teaching with film), Connecticut-based teacher Stuart Abrams (Avon High School, teaching with monuments and memorials), along with Avinoam Patt’s chapter on Jewish Displaced Persons.
More information can be found here:
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5767.htm
“Hilton and Patt’s wide-ranging volume combines authoritative surveys of key aspects of the Holocaust—from antisemitism to postwar justice—with practical guides of using survivor testimonies, photographs, museums, and more with students. This book will help anyone involved in teaching about a subject that remains as challenging as it is urgent.”
On Sunday, June 14, The Times of Israel published a must-read article by Professor Miller, "The Voices We Are Finally Hearing," which reflects on today's turmoil. You can access it here:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-voices-we-are-finally-hearing/
Part two of Professor Miller's thought-provoking piece, "The Other Voices that Need to be Heard – Ours," was published on June 26 and can be read here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-other-voices-that-need-to-be-heard-ours/
Founding Center Director Professor Emeritus Arnold Dashefsky has recently published a new edition of Americans Abroad: A Comparative Study of Emigrants from the United States (Springer 2020). The book is co-authored by Karen A. Woodrow-Lafield and includes a new introduction as well as four new chapters with a Foreword by Steven J. Gold and Postscripts provided by David J. Graham and Chaim I. Waxman. Originally published in 1992 by Plenum Press, the first edition of Americans Abroad was co-authored by Arnold Dashefsky, Jan DeAmicis, the late Bernard Lazerwitz (z”l), and Ephraim Tabory.
About the Book
Since the publication of Americans Abroad in 1992, the study of emigration has advanced considerably. Since the United States in particular receives such a high volume of immigrants, its emigrant population is less-frequently studied. International migration continues to increase, with now over 200 million people worldwide living as emigrants from their birth country for the purposes of work, family integration, improved living situations, or human rights.
Utilizing the same social psychological approach that made the first edition so successful, the authors examine the motivation, adjustment issues and return migration of American emigrants. The analysis of these comparative experiences reveal core elements of American culture.
Learn more on the publisher's website.
Professor Arnold Dashefsky was featured on the July 10, 2019, episode of The UConn360 Podcast. Professor Dashefsky discussed the recent release of the American Jewish Year Book 2018, which he has co-edited with Professor Ira Sheskin of the University of Miami since 2012. The American Jewish Year Book was first published in 1899 and is considered the annual record of the North American Jewish communities.
Listen to the episode: https://uconn.edu/uconn360-podcast/episode-37-special-celebrity-guest-the-good-boy-of-uconn/
For decades, the American Jewish Year Book has been the premier place for leading academics to publish long review chapters on topics of major interest to the American Jewish communities. Each volume features 5-7 major review articles, including 2-3 long chapters written by leading experts on topics of contemporary interest.
The 2018 volume features a Forum on "American Jewry in the 21st Century: Grounds for Optimism or Pessimism." Contemporary assessments from more than 20 leading scholars are included. A review article on "Antisemitism in Contemporary America" by Tom W. Smith and Benjamin Schapiro is followed by several standard articles typically featured in the Year Book, including "American Jews and the Domestic Arena" by Steven Windmueller; "American Jews and the International Arena" by Mitchell Bard; "United States Jewish Population, 2018" by Ira M. Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsky; "Canadian Jewish Population, 2018" by Charles Shahar; and "World Jewish Population, 2018" by Sergio DellaPergola.
For more information on the 2018 volume, visit the series publisher Springer's website.
Congratulations to incoming Director Professor Avinoam Patt whose new volume The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (Wayne State UP) was recently released! Professor Patt will begin his tenure as Director at the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life in August 2019 at which time he will also serve as the next Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies.
The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism traces the history of the JDC—an organization founded to aid victims of World War I that has played a significant role in preserving and sustaining Jewish life across the globe. The thirteen essays in this volume, edited by Avinoam Patt, Atina Grossmann, Linda G. Levi, and Maud S. Mandel, reflect critically on the organization’s transformative impact on Jewish communities throughout the world, covering topics such as aid for refugees from National Socialism in Cuba, Shanghai, Tehran, the Dominican Republic, France, Belgium, and Australia; assistance to Holocaust survivors in Displaced Persons camps for rebuilding and emigration; and assistance in Rome and Vienna to Soviet Jewish transmigrants in the 1970s. Despite the sustained transnational humanitarian work of this pioneering non-governmental organization, scholars have published surprisingly little devoted to the history and remarkable accomplishments of the JDC, nor have they comprehensively explored the JDC’s role on the ground in many regions and cultures. This volume seeks to address those gaps not only by assessing the widespread impact of the JDC but also by showcasing the richness and depth of the JDC Archives as a resource for examining modern Jewish history in global context.
The JDC at 100 is addressed to scholars and students of humanitarian aid, conflict, displacement, and immigration, primarily in Jewish, European, and American history. It will also appeal to readers with a more general interest in Jewish studies and refugee studies, Holocaust museum professionals, and those engaged in Jewish and other relief and resettlement programs.
This innovative volume uses the history of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as a window onto the experiences of the Jewish people during the twentieth century. It provides a unique panorama onto far-flung Jewish communities joined together through a remarkable American-based organization with worldwide concerns.
– David Engel, Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies, professor of history, New York University
Few organizations have histories as important and powerful as the JDC. Its century of service make it worthy of a book as excellent as this one, which we can hope, will inspire many more scholarly projects. The JDC truly deserves to be the focus of research and attention.
– Hasia R. Diner, director of Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History
This remarkable collection of scholarly essays, based on the recently opened archives of the JDC, transforms our understanding of American Jewish rescue and humanitarian efforts, emphasizing the interwar and Holocaust years. Heroes, villains, murders, and mysteries fill these pages; so do grim details, poignant photographs, and trenchant analyses. A major contribution to twentieth-century Jewish history.
– Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University, author of American Judaism: A History
Based largely on the underutilized archives of the Joint Distribution Committee, these riveting accounts of that century-old institution tell dramatic stories of the rescue and support the JDC has provided to Jews from China to Cuba, Eastern Europe to Israel, and beyond. Firmly committed to avoiding politics, the JDC nevertheless has had to navigate tense, delicate situations and has done so with aplomb, discretion, and remarkable successes.
– Zvi Gitelman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan
Warm congratulations to our colleague Professor Sarah Willen whose book Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins will be available this August from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"Sarah Willen's absorbing ethnography of Israeli criminalization and expulsion of migrants is disquieting and haunting by turns. Her essential and provocative treatment of how existential abjection leads to social mobilization bears lessons for observers of similar phenomena elsewhere in the world."—Samuel Moyn, author of Christian Human Rights
"Fighting for Dignity breaks new ground in anthropological studies of global migration by combining a sociopolitical approach with careful attention to the embodied experience of migrants in Israel; most importantly, even in the most dire or abject conditions, it is a story about dignity and flourishing, not one about suffering. This long awaited ethnography, based on nearly twenty years of research, is essential reading for anyone interested in how Otherness (both migrant and Palestinian) is created, lived, and challenged in Israel."—Miriam Ticktin, author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
"Sarah Willen's compassionate ethnography of those excluded and expelled under the nationalist agenda of the Israeli state echoes Hannah Arendt's argument that the humanity of a persecuted people seldom survives the hour of their liberation, and may even entail visiting on others the injustices they themselves suffered in the past. Willen's moving and sobering documentation of the everyday lives of those on the margins of the state, and of Israelis actively working to preserve humanity in dark times, is not only a brilliant essay in existential anthropology; it is a wakeup call to the world."—Michael Jackson, author of Critique of Identity Thinking
In Fighting for Dignity, Sarah S. Willen explores what happened when the Israeli government launched an aggressive deportation campaign targeting newly arrived migrants from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine. Although the campaign was billed as a solution to high unemployment, it had another goal as well: to promote an exclusionary vision of Israel as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have no place. The deportation campaign quickly devastated Tel Aviv's migrant communities and set the stage for even more aggressive antimigrant and antirefugee policies in the years to come.
Fighting for Dignity traces the roots of this deportation campaign in Israeli history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and shows how policies that illegalize and criminalize migrants wreak havoc in their lives, endanger their health, and curtail the human capacity to flourish. Children born to migrant parents are especially vulnerable to developmental and psychosocial risks. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic engagement in homes and in churches, medical offices, advocacy organizations, and public spaces, Willen shows how migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusions and vulnerabilities they endure. To complement their perspectives, she introduces Israeli activists who reject their government's exclusionary agenda and strive to build bridges across difference, repair violations of migrants' dignity, and resist policies that violate their own moral convictions. Willen's vivid and unflinching ethnography challenges us to reconsider our understandings of global migration, human rights, the Middle East— and even dignity itself.
Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. She is editor of Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context.
A serious, probing look at early modern Mediterranean slavery. Daniel Hershenzon locates new and highly personalized sources within the vast bureaucratic archives of Spain and then wields them to identify and theorize the expectations and logics of behavior that underlay the captives' struggles to obtain freedom.—James Amelang, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Congratulations to affiliated faculty member Professor Daniel Hershenzon on the recent publication of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press).
In The Captive Sea, Daniel Hershenzon explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Despite their confessional differences, the lives of captives and captors alike were connected in a political economy of ransom and communication networks shaped by Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan rulers; ecclesiastic institutions; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intermediaries; and the captives themselves, as well as their kin.
Hershenzon offers both a comprehensive analysis of competing projects for maritime dominance and a granular investigation of how individual lives were tragically upended by these agendas. He takes a close look at the tightly connected and ultimately failed attempts to ransom an Algerian Muslim girl sold into slavery in Livorno in 1608; the son of a Spanish marquis enslaved by pirates in Algiers and brought to Istanbul, where he converted to Islam; three Spanish Trinitarian friars detained in Algiers on the brink of their departure for Spain in the company of Christians they had redeemed; and a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria, captured in 1613 by the Sicilian squadron of Spain.
Examining the circulation of bodies, currency, and information in the contested Mediterranean, Hershenzon concludes that the practice of ransoming captives, a procedure meant to separate Christians from Muslims, had the unintended consequence of tightly binding Iberia to the Maghrib.