Public Lecture Announcements
Welcome University of Haifa Visiting Scholars, Dr. Efraim Lev and Dr. Moshe Lavee
The Center for Judaic Studies will be hosting two members of the University of Haifa faculty, Dr. Efraim Lev and Dr. Moshe Lavee, for a week from September 1 to September 5. Dr. Lev and Dr. Lavee are the co-directors of a center recently established at UHaifa called The Interdisciplinary Center for the Broader Application of Genizah Research, a center that is seeking to use newly available digital technologies to foster wider and more diverse use of the extraordinary historical archives of the Cairo Genizah. (If you are unfamiliar with the Cairo Genizah, you can get a quick sense of it from the site of Cambridge’s digital collection. There will also be a display in the Dodd Center of some of their Genizah Research during that same week – come check it out!
Dr. Lev is trained as a historian of medicine and an ethno-pharmacologist. Much of his research centers on the records of plant remedies and other medicinal knowledge that has been preserved in the Genizah fragments.
Dr. Lavee is trained as a scholar of rabbinic literature and his research focuses on the transmission and peregrinations of rabbinic texts throughout the classical and medieval periods. His academia.edu page is probably the best place to get a sense of the work he does.
We are excited about hosting Dr. Lev and Dr. Lavee, and for the opportunities to explore potential collaborative relationships between UHaifa and UConn, especially amongst our faculty and advanced graduate students.
On September 2nd, at 4:00pm, Dr. Lev will be conducting a Public Lecture, free and open to the public, on the subject “Practical and Theoretical Medicine in Medieval Eastern Societies: The Case of the Cairo Genizah.”
On September 3rd at 12:30pm, Dr. Lavee will be giving a Research Seminar, open to anyone – but geared more towards faculty and graduate or advanced undergraduate students, “The Egyptian Midwives: Gender and Identity in Lost Aggadic Traditions from the Genizah.”
During their time in Storrs Drs. Lev and Lavee are available and eager to meet with faculty and students interested in their research and in possible collaborative arrangements. If you are teaching a course in the Fall that might lend itself to a visit by one or both of these scholars and/or you are someone with whom they might like to meet, perhaps for a lunch or dinner during that same week, please contact us.
Dr. Efraim Lev of the University of Haifa Presents “Practical and Theoretical Medicine in Medieval Eastern Societies: The Case of the Cairo Genizah” on 9/2/14 at 4pm – Dodd Konover
Please join us for a SPECIAL PUBLIC LECTURE
by Dr. Efraim Lev, Associate Professor
Department of Land of Israel Studies
University of Haifa, Israel
“Practical and Theoretical Medicine in Medieval Eastern Societies: The Case of the Cairo Genizah “
on: Tuesday, September 2, 2014 at 4:00pm
Dodd Research Center – Konover Auditorium
Dr. Efraim Lev (B.A., M.Sc. Ph.D) is serving as the Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion, Israel. Prof. Lev studied at Bar-Ilan University and was trained both as a historian and as a field biologist and therefore his academic work has always had a strong interdisciplinary focus. He won the British Council Chevening and Koret Foundation Post-Doctoral awards (1999-2000); and was granted a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, London. Prof. Lev won various prizes including “Levkovitz” Foundation for Research Students in the History of Medicine (Tel Aviv University – 1998), Dr. Moses Einhorn prize for the research of Hebrew language and Medical literature (Tel-Aviv – 2003), Overseas Visiting Scholar grant, St. John’s College, (Cambridge 2003-2004 and 2011-2012) and the George Urdang Medal for pharmaco-historical writings 2012 (Award of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy). At the last few years his research focus is on ethno-pharmacology and the history of medicine in the medieval Middle East with particular emphasis on the medical documents in the Cairo Genizah (11th-13th century). In his project, “Medicine of the Genizah People”, he created a carefully planned framework of research teams, that reconstructed the medieval inventory of the practical materia medica of the Genizah community; and studied and published its original and practical prescriptions, list of drugs and medical notebooks.
Dr. Moshe Lavee of the University of Haifa presents “The Egyptian Midwives: Gender and Identity in Lost Aggadic Traditions from the Genizah” on 9/3/14 at 12:30pm – Class of ’47 Room
Did you miss the lecture? View it here!
Please join us for a RESEARCH SEMINAR
by Dr. Moshe Lavee, Lecturer
Center for Interdisciplinary Study of the Cairo Genizah
University of Haifa, Israel
Presenting…
“The Egyptian Midwives: Gender and Identity in Lost Aggadic Traditions from the Genizah“
on: Wednesday, September 3, 2014 at 12:30pm
Library Building – Class of ’47 Room
Dr Moshe Lavee is a lecturer in Talmud and Midrash and the head of the Center for Interdisciplinary study of the Cairo Genizah in the University of Haifa. His studies are devoted to questions of identity, gender and canonicity in rabbinic literature, and he is also devoted to the promotion Jewish Studies among various communities in Israel and abroad and involved in inter-religious study groups and discourse.
Presentation Brunch at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford with Dr. Lev and Dr. Lavee “Gems from the Cairo Genizah: Practical and Theoretical Medicine in Medieval Eastern Societies” on 9/7/14 at 10am – Mandell JCC
We are partnering with the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford
and hosting a Brunch Presentation Open to the Public
“Gems from the Cairo Genizah: Practical and Theoretical Medicine in Medieval Eastern Societies”
by Dr. Moshe Lavee and Dr. Efraim Lev
Center for Interdisciplinary Study of the Cairo Genizah
University of Haifa, Israel
on: Sunday, September 7, 2014 at 10:00am
at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford
335 Bloomfield Avenue West Hartford, CT 06117
UConn Center for Judaic Studies is hosting two visiting scholars from the University of Haifa. Professors Efraim Lev and Moshe Lavee, are the co-directors of University of Haifa’s recently established Interdisciplinary Center for the Broader Application of Genizah Research, which seeks to use newly available digital technologies to foster wider and more diverse use of the extraordinary historical archives of the Cairo Genizah. (If you are unfamiliar with the Cairo Genizah, you can get a quick sense of it from the site of Cambridge’s digital collection: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah)
Professor Lev is trained as a historian of medicine and an ethno-pharmacologist. Much of his research centers on the records of plant remedies and other medicinal knowledge that has been preserved in the Genizah fragments.
Professor Lavee is trained as a scholar of rabbinic literature and his research focuses on the transmission and peregrinations of rabbinic texts throughout the classical and medieval periods: https://haifa.academia.edu/MosheLavee
We welcome your attendance at this brunch event, open to the public, where they will present some of their fascinating work on the Genizah .
COMING OF AGE AROUND THE WORLD – A Presentation and Demonstration of Ethnic Traditions – 5/29/14 7pm at Mandell JCC
COMING OF AGE AROUND THE WORLD
A MULTI-CULTURAL LOOK AT WOMEN’S RITES OF PASSAGE:
A PRESENTATION AND DEMONSTRATION OF ETHNIC TRADITIONS
THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2014 at 7:00 P.M.,
MANDELL JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER, 335 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford
Almost every religious and ethnic group has a particular ritual or ceremony marking a young
person’s transition into adulthood. Learn about these rites of passage within four different
communities and how young women are initiated into these societies, reflecting their own unique
values and ethos.
Speakers include: Rosaida Morales Rosario, representing the Latino community; Rachnal Agrawal,
representing the Indian community; Rachel Sayet & Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, mother and daughter
members of the Mohegan Tribe, representing the Native American community; and Rabbi Debra Cantor,
Congregation B’nai Tikvoh-Sholom representing the Jewish community.
THIS PROGRAM IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
For more information, go to www.jhsgh.org or call 860 727-6170
“The Human Face: Genocide and Human Rights Education” Keynote Lecture 5/16/14, 3-4:30pm at Konover Auditorium, Dodd Building
“The Human Face: Genocide and Human Rights Education” Keynote lecture is being held today at Konover Auditorium from 3-4:30pm!
The Dodd Center, in partnership with the UNESCO Chair & Institute of Comparative Human Rights, is proud to present Dr. Stephen D. Smith, UNESCO Chair of Genocide Education and Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation–The Institute for Visual History and Education.
Dr. Stephen D. Smith is one of the world’s leading advocates of Holocaust education and genocide prevention. He was founding director of the UK Holocaust Centre, Britain’s first dedicated Holocaust memorial and education institution, and he was inaugural chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the body that runs national Holocaust commemoration in the UK. He also founded the Aegis Trust, an agency that works globally to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.
Holocaust Convocation and I. Martin and Janet M. Fierberg Lecture – April 28, 2014 5pm
The I.Martin and Janet M. Fierberg Lecture and 27th Academic Convocation on the Holocaust will be held on Monday, April 28th, at 5pm in the Doris and Simon Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
The event will include a welcome by Dr. Jeffrey Shoulson, Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, and Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and Professor, Department of English.
Student Awards will be presented by Joan Seliger Sidney, Writer-in-Residence, Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, at which time a student will be presented with the Frances and Irving Seliger Prize for Excellence in Holocaust Studies.
The speaker will be Ellen Cassedy, award-winning author of “We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust” (2012), a ground breaking account of how a post-Holocaust nation is, and is not, engaging with its Jewish heritage. Her essays and translations have appeared in Polin, Ha’aretz, The Forward, and other publications. With Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, she received the 2012 Translation Prize awarded by the National Yiddish Book Center. She was a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration and a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. Ms. Cassedy resides near Washington, D.C.
Ellen Cassedy’s lecture topic will be “Can Vilnius Remember Vilna? Facing the Holocaust in the former Jerusalem of the North”. A reception will immediately follow.
The Center looks forward to hosting this annual event. Please RSVP here. For additional information, please call 860-486-2271, or email judaicstudies@uconn.edu.
Seth Kimmel presents: “Parables of Coercion at the End of Islamic Spain” on Thursday, April 17, 1-2:30pm Oak 236
Please join us for a lecture: “Parables of Coercion at the End of Islamic Spain” on Thursday, April 17, 1-2:30pm Oak 236
Presented by: Dr. Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
Seth Kimmel is an assistant professor in Columbia University’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, where he studies and teaches about early modern Iberia. Before coming to Columbia, he was a post-doctoral fellow in Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. His current book project is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the long sixteenth century. His other research interests include the history of cartography, debates about religion and secularism, and comparative literature.
The talk argues that both opponents and advocates of Morisco expulsion employed debate about the Morisco period’s endgame to counter a pervasive narrative of imperial decline and to stake their respective claims on contemporary public affairs. The two different archives of arguments and episodes that emerged from this early seventeenth-century debate offered distinct models of regional exemplarity, scriptural exegesis, and textual production. In this way, the apparently chauvinistic struggle over how to eliminate Islam from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon became an engine of scholarly innovation.
Sponsored by and for more information, please contact: Daniel Hershenzon, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages, UConn
Ted Merwin – Special Lecture “Homeland of the Jewish Soul: A History of the Jewish Deli” – 4/9/2014 5:30pm
Please join us for a SPECIAL LECTURE
by Dr. Ted Merwin, Associate Professor of Religion;
Director of The Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life
Dickinson College
“Homeland of the Jewish Soul: A History of the Jewish Deli “
on: Wednesday, April 9 at 5:30 p.m.
Class of ’47 Room – Library Building
Ted Merwin, Ph.D is a professor, writer, journalist, and noted public speaker. He is the author of In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture, as well as of a forthcoming book on the history of the Jewish delicatessen, Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Delicatessen.
In addition to numerous scholarly articles on American Jewish culture, Merwin has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, international Herald Tribune, Haaretz, Forward, Moment, Hadassah, and many other newspapers and magazines. For the last thirteen years, Merwin has also penned a weekly theater column for the New York Jewish Week, the largest-circulation Jewish newspaper in the nation. He teaches religion and Judaic Studies and is the founding director of the Milton B Asbell Center for Jewish Life at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.
.