Jewish studies
From the Director
October 5, 2020
Dear Friends of UC Davis Jewish Studies,
Welcome to our new academic year! It is not business as usual in the Jewish Studies Program. We are adapting and responding to the challenges we face in this country and around the world, informed and inspired by our distinctive perspective as scholars and students of Jewish history, culture, and thought. Jewish Studies scholars have powerful historical reasons to insist that our work is not, and cannot, be divorced from our ethical commitments. We face persistent and deadly white supremacy and resurgent fascism; environmental collapse here at our doorstep; and widening economic inequality made starker by the global pandemic. The Jewish Studies program pledges to draw on our resources, both intellectual and material, and our shared experience to understand and help mitigate them in our own small way.
My thanks Professor Susan Gilson Miller, eminent scholar of North African Jewish history, who navigated Jewish Studies through the last academic year. The first phase of campus shutdown last spring derailed Professor Miller’s plans for a Mizrahi Studies workshop—an event that would have showcased work on Jewish cultures that often remain marginal, as the field tends to center Ashkenazi Jewish history and experience. Professor Miller has begun a well-deserved retirement, but she is committed to rescheduling this workshop when we are able to meet again. Professor Miller’s many years of work in bringing Mizrahi Studies into the center of Jewish Studies is all the more crucial as the entangled history of Jewishness, whiteness, and the construction of race resurfaces again and again in public discourse. We look forward to hosting the workshop, but meanwhile, we wish Susan a very happy retirement!
Issues race and identity also drive our first event of the academic year: a talk by our own Professor Bruce Haynes, “Judaism and the Black Experience,” this Thursday, October 8. Professor Haynes’ is the author of The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (2018), and he will draw upon theories of “Racialization and Orientalism to provide insights into the negotiation of Afro-American claims to Judaism. Black Judaisms (in both their confrontational and collaborative forms) are shown to be racial projects as both Blacks and Jews have navigated the boundaries of American color-line, while challenging normative understanding of Jewish identity, group boundaries, and the process of conversion.” Please register for the event here.
We welcome two new faculty members to the Jewish Studies community this year:
The first is our Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Dr. Yael Teff-Seker, a scholar of the cultural, social, and political aspects of environmental sustainability and policy. Her expertise in how societies manage desert, marine, and agricultural landscapes, focusing on the Middle East but with a comparative global perspective, speaks directly to the environmental crisis we face. Dr. Teff-Seker has a PhD in Conflict Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been a researcher and teacher at Technion University in Haifa, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Dr. Teff-Seker is teaching courses on environmental sustainability, ethics, conflict, and cooperation in the Departments of Sociology and Religious Studies this year.
Dr. Teff-Seker will be presenting one aspect of her current research on October 20 as part of the Religious Studies “Notes from the Field” series, co-hosted by Sociology and Jewish Studies: “Using Embodied Interviews to Understand Nature Experiences,” where she will discuss research on people’s experiences of cultural ecosystem services in Israel, the Netherlands, Finland, and Scotland. With the combination of the pandemic and wildfire crises, our own experiences of nature here in northern California are growing both more important and more fraught, so Dr. Teff-Seker’s comparative work will resonate. Please register here.
We also welcome our new Hebrew instructor, Dr. Itay Eisinger, an experienced Hebrew teacher and scholar of Israeli literature and culture who comes to us from Fordham University. He is a scholar of dystopian Hebrew literature and as critical theory, as well as an active published poet. Dr. Eisinger’s current work is about militarized feminism in Israeli culture—and in addition to teaching our Hebrew classes, he will be offering a workshop on this project later this academic year. Please look out for the announcement of his talk.
This summer we said goodbye to two valued colleagues: Dr. Galia Franco, who taught Hebrew at UC Davis for fifteen years, is now enjoying retirement. Dr. Franco is a beloved teacher and mentor: her students remark again and again that, given how enjoyable her classes were, they can hardly believe how much they learned. Happy retirement, Galia! We also bid farewell to our previous Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Dr. Rafi Grosglik, whose interdisciplinary scholarship in the sociology of food—and his own inimitable dynamism—brought together parts of our campus that would never have connected without his work. We will miss you, Rafi!
What is happening during the rest of the year? While we are not welcome guest speakers to campus, we are proud to present a new initiative: The New Directions in Jewish Studies Lectureship. This lectureship is a competitive program that showcases ground-breaking research in Jewish Studies. Given the increasing cuts to academic programs and the increasing inequality in academic labor conditions, our field is missing out on exciting work by the many excellent scholars who do not normally have the institutional support to prioritize their research. The new lectureship is open exclusively to scholars who do not hold a tenure track or equivalent permanent academic position, and offers an honorarium and an opportunity to present their work in a remote lecture series. The application deadline has just passed, and we have received fifty-eight strong proposals. We will announce our four New Directions Lecturers for 2020-2021 and schedule the series later this month.
The Jewish Studies Program hopes to become a second home for the graduate students who are working on topics related to Jews and Judaism across various departments on campus. This year we welcome PhD students Shahar Zaken (Sociology), who is interested in contemporary American Judaism, intersectionality, and social movements; and Katie White (Religious Studies), who works at the intersection of biblical and early Jewish literature, gender, and trauma studies. In my own home department of Religious Studies, three PhD students are continuing their work on Jewish texts and thought. Benjamin Steele-Fisher, who is our Program Assistant in Jewish Studies, works in the area of modern Jewish thought, focusing on "the critique of myth" that runs through the work of several key German Jewish thinkers of the last century. S. Josh Shahryar researches comparative scriptural interpretation in Judaism and early Islam, especially the reception of the Book of Job and questions of ethnic identity, and Aron Tillema is writing a dissertation that attempts to answer why the Book of Jonah seems so strange. Anya Free is completing her dissertation in the Department of History while working to develop Jewish Studies-related K-12 curricular materials for the California History-Social Science Project. Please stay tuned as we highlight the work of other emerging scholars in the Departments of History, Comparative Literature, and more.
We are actively seeking out graduate students whose work touches Jewish Studies in big and small ways. If that’s you or your advisee, please write! We are working to make the Jewish Studies Program a source of intellectual community and support for our graduate students across campus. We also continue to welcome undergraduate students who wish to minor in Jewish Studies, and to offer the Kunitz Family awards for outstanding undergraduate essays. Scholarship opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students will be announced later this year.
We hope to see many of you virtually at our events, starting with Prof. Haynes' talk this Thursday. Chag Sukkot sameach if you are celebrating, and stay safe and healthy until we can meet again in person.
With best wishes,
Eva Mroczek
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Director, Jewish Studies Program
Co-coordinator, BRANEcollective.org: an inclusive, open-access research group for the study of biblical and ancient Near Eastern literatures and their cultural worlds in the 21st century
October 5, 2020
Dear Friends of UC Davis Jewish Studies,
Welcome to our new academic year! It is not business as usual in the Jewish Studies Program. We are adapting and responding to the challenges we face in this country and around the world, informed and inspired by our distinctive perspective as scholars and students of Jewish history, culture, and thought. Jewish Studies scholars have powerful historical reasons to insist that our work is not, and cannot, be divorced from our ethical commitments. We face persistent and deadly white supremacy and resurgent fascism; environmental collapse here at our doorstep; and widening economic inequality made starker by the global pandemic. The Jewish Studies program pledges to draw on our resources, both intellectual and material, and our shared experience to understand and help mitigate them in our own small way.
My thanks Professor Susan Gilson Miller, eminent scholar of North African Jewish history, who navigated Jewish Studies through the last academic year. The first phase of campus shutdown last spring derailed Professor Miller’s plans for a Mizrahi Studies workshop—an event that would have showcased work on Jewish cultures that often remain marginal, as the field tends to center Ashkenazi Jewish history and experience. Professor Miller has begun a well-deserved retirement, but she is committed to rescheduling this workshop when we are able to meet again. Professor Miller’s many years of work in bringing Mizrahi Studies into the center of Jewish Studies is all the more crucial as the entangled history of Jewishness, whiteness, and the construction of race resurfaces again and again in public discourse. We look forward to hosting the workshop, but meanwhile, we wish Susan a very happy retirement!
Issues race and identity also drive our first event of the academic year: a talk by our own Professor Bruce Haynes, “Judaism and the Black Experience,” this Thursday, October 8. Professor Haynes’ is the author of The Soul of Judaism: Jews of African Descent in America (2018), and he will draw upon theories of “Racialization and Orientalism to provide insights into the negotiation of Afro-American claims to Judaism. Black Judaisms (in both their confrontational and collaborative forms) are shown to be racial projects as both Blacks and Jews have navigated the boundaries of American color-line, while challenging normative understanding of Jewish identity, group boundaries, and the process of conversion.” Please register for the event here.
We welcome two new faculty members to the Jewish Studies community this year:
The first is our Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Dr. Yael Teff-Seker, a scholar of the cultural, social, and political aspects of environmental sustainability and policy. Her expertise in how societies manage desert, marine, and agricultural landscapes, focusing on the Middle East but with a comparative global perspective, speaks directly to the environmental crisis we face. Dr. Teff-Seker has a PhD in Conflict Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been a researcher and teacher at Technion University in Haifa, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Dr. Teff-Seker is teaching courses on environmental sustainability, ethics, conflict, and cooperation in the Departments of Sociology and Religious Studies this year.
Dr. Teff-Seker will be presenting one aspect of her current research on October 20 as part of the Religious Studies “Notes from the Field” series, co-hosted by Sociology and Jewish Studies: “Using Embodied Interviews to Understand Nature Experiences,” where she will discuss research on people’s experiences of cultural ecosystem services in Israel, the Netherlands, Finland, and Scotland. With the combination of the pandemic and wildfire crises, our own experiences of nature here in northern California are growing both more important and more fraught, so Dr. Teff-Seker’s comparative work will resonate. Please register here.
We also welcome our new Hebrew instructor, Dr. Itay Eisinger, an experienced Hebrew teacher and scholar of Israeli literature and culture who comes to us from Fordham University. He is a scholar of dystopian Hebrew literature and as critical theory, as well as an active published poet. Dr. Eisinger’s current work is about militarized feminism in Israeli culture—and in addition to teaching our Hebrew classes, he will be offering a workshop on this project later this academic year. Please look out for the announcement of his talk.
This summer we said goodbye to two valued colleagues: Dr. Galia Franco, who taught Hebrew at UC Davis for fifteen years, is now enjoying retirement. Dr. Franco is a beloved teacher and mentor: her students remark again and again that, given how enjoyable her classes were, they can hardly believe how much they learned. Happy retirement, Galia! We also bid farewell to our previous Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Dr. Rafi Grosglik, whose interdisciplinary scholarship in the sociology of food—and his own inimitable dynamism—brought together parts of our campus that would never have connected without his work. We will miss you, Rafi!
What is happening during the rest of the year? While we are not welcome guest speakers to campus, we are proud to present a new initiative: The New Directions in Jewish Studies Lectureship. This lectureship is a competitive program that showcases ground-breaking research in Jewish Studies. Given the increasing cuts to academic programs and the increasing inequality in academic labor conditions, our field is missing out on exciting work by the many excellent scholars who do not normally have the institutional support to prioritize their research. The new lectureship is open exclusively to scholars who do not hold a tenure track or equivalent permanent academic position, and offers an honorarium and an opportunity to present their work in a remote lecture series. The application deadline has just passed, and we have received fifty-eight strong proposals. We will announce our four New Directions Lecturers for 2020-2021 and schedule the series later this month.
The Jewish Studies Program hopes to become a second home for the graduate students who are working on topics related to Jews and Judaism across various departments on campus. This year we welcome PhD students Shahar Zaken (Sociology), who is interested in contemporary American Judaism, intersectionality, and social movements; and Katie White (Religious Studies), who works at the intersection of biblical and early Jewish literature, gender, and trauma studies. In my own home department of Religious Studies, three PhD students are continuing their work on Jewish texts and thought. Benjamin Steele-Fisher, who is our Program Assistant in Jewish Studies, works in the area of modern Jewish thought, focusing on "the critique of myth" that runs through the work of several key German Jewish thinkers of the last century. S. Josh Shahryar researches comparative scriptural interpretation in Judaism and early Islam, especially the reception of the Book of Job and questions of ethnic identity, and Aron Tillema is writing a dissertation that attempts to answer why the Book of Jonah seems so strange. Anya Free is completing her dissertation in the Department of History while working to develop Jewish Studies-related K-12 curricular materials for the California History-Social Science Project. Please stay tuned as we highlight the work of other emerging scholars in the Departments of History, Comparative Literature, and more.
We are actively seeking out graduate students whose work touches Jewish Studies in big and small ways. If that’s you or your advisee, please write! We are working to make the Jewish Studies Program a source of intellectual community and support for our graduate students across campus. We also continue to welcome undergraduate students who wish to minor in Jewish Studies, and to offer the Kunitz Family awards for outstanding undergraduate essays. Scholarship opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students will be announced later this year.
We hope to see many of you virtually at our events, starting with Prof. Haynes' talk this Thursday. Chag Sukkot sameach if you are celebrating, and stay safe and healthy until we can meet again in person.
With best wishes,
Eva Mroczek
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Director, Jewish Studies Program
Co-coordinator, BRANEcollective.org: an inclusive, open-access research group for the study of biblical and ancient Near Eastern literatures and their cultural worlds in the 21st century