University News

  For many persons today it is entirely plausible to imagine God as bodiless, or further still, as an entity created by the human intellect, a conceptual idea unaffected by time and space but this is not how most ancients viewed God. One encounters, as Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic specialists have made clear, everything from a very human-like body in the Hebrew Bible to an utterly incorporeal deity in the writings of Maimonides with much overlap in between.

  This talk will explore how the Haratin, a community marginalized because of their putative slave ancestry, engages in memory and cultural preservation as means of cultivating a sense of local and national belonging in Morocco. It explores how the Haratin have made great strides in problematizing, and combatting notions that they are not indigenous to Morocco, and thereby their Africanity, through the preservation of local Jewish history and artifacts. Talk centers on the Haratin in two places in the Anti-Atlas, in Aqqa and Zagora.

  Luce will focus her presentation on a cohort of young Jewish activists raised in the Yiddish-speaking immigrant milieu of Los Angeles who came of age in the Young Communist League in the 1920s and 1930s, including Dorothy Ray Healey (Dorothy Rosenblum), Ben Dobbs (Ben Isgur), and others who became prominent leaders of the California Communist Party by the 1940s.

The UC Davis Jewish Studies Program is pleased to announce the calendar for the New Directions in Jewish Studies 2021 Lecture Series. Please find more information below, as well as registration links.   Registration:

Elliot Ratzman, Zipporah's Knife: A Jewish Reckoning With Race
Tuesday, January 12, 2020, 12 PM PST
Register here. 
 

The UC Davis Jewish Studies Program is happy to announce the lineup for the inaugural New Directions in Jewish Studies Lecture Series. Please find more information below and be on the lookout for these upcoming events!  

  In recent years, researchers have come to recognize the importance of understanding the cultural significance of nature for people. However, methods to evaluate those services and values often miss the authentic and complex nature of experiences and relationships that people have with nature. For the past several years, Dr. Yael Teff-Seker has employed an embodied approach to the evaluation of cultural ecosystem services, as she interviewed people while walking with them in nature.

  Register here.

Coming up:      
Past events:      

 

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Every year the Kunitz Award honors the best undergraduate work in the field of Jewish Studies. This award was made possible by donations from the family, friends and community of Don Kunitz, a librarian at UC Davis. 
2018 winners in the research paper category are Josie Kamida, Ethan Kogon-Schneider, and Oswaldo Vargas. Prizes in the short paper category were awarded to Noah Scheindlin and Maddie Thomas. Finally, Bardia Eshghi and Danielle Schwartz received honorable mentions!