Congratulations to the 2023 "New Directions in Jewish Studies" Lecturers!
Launched in 2020, the "New Directions in Jewish Studies" Lecture Series at UC Davis is a one-of-a-kind program that aims to promote the work of scholars doing cutting edge research in Jewish Studies outside the tenure track. This year's three lecturers were selected from a large pool of applicants of extraordinary range and quality, and each will present their research in a virtual talk in 2023. Congratulations to Dr. Aleksandra Jakubczak, Dr. Larisa Reznik, and Dr. Daniella Farah!
January 18, 2023, 10 AM PST
Aleksandra Jakubczak
Responding: Naomi Seidman
Abstract: Jewish women who sold sex have been marginalized in Jewish historiography. Endowed with little or no agency, they have been primarily presented as victims of international trafficking between Eastern Europe and Argentina. Yet, they did not live on the margins of Eastern European Jewish society. If we remove the morally judgmental label of prostitutes, we discern that these women functioned in various contexts beyond the sex world – as migrants, workers, and family relatives. Once we recognize them as historical actors, we can pose and answer questions: Why did some Jewish women enter prostitution? What were their prospects after leaving this occupation? What did their families think about them selling sex? Drawing on the latest feminist research on trafficking and sex work, this lecture challenges our understanding of Eastern European Jewish women who sold sex in various countries between 1870 and 1939. It reveals that the boundary between the commercial sex and the “respectable” worlds was fluid, and being a sex worker was not indefinitely determining one’s status. Furthermore, it demonstrates that for some women, entering the trafficking system was part of a larger migratory project; for others, soliciting abroad was a family economic strategy.
Bio: Aleksandra Jakubczak is a senior historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in her final year, finishing a dissertation titled (Sex)worker, Migrant, and Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex and Mobility, 1870-1939. She works in the fields of migration studies, gender and women history, and Jewish studies, specializing in Eastern European Jewish history. Before coming to Columbia, Aleksandra received her BA and MA degrees in Hebrew Studies and History from the University of Warsaw. In the past, Aleksandra taught several courses on Eastern European Jewry at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Currently, she is a Sophie Bookhalter fellow at the Center for Jewish History and Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellow at YIVO.
April 4, 2023, 12 PM PDT
Larisa Reznik
Our Rosenzweig, Ourselves: Or, What Does Gender Critique Want?
Responding: Mara Benjamin
Abstract: This lecture looks at the history of scholarly attempts to talk about the gender politics of Rosenzweig's classic text, The Star of Redemption. In particular, Rosenzweig's account of revelation and the community constituted around it has been read as everything from patriarchal, dominative, and homosocial; to casually sexist; to queer; to evincing something like a feminist ethics of care; to something that can be explained (away) by Rosenzweig's social, historical, or exegetical context. It's not especially surprising that people disagree on how and why to read a text. But I suggest that the particular contours of this disagreement are indicative of a larger issue in the fields of feminist studies and modern Jewish thought. I use the story-telling maneuvers of these attempts, and the difficulties embodied in their contradictions, to speak about the gender politics of The Star and diagnose a broader challenge in these fields; namely, that the goals of feminist critique are many and often incommensurable. For example, the desire for greater inclusion of women may sit uneasily with the goal of abolishing gender or the demand to do away with gender binaries. In short, we don't know if we want more gender, less gender, different genders, or something else altogether. In analyzing the stories scholars tell (or refuse to tell) about the gender politics of this classic Jewish text, I suggest that this productive disagreement needn't paralyze Jewish feminist thought and ought not be used as an excuse for scholars who claim not to work on gender to avoid addressing the gender politics of philosophical texts. Instead, I use the case study of Rosenzweig and his readers to reflect on questions of method in Jewish thought.
Bio: Larisa Reznik is Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at The University of Chicago. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Pomona College. Her research and teaching focus on modern Jewish thought, political and social theory, religion, ethics, and politics, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Modern Jewish Thought and the Politics of Political Theology.
May 3, 2023, 12 PM PDT
Daniella Farah
Responding: Lior Sternfeld
Abstract: Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,700 years, and today Iran contains the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel. Despite their longstanding presence in Iran, there are few nuanced historical studies on this population, with the standard account positing that Iran’s Jews were insular, victimized, and politically disengaged. However, during the twentieth century Iranian Jews experienced rapid upward mobility, migrated within the country and abroad, and participated in Iran’s major political and social movements. Engaging with Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Education history, as well as transnational and diaspora studies, this talk will challenge the received narrative of Iranian Jews as peripheral victims by showing how they were active citizens who crafted multi-layered identities that reinforced and reflected their national agency, while also maintaining their religious distinctiveness. More specifically, the talk will explore the landscape of Jewish identity in Iran during the 20th century, with a focus on Jewish-Muslim interactions, political engagement and aspirations, and the intersection of education and integration. In examining how Iranian Jews navigated between their Iranian and Jewish identities in an era of new nationalisms, this talk will stake out new directions in Jewish Studies by offering insights into what Jewish emancipation and assimilation looked like in a Muslim-majority country.
Bio: Dr. Daniella Farah (PhD Stanford University, 2021) is the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. As a historian of the Jews of the modern Middle East and North Africa, her research focuses on Jewish-Muslim relations, national belonging, and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth and twentieth-centuries Iran and Turkey. Her current book project, tentatively titled Integrating Iranian Jews: Education, the Press, and National Belonging in Modern Iran, explores how the intersection of education, the press, and nationalism enabled Jews in twentieth-century Iran to make claims of belonging to the nation. Dr. Farah’s research has been supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, and in 2021 she received a Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award. As an Iranian-American Jewish woman, she aims to give voice to the diverse experiences of Middle Eastern Jews.