Jewish Studies Books & Bagels Series 2023-2024
The Jewish Studies Program invites you to join us for Books & Bagels!
Presenters in this series—who can be faculty members, undergraduate or graduate students, librarians, staff members, or anyone else in the UC Davis community—will offer some informal remarks, oriented toward our undergraduate students, on a Jewish book (in any way they define "Jewish book") that they find interesting and significant personally or professionally, or both.
Sometimes short readings will be pre-circulated for people to read ahead of time, but this preparation is by no means obligatory. Whether or not you are able to read in advance, come for a bagel and stay for the conversation! Open to everyone!
Thursday, October 19, 2023, 12PM - Garrison Room, Memorial Union
Professor Eva Mroczek: Eva Mroczek will present on the Bible–the Tanakh, or Torah, Prophets, and Writings–in the imagination of ancient and medieval Jews, not so much as an unchanging eternal record of divine revelation, but as a precarious text that keeps getting lost, burned, censored, hidden, forgotten, and found again. Why did Jewish writers imagine the Torah as a text constantly under threat of destruction, loss, and human interference? We will read a selection of sources and discuss what such speculation about the fragility of sacred texts tells us about Jewish ideas of scripture and revelation.
Thursday, November 16, 2023, 12PM - Garrison Room, Memorial Union
Professor Emerita Susan Miller will expand on her book Years of Glory about Nelly Benatar’s activism during WWII to talk about the leading role this Moroccan Jewish lawyer played in investigating a brutal pogrom in Eastern Morocco just after the State of Israel was declared in 1948. Historians have never adequately answered the question of why this violence took place, who was responsible, and why the terrible events of June, 1948 have been so completely erased from the memory of both Moroccan Jews and Muslims. Was it a deliberate cover-up, and if so, why? We will go over the facts of the case as we know them, and speculate on their disappearance from the pages of history.
Thursday, January 25, 2024, 12 PM - Andrews Conference Room, SSH
Professor Seth Sanders will present Ruth HaCohen's book The Music Libel Against the Jews, which asks, is there a Jewish sound? A Jewish spirit in music or art? If not, what bothered both Christians and, eventually, Jews themselves about traditional Jewish liturgy? Between Romantic or racist essentialism that assumes that peoples have eternal and unchanging natures, and historicist or postmodern views that assume that nobody has any real direct connection to the past lie the discoveries of Jewish musicology. Together we will explore the scandals of the musical Blood Libel, the scorched-earth approaches of Barbara Streisand and 19th-century synagogue reform, and sonic pathways beyond.
Thursday, February 22, 2024, 12 PM - Andrews Conference Room, SSH
Shields Library Humanities Librarian Adam Siegel will present A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (Żaba pod językiem) by Marek Tuszewicki (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2021, translated by Jessica Taylor-Kucia). What were the cultures of healing in Eastern European Jewish communities? What was illness, who treated it, how, where, and under what conditions? To what degree was healing a clinical, religious, or magical process? A Frog Under the Tongue reconstructs, from a dizzying array of textual evidence, this lost world.
Thursday, April 18, 2024, 12 PM - Sproul 912
Dr. Yael Teff-Seker will present on the poetry of Yehuda Amichai on love, war, and God’s unfairness, questioning some of the sacred cows of the national Jewish-Israeli narrative. The presentation will follow his work through the years, including poems such as “In the Place Where We Are Right,” “God Has Pity on the Kindergarten Children,” “Messengers from my Childhood,” and “Ideal Love.”
Thursday, May 2, 2024, 12 PM - Sproul 912
Doctoral Candidate Benjamin Fisher will present British philosopher Gillian Rose's memoir Love's Work. A beloved scholar of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Theodor Adorno, and modern Jewish thought, Rose traces her own life through meditations on Jewishness after the Holocaust and Zionism, conventions of naming and the fate of language, feminism and gender, childhood disability and terminal illness. In particular, Rose negotiates the speculative “broken middle” between what she calls “my Protestantism” and “my Judaism,” demonstrating her thesis of the non-identity at the heart of every identity and shedding light on her deathbed conversion to Christianity.