James Young

James Young: “Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine”

The selection of a design for the Berlin Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews was a contentious one. After September 11th, the memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center was compared by some to holocaust memorials before it, and by one reporter specifically to the Berlin Memorial. How did it come to pass that the memorial at Ground Zero would evoke Berlin’s Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews?

Joel Blecher: “The Maimonides Madrasah: Islamic Secular Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Damascus”

A visitor to the last standing Jewish day-school in Syria, the Maimonides Madrasah, will notice the logo of the Syrian Arab Republic’s Ministry of Education proudly chiseled above the entrance. The secular state stakes out an overt presence in many other Jewish sites in Damascus. The very centerpiece of the Syrian National Museum is a historical reconstruction of a 3rd century Jewish synagogue.

Ghetto: Jews, African Americans, and the Urban Imaginary

Since its inception in sixteenth century Venice, the term “ghetto” has been applied to Jewish urban spaces in Europe and the United States. Over the last half century, it has also become associated with African American inner city neighborhoods. Highly regulated and surveilled by the state, Jewish and African American ghettos have also been marked by a high degree of social autonomy.

Jewish Studies at Santa Cruz: On the Cutting Edge of Tradition

One of the most important achievements of Jewish studies at UC-Santa Cruz is the remarkable number of alumni who have become distinguished scholars of Jewish studies in their own right. This conference brought these alumni together with their former teachers from a variety of disciplines to discuss the impact of Santa Cruz on their intellectual development and research, as well as to explore the question of whether there is a distinctly Santa Cruz approach to Jewish Studies.

James Young

James Young: “Stages of Memory in Berlin and New York”

The selection of a design for the Berlin Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews was a contentious one. After September 11th, the memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center was compared by some to holocaust memorials before it, and by one reporter specifically to the Berlin Memorial. How did it come to pass that the memorial at Ground Zero would evoke Berlin’s Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews?

Yossi Chajes: “Entzauberung (De-Magic-ing) and Jewish Modernity”

Modern identity was forged, in large part, through a self-conscious distancing from a past construed as magical. Until the late nineteenth-century, to be modern meant to have “faith” in “reason & materialist science.” We will explore the ways this identity project worked in Jewish culture, as expressed by figures including the Italians Leone Modena (1571-1648) & Tobias Cohen (1652-1729), as well as in later eastern European Jewish debates on the border between the newly emerging realms of the “natural” and “supernatural.”

Alternative Teleologies: The Mediterranean and the Modern World(s)

This exciting conference was organized by the Mediterranean Seminar at UC-Santa Cruz. Many of the talks will explore aspects of the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean region, including the construction of a pan-Sephardi identity, the creation of the Donmeh community, and the emergence of diasporic Andalusian musical traditions.