Derek Penslar – Is Israel a Settler-Colonial State? February 13 @ 6:00 pm | Virtual Event Due to the atmospheric river event effecting Santa Cruz County, this event will now take place via Zoom. Everyone who has RSVP’d for the event will receive a Zoom link. Anyone interested in attending the virtual event can register below using […]
Diller Lecture Series
Every year we honor Helen Diller, whose generous endowment continues to provide crucial support to Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, by hosting a public lecture series on campus by an internationally recognized scholar.
March 19, 2020 // Annual Diller Lecture: “The Future of Jewish Food”
The Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies presents “The Future of Jewish Food”: A Conversation with Rachel Gross, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, and Nathaniel DeutschThursday, March 19, 6:30-8pm
February 20, 2019 @ 6:00 pm // James Loeffler: “The Right to Be Heard – Jews, Human Rights, and Global Democracy”
In this talk, James Loeffler draws on his new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, to revisit the 1948 moment in which modern human rights was born. This talk will also address the challenges and opportunities for minorities and stateless peoples by focusing on Jewish human rights pioneers who saw the Jewish state as an expression of global democracy. Join THI to ask where Human Rights come from, how Jews are part of the story, and if Zionism is in conflict with the modern Human Rights movement?
November 2, 2017 @ 4pm – Marina Rustow: “The Cairo Geniza and the Middle East’s Archive Problem”
The Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies Presents: Marina Rustow: “The Cairo Geniza and the Middle East’s Archive Problem” The Cairo Geniza, a cache of 400,000 manuscript pages preserved in a medieval Egyptian synagogue, has yielded many unexpected finds, but perhaps none so unexpected as thousands of documents in Arabic script from […]
April 19, 2017 // Mitchell Duneier: “Ghetto: Invention of a Place, History of an Idea”
April 19 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm | Humanities 1, Room 210 | Free The Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies presents: Mitchell Duneier, the Maurice P. During, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University on “Ghetto: Invention of a Place, History of an Idea” Lecture at 4:00pm – Humanities 1, RM […]
Todd Presner: “The Ethics of the Algorithm: Holocaust Testimony and Digital Humanities”
2016 Helen Diller Family Endowment Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies Wednesday, February 24, 2016 | 4:00-6:00 PM | Free & Open to the Public 210 Humanities Building 1, UC Santa Cruz Directions and Parking Information With more than 52,000 testimonies, 100,000+ hours of video footage, and a database of some 6 million records, the […]
Maurice Samuels: “French Universalism and the Jews: Anti-Antisemitism and the Right to Difference”
In conflicts over the veil or the return of antisemitism in France today, minority difference is often seen as a threat not only to public order but to the Republic itself. Long on the defensive, universalism has now staged a comeback in current discourse that seeks to guard against excessive communitarianism or the fantasized demon of American-style multi-culturalism.
Steven J. Zipperstein: "How the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom Changed Jewish History"
Kishinev’s 1903 pogrom was the first instance when an event in Russian Jewish life received wide hearing. The riot, leaving 49 dead, in an obscure border town, dominated headlines in the western world for weeks, it intruded on US-Russian relations, and it left an imprint on an astonishingly diverse range of institutions including the nascent Jewish army in Palestine, the NAACP, and, most likely, the first version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. How was it that incident came to define so much, and for so long?
Ari Kelman: “Learning to be Jewish”
For most Americans, the phrase “Jewish education” summons images of Hebrew School. But, Hebrew School, or even what we might call “formal Jewish education” amounts to only a very small percentage of where and how people learn to be Jewish.
ChaeRan Freeze: “Crafting an Elite Russian-Jewish Identity: Subjectivity and Gender in Diaries of Zinaida Poliakova”
Prof. ChaeRan Freeze, an associate professor in Jewish history at Brandeis University, has focused her research on the Jews of Russia and women’s and gender studies.