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FULL SCHEDULE (PDF)

 

Welcome to the Penn Jewish Studies Graduate Student Conference, Jews and Political Authority: Citizenship, Homeland, and Diaspora, on March 11th – 12th, 2024

Location: Room L1, Penn Museum

 

Panel 1, Monday March 11: Jews in the American Public Sphere

Time: 9:45am-11:15am
 

Chair: Alexandra Zborovsky 

Panelists:

   Levi Morrow (Hebrew University): Joseph Soloveitchik’s Political Theology of the Diaspora Community

   Jacob Morrow-Spitzer (Yale University): Jewish Citizenship in the Age of American State Transformation, 1865-1933

   Cassandra Euphrat Weston (University of Michigan): “Let the B’nai B’rith Organize its Own Bureau of Secret Service”: American Jewish Sexual Politics and the Mann Act

Respondent: Prof. Beth Wenger

 

Panel 2, Monday March 11: The Jewish “Other”

Time 11:45am-1:45pm
 

Chair: Chaya Sara Oppenheim

Panelists:

   Makena Mezistrano (Stanford University): The Transmission and Adaptation of Jewish Nationalism and Hebrew Revival in Nineteenth Century Salonica

   Esther Zyskina (Hebrew University): Shtadlanut, Naivety and Pragmatism: Isaac Baer Levinsohn and Russian Imperial Authorities

   Aaron Schimmel (Stanford University): Russian Maskilim and Bukharian Jewry

   Daria Berman (Washington University in St. Louis): Escaping Rumor in the Mexican Inquisition

Respondent: Prof. Benjamin Nathans

 

Panel 3, Monday March 11: Premodern Jews as Imperial Subjects

Time: 2:45-4:45pm

 

Chair: Jeremy Steinberg

Panelists

   Tyler Jarvis (UCLA): Hegemony and Hybridity: Negotiating Judean Identity at Elephantine in the 5thCentury

   Aaron Forman (NYU): Jews and the Fatimid Military: Unexamined Fragments from the Cairo Geniza

   Louis Polcin (University of Pennsylvania): Mosaics of Identity Herodian Legitimization through Localized Cultic Toleration

   Danny Golde (Jewish Theological Seminary): Babylonian Graeco-Aramaic: How the Rabbis of Bavli Avodah Zara Imbue a Misunderstood Language with Meaning 

Respondent: Prof. Natalie Dohrmann

 

 

Panel 4, Tuesday March 12: Belonging in the Medieval Period

Time:  10am-12PM
 

Chair: Ben Notis

Panelists:

   Naomi Mendez (Stanford University): “I am of Uncircumcised Lips!”: Uniting Exiled Speech with Divine Voice in Zoharic Prophecy

   Chaya Sara Oppenheim (University of Pennsylvania): Political Authority in the Purim Story: A Comparative Analysis Between Megillat Esther and Megillat Saragossa

   Nimrod Baratz (Leipzig University): “Written Upon the Stones”: of the Cyclopes, the Shapeshifter, and other Legends of Origin in The Book of Travels

   Nina Gary (UT Austin): The Writings of Anglo-Jewish poet Meir of Norwich

Respondent: Prof. Talya Fishman 

 

Panel 5, Tuesday March 12: The Mobility of Homeland, Memory, and Authority

Time: 1:15-3:15

 

Chair: Asaf Roth

Panelists: 

   Elliott Niblock (Virginia & TU Dortmund): Prophets and Theocrats in the Wreckage of History: An Anarchic Theopolitics Out of the Sources of Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin

   Jaimie Luria (Cornell University): Troubled Waters: An Archaeo-ethnographic Study of Jewish Heritage Tourism and Ritual Immersion Pools in Spain and Israel

   Alexandra Zborovsky (University of Pennsylvania): Imagining Home: Soviet Jewish Conceptualizations of the United States and Israel

    Yaakov Lipsker (Jewish Theological Seminary): Palestine in the Pale: Forging a Zionist Culture in Late Imperial Russia, 1897-1914 

Respondent: Prof. Joshua Teplitsky

 

Conference organizers:  Ben Notis, Asaf Roth, Jeremy Steinberg, Sasha Zborovsky, and Chaya Sara Oppenheim.