Crossing Borders – New Approaches to Modern Judeo-Spanish (Sephardic) Cultures

Recent path-breaking scholarship on modern Sephardic culture has emphasized the porous nature of the boundary that delineated (or that continues to delineate)  “Sephardic” as a cultural or historical category, emphasizing, instead, the many cultural, material, and quotidian ties that linked Sephardim to non-Jews, and Jews of other backgrounds.
This workshop will bring together junior scholars engaged with crossing, rethinking, and perhaps even redrawing the borders thought to delineate Sephardic culture and history.

April 4 – 5, 2011
314 Royce Hall, UCLA

PROGRAM

Monday, April 4, 2011

• 9:15 AM • Opening Remarks / Welcome
  Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)
• 9:30 AM • «Aspects of Material Culture»
  Chair: Debora Silverman (UCLA)
  Presenters:
  Julia Cohen (Vanderbilt University)
  Cultural Crossings: Ottoman Jewish Merchants as Oriental Ambassadors
  Paula Deccarett (UC Santa Cruz)
  Exploring Jewish Time in Late Ottoman Salonica
• 11 AM • Break
• 11:30 AM • “Overlapping Worlds”
  Chair: Gabi Piterberg (UCLA)
  Presenters:
  Michelle Campos (University of Florida)
  East and West: The Cultural Project of Jerusalem’s Sephardi Jews
  Paris Papamuelos Chronakis (Univ of Crete)
  Bourgeois sociality as ethnic hegemony. Jews and Greeks from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state, 1880-1922
• 1 PM • Lunch Break
• 3 PM • “Overlooked Centers”
  Chair: Münir Beken (UCLA)
  Presenters:
  Maureen Jackson (Carleton College)
  A View from the Provinces: Jews and Music-Making in Late Ottoman Izmir
  Dina Danon (Stanford)
  “’Por bien de la sivdad i por amor del puevlo:’” The Changing Boundaries of the Jewish Community of Izmir in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries”
• 6 PM • Dinner

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

• 9:30 AM • “Self-Fashioning”
  Chair: Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)
  Presenters:
  Devin Naar (Stanford)
  “Who Will Save Sephardic Judaism?” The Quest for a Chief Rabbi of Salonica, 1919-1933 Ramajana Hidic Demirovic (Indiana University Bloomington) Bohoreta’s Theater en Saraj: Gendering Sephardic Politics During the January
  Dictatorship
• 12 PM • Lunch Break
• 1:30 PM • “Reinventions”
  Chair: TBA
  Presenters:
  Marcy Brink-Danan (Stanford)
  Ladinoland Online: Medium and Meaning
  Adriana Brodsky (St. Mary’s College of Maryland)
  “There is a Sephardic Problem:” Sephardim, Zionism and Youth in Argentina, 1950-1973
• 3 PM • Break
• 3:15 PM • Wrap Up Discussion

Sponsored by: The UCLA Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies