Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies Annual Conference July 20-22, 2014 at the Hilton Anatole Hotel

Registration is now open to the public for the 24^th annual conference of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, an international academic research and cultural association devoted to the history of the descendants of Jews who were forcefully converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, and persecuted by the Inquisition from the 15^th through the 18^th century.  Many of these converts continued to hide their Jewish past in the New World, including in the American Southwest, and Texas.

The conference will take place at the elegant Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas from Sunday, July 20, through Tuesday, July 22, 2014.  It will feature presentations by scholars and researchers in the field of Sephardic and Crypto-Judaic studies as well as narratives by individuals of converso ancestry describing their discovery of a Jewish heritage. (Conversos were Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, or anusim in Hebrew.)

Keynote speakers will be Angelina Muñiz Huberman, a Mexican novelist and poet of Sephardic origin, and Ilan Stavans, Professor at Amherst College and foremost scholar of Hispano Literature.   Huberman’s work has been recognized with prestigious literary awards such as the Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz prize; Stavans has taught and lectured on a wide array of topics, including Spanglish, modern American poetry, Latin music, popular culture in Hispanic America, world Jewish writers, the cultural history of Spanish, and U.S.-Latino culture

Doreen Carvajal, author a of a memoir called The Forgetting River and writer for the Herald Tribune in Paris, France, and the New York Times, will be one of the artists to be funded under the Martin Sosin-Stratton-Pettit grant. She will speak about tracing her family’s history to Segovia, Spain, in the era of Inquisition prosecution of conversos.

The Judy Frankel Memorial Concert, highlighting an artist whose music has been influenced by the converso experience, will feature Los Morales Boyz on Monday night, July 21. Their style, conjunto, emerged from the borderlands where songs from Spanish settlers, many of them conversos, combined with other regional ethnic elements, creating a fusion that has become a true American folk music idiom.

A pre-conference genealogy workshop will be conducted by genealogists Schelly Talalay Dardashti, Genie Milgrom and Bennett Greenspan (Founder and CEO, Family Tree DNA.com), with sessions covering Sephardic resources, Sephardic genealogy, converso research techniques and DNA testing.

In addition to all above, film maker Bonnie Burt will be present for the showing on Sunday of the documentary film Trees Cry for Rain; A Sephardic Journey, featuring Dallas resident Rachel Amado Bortnick.

The registration fee for the conference covers all meal and beverage services, beginning with a Sunday evening dinner event, are included with the registration fee.  To see program details and to register, go to: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/639496 or email Rachel Bortnick at bortnickra@sbcglobal.net

For hotel stay, the special conference price at the Hilton Anatole is $105 per room per night.  Hotel registration may be accessed at: https://resweb.passkey.com/Resweb.do?mode=welcome_ei_new&eventID=11054692

The Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies (SCJS) was founded in 1991 and fosters the research of the historical and contemporary development of Crypto-Jews of Iberian origin. It provides a venue for the descendants of Crypto-Jews, scholars, and other interested parties to network and discuss pertinent issues. 

Contact:

Rachel Bortnick
bortnickra@sbcglobal.net
972-458-2254