Please join Dr. Jacob Ari Labendz and the CJHS in congratulating Hannah Klacik on the submission and approval of her MA Thesis for a graduate degree in history at Youngstown State University. We appreciate her generosity in making it available here.
Hannah Klacík, “Architecture and Community: Congregation Rodef Sholom, Youngstown, OH” (MA Thesis, YSU, 2022).
We’re excited for Dr. Anat Plocker’s keynote address, “‘A Dream of Belonging’: The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland”
Sunday, May 22 at 6:00 PM eastern at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor (Steel Museum). We also hope to livestream and record the talk.
Dr. Plocker’s Keynote will open our symposium, co-organized with the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue University, “Meeting and Movements of Jewish People and Artifacts across Cold-War Boundaries.”
More information / Purchase Dr. Plocker’s book.
What a wonderfully successful and educational event!
To learn more about Dr. Adam Fuller’s Model Knesset program, click here.
To view pictures from this year’s Model Knesset, click here.
Dr. Elly Moseson joined us to deliver the last of three talks in our Emerging Scholars Lecture Series, which we co-organize with the Jewish Studies Program at Kent State University. For more information about our Emerging Scholars Lecture Series, click here.
We welcomed Dr. Ilan Peleg (Lafayette College) to YSU on April 11th for a discussion about different pathways to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We are grateful to Dr. Peleg for his time and for allowing us to share his talk online for those who may have missed it or those who would like to revisit his ideas. We also thank Dr. Adam Fuller for inviting Dr. Peleg to join us.
Dr. Adam Fuller’s “Israeli Politics” course culminates in a Model Knesset (Israeli Parliament).
This semester’s Model Knesset will be held on April 18, 2022 at 5:00 pm at the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor (Steel Museum). The event is free and open to the public. A light buffet dinner will be served.
For more information and videos, click here.
CJHS faculty affiliate and Academic Advisory Committee member spoke with WFMJ about Russia’s war on Ukraine and US responses. For more, click here.
Online webinar (only). Register here.
In partnership with the Jewish Studies Program at Kent State University
Dr. C. Tova Markenson
Assistant Professor
Academy for Jewish Religion
“Jewish Feelings: Performing Tsuris (Troubles) at the Yiddish Theatres in Buenos Aires, 1880-1940″
Tuesday, March 15, 2022 at 5:00 pm (eastern) / Online only with registration in advance.
Dr. Markenson asks, “How can we be present to the past when that history is filled with shame?” This project is the first full-length study of a locus of shame for diasporic Jews, the Yiddish theatres in Buenos Aires, which many believed maintained business ties with Jewish pimps. Amidst antisemitic stereotypes that Jews were sexually deviant—and the historical reality that some Jews were sex workers—many have dismissed the Argentinean Yiddish theatres as a “low brow” cultural arena. Arguing that the Yiddish theatres in Buenos Aires were a flash point for conflict about acceptable performances of Jewishness, I build on methods from theatre studies and affect studies to support interdisciplinary scholars of Jewish Studies in “making sense” of shame.
Dr. Eli Rosenblatt joined us to deliver the first of three talks in our Emerging Scholars Lecture Series, which we co-organize with the Jewish Studies Program at Kent State University. For more information about our Emerging Scholars Lecture Series and to register for the remaining two talks, click here.
Full Video
Dr. Rosenblatt will explore a Caribbean Jewish society on the northeastern coast of South America. Among the oldest continuously existing Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere, my talk will argue that the Jews of Suriname, though distinctly situated in their tropical environment and largely unknown outside the Dutch sphere today, are the “relatives” of all American Jews. While most scholarship on race and racism in American Jewish culture has focused on the United States, this talk will focus on Surinamese Jews as they experienced events we commonly associate with America – the rise of Black Power politics, the mass migration of East European Jews to American cities, the emergence of Zionism, the Holocaust, and local antisemitism. In the context of a different American society divided by color and radically diverse in its cultural, linguistic, and religious makeup, the history of the Jews of Suriname provides us with a way of looking at American Jewish futures through the expanded lens of a lesser-known past.
