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Spring 2020 Annual Report

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Spring 2020 Annual Report PRINCETON UNIVERSITY RONALD O. PERELMAN INSTITUTE FOR JUDAIC STUDIES Program in JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 RONALD O. PERELMAN INSTITUTE FOR JUDAIC STUDIES I am delighted to have the opportunity to establish this program, which will shape intellectual concepts in the field, promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship, and perhaps most important, bring Jewish civilization to life for Princeton students— Ronald O. Perelman In 1995 financier and philanthropist Ronald O. Perelman, an innovative leader and generous supporter of many of the nation’s most prominent cultural and educational institutions, gave Princeton University a gift of $4.7 million to create a multidisciplinary institute focusing on Jewish studies. The Ronald O. Perelman Institute for Jewish Studies allows undergraduate students to earn a certificate in Jewish Studies, strengthening Princeton’s long tradition of interdisciplinary studies and broad commitment to Jewish culture. The gift from Mr. Perelman, chairman and chief executive officer of MacAndrews and Forbes Inc., also supports a senior faculty position—the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies—and a wide variety of academic and scholarly activities that bring together leading scholars to examine Jewish history, religion, literature, thought, society, politics and cultures. FACULTY Executive Committee William C. Jordan, History Leora Batnitzky, Religion Eve Krakowski, Near Eastern Studies Gabriel Citron, Religion Lital Levy, Comparative Literature Yaacob Dweck, History Marina Rustow, Near Eastern Studies Jonathan Gribetz, Near Eastern Studies Esther Schor, English Martha Himmelfarb, Religion Moulie Vidas, Religion ASSOCIATED FACULTY David Bellos, French and Italian AnneMarie Luijendijk, Religion Jill S. Dolan, English, Dean of the College Deborah Nord, English Anthony Grafton, History Anson G. Rabinbach, History Wendy Heller, Music Stacy E. Wolf, Lewis Center for the Arts Daniel Heller-Roazen, Comparative Literature Stanley N. Katz, Woodrow Wilson School SENIOR RESEARCH SCHOLAR Daniel Kurtzer, Woodrow Wilson School Ra’anan Boustan, Judaic Studies EMERITUS FACULTY Mark R. Cohen, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Froma Zeitlin, Ewing Professor of Greek Language Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Near and Literature, Classics and Comparative Eastern Studies Literature, Women and Gender, and Judaic Peter Schäfer, Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Studies Jewish Studies, Religion TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Director’s Message 2 JDS Courses 3 Events, 2019-2020 4-11 Undergraduate Summer Funding Reports 12-15 Graduate Summer Funding Reports 16 Faculty Updates DirECTOR’S MESSAGE As the contents of this newsletter attest, 2019 was another busy year for the Program in Judaic Studies. On p. 3 you can see posters for some of the lectures that JDS initiated or cosponsored. We are grateful to the donors who make possible the several endowed lectures and the week-long scholar-in-residence program. JDS also cosponsored two conferences last spring semester: “Ultra-Orthodox Women through Social and Legal Lenses” and “Legendary Characters: Attribution and Personhood in Ancient Judaism.” The lectures and conferences give an excellent idea of the range of Jewish Studies at Princeton and of JDS’s contribution to the intellectual life of the university. So too do the reports on pp. 4-15 on student research and projects that JDS helps to fund. The number, variety and quality are extremely impressive. I also want report some good news about JDS faculty. Yaacob Dweck of History and JDS was promoted to the rank of professor, and Jonathan Gribetz of NES and JDS was promoted to associate professor with tenure. We are delighted for both of them. Dweck also published a new book this year. You can find a picture of its cover on p. 16. Martha Himmelfarb PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 1 COURSES FALL 2019 SpriNG 2020 Ancient Judaism from Alexander to the Rise of Apocalypse: The End of the World and the Secrets Islam, Martha Himmelfarb of Heaven in Ancient Judaism and Christianity, Elementary Biblical Hebrew I, Philip Zhakevich Martha Himmelfarb Muslims, Jews and Christians in North Africa: Art and Judaism in the Ancient World, Ra’anan Boustan Interactions, Conflicts and Memory, M’hamed Great Books of the Jewish Tradition, Ra’anan Boustan Oualdi Intermediate Biblical Hebrew, Philip Zhakevich Religion and Law, Leora Batnitzky Jerusalem Contested: A City’s History from Jewish, Texts and Images of the Holocaust, Froma Zeitlin Christian and Muslim Perspectives, Jonathan Gribetz The World of the Cairo Geniza, Marina Rustow Modern Jewish History: 1750-Present, Yaacob Dweck One Text, Many Angles: Merchant of Venice, Leonard Barkan Topics in American Literature: American Jewish CONGRATULATIONS Writers: Citizens, Immigrants and Iconoclasts, to our 2019 Certificate Students: Esther Schor Miriam Friedman (Politics) Yael Lilienthal (Linguistics) Noreen Anderson (Near Eastern Studies) PhD students Eliav Grossman (Religion) (l) and Rachel Richman (Near Eastern Studies) were among some 25 participants in the Geniza Lab Transcribe-a-thon in November, where volunteers transcribed Hebrew and Arabic fragments via the Zooniverse platform. (Photo by Michele Alperin) 2 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 2019-2020 EVENTS PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 3 UNDERGRADUATE SUMMER FUNDING TALI ANISFELD ’20 I spent a month in Israel, conducting interviews in the Ethiopian Jewish community. I went into the project hoping to understand the role of land – both physical and mythic – in creating Ethiopian Jewish identities. But on July 1, 19-year-old Solomon Teka was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in Haifa. The killing immediately re-ignited a deep and urgent rising up of Ethiopian and allied voices in Israel in the call against racism and police brutality, and it became clear to me that the experience of racism in Israel and its intersections within the Jewish community was what I needed to focus on. I spent the next month talking with Ethiopian Israelis – not experts, simply members of the community in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hadera and Tzipori. Most were born in Ethiopia and had immigrated to Israel in their youth, currently aged between early 20s to mid-50s, some extremely traditional and others entirely secular. One of the most interesting threads was the extent to which this movement for racial liberation in Israel identified with African Americans and the movement for Black Lives in the United States; some identified deeply, while others felt that the comparison was inappropriate and dangerous. The history of the relationship between racial liberation movements of Jews of color in Israel and other racial liberation movements across the globe and the way the current protests in the Ethiopian Jewish community both fit into and diverge from that history are the central explorations of my senior thesis. The time I spent in Israel this summer, creating real connections with and engaging in honest conversations with members of the Ethiopian community, has made me feel responsible to real people in the writing of this work in a way that has forced me to think more deeply about what it is that I want to contribute to this conversation and what the stakes of those contributions might be. Thank you to the Judaic Studies Department for making this possible for me. BES ARNAOUT ’20 With the help of the French and Italian Department, Department of Humanistic Studies, and Judaic Studies, in May 2019 I traveled to Frankfurt to explore a potential thesis topic and deepen my understanding of cinematic storytelling related to the topic of war, genocide and trauma. My goal was to study the archives at the Fritz Bauer Institute, in particular the translated documentation of lived experiences of women prisoners during the Shoah, and later turn to fictional cinema and analyze ethics of representation on the topic of the Holocaust as a case study of fictional models of gendered trauma. Researching women prisoners’ experiences has been elucidating, both of the Holocaust in general, and of the specificities of the role of gender and female experiences at times of mass violence. Understanding that there are spaces and institutions that help serve as a reminder of the history and keep the memory of those who suffered has been very helpful in my work, both morally and educationally. I have gained experience and practice in navigating varied resources, to lead me and my work into directions I would not have had a chance to interpret otherwise. ELI BERMAN ’20 I continued to prototype my Xibuccal Dresses, which are wearable musical instruments central to my thesis. I experimented with four different kinds of pipes to test their interactions with human voices, and collected data on each pipe’s resonant frequencies, as well as how each pipe manipulated the amplitude and frequency of five individual singers. After comparing my qualitative analysis with graphs that analyzed the parameters across 4 PROGRAM IN JUDAIC STUDIES SPRING 2020 the different materials, configurations and individual singers, I found that one specific brand of corrugated pipe was the most effective in achieving my desired resonance, so I used this information to construct two new prototypes of Xibuccal Dresses made primarily out of corrugated pipes. In Europe, I developed significantly as a solo composer-performer. With Jaap Blonk, I developed much more experimental and nuanced relationships to language and semantics by studying sound poetry in relation to the extended techniques I have
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