Table of Contents From the Editors 3 From the President 3 From the Executive Director 4 The Iraq & Iran Issue Iran and Iraq: Demography beyond the Jewish Past 6 Sergio DellaPergola AJS, Ahmadinejad, and Me 8 Richard Kalmin Baghdad in the West: Migration and the Making of Medieval Jewish Traditions 11 Marina Rustow Jews of Iran and Rabbinical Literature: Preliminary Notes 14 Daniel Tsadik Iraqi Arab-Jewish Identities: First Body Singular 18 Orit Bashkin A Republic of Letters without a Republic? 24 Lital Levy A Fruit That Asks Questions: Michael Rakowitz’s Shipment of Iraqi Dates 28 Jenny Gheith On Becoming Persian: Illuminating the Iranian-Jewish Community 30 Photographs by Shelley Gazin, with commentary by Nasrin Rahimieh JAPS: Jewish American Persian Women and Their Hybrid Identity in America 34 Saba Tova Soomekh Engagement, Diplomacy, and Iran’s Nuclear Program 42 Brandon Friedman Online Resources for Talmud Research, Study, and Teaching 46 Heidi Lerner The Latest Limmud UK 2009 52 Caryn Aviv A Serious Man 53 Jason Kalman The Questionnaire What development in Jewish studies over the last twenty years has most excited you? 55 AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the President Please direct correspondence to: Association for Jewish Studies Marsha Rozenblit Association for Jewish Studies University of Maryland Center for Jewish History Editors 15 West 16th Street Matti Bunzl Vice President/Publications New York, NY 10011 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jeffrey Shandler Rachel Havrelock Rutgers University Voice: (917) 606-8249 University of Illinois at Chicago Fax: (917) 606-8222 Vice President/Program E-Mail: [email protected] Derek Penslar Web Site: www.ajsnet.org Editorial Board Allan Arkush University of Toronto Binghamton University AJS Perspectives is published bi-annually Vice President/Membership by the Association for Jewish Studies. Carol Bakhos and Outreach University of California, Los Angeles Anita Norich The Association for Jewish Studies is an Orit Bashkin University of Michigan affiliate of the Center for Jewish History. University of Chicago Sarah Benor Secretary/Treasurer © Copyright 2010 Association for HUC-JIR, Los Angeles Jonathan Sarna Jewish Studies ISSN 1529-6423 Brandeis University Michael Brenner University of Munich AJS Staff Nathaniel Deutsch Rona Sheramy AJS Perspectives encourages submis- University of California, Santa Cruz Executive Director sions of articles, announcements, Todd Hasak-Lowy Karen Terry and brief letters to the editor related University of Florida Program and Membership to the interests of our members. Coordinator Materials submitted will be Ari Kelman published at the discretion of the University of California, Davis Natasha Perlis editors. AJS Perspectives reserves the Heidi Lerner Project Manager right to reject articles, announce- Stanford University Emma Barker ments, letters, advertisements, and Laura Levitt Conference and Program Associate other items not consonant with the Temple University goals and purposes of the organiza- tion. Copy may be condensed or Diana Lipton rejected because of length or style. King’s College London AJS Perspectives disclaims respon- Meira Polliack sibility for statements made by Tel Aviv University contributors or advertisers. Riv-Ellen Prell University of Minnesota Jonathan Schorsch Columbia University David Shneer University of Colorado Dina Stein University of Haifa Nadia Valman Queen Mary University of London Yael Zerubavel Rutgers University Managing Editor Karin Kugel Graphic Designer Ellen Nygaard Front Cover: © Shelley Gazin/2010. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt from Becoming Persian: Photographs & Text Threads Illuminating the Iranian- Jewish Community; California Council for the Humanities Documentary Project. [Iranian-American demonstrators at Iranian election/political protest, Federal Building, Westwood, 2009.] Back Cover: © Shelley Gazin/2010. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt from Becoming Persian: Photographs & Text Threads Illuminating the Iranian- Jewish Community; California Council for the Humanities Documentary Project. [Dariush Fakheri, president/founder of the International Judea Foundation a.k.a. Siamak Organization, and Roya Fakheri, educator and artist, attend political rally, Federal Building, Westwood, 2009.] 2 AJS Perspectives From the Editors In this issue, we pair two places with long and important Jewish In the modern period, Orit Bashkin analyzes the position of the histories. The pairing seems almost natural—Iraq and Iran share Iraqi-Arab-Jew caught between the acts of remembering and forgetting. a long border and a contentious relationship, and both places once On the one hand, many people in Israel maintain a connection to their served as centers of Jewish cultural and intellectual life. The fact that Arab pasts; on the other, the immigration necessitated a certain dis- they no longer function as such raises the issue of memory and its tance from Arab intellectual and political life. Aware of this very ten- companion, forgetting. sion, Lital Levy presents the Iraqi-Jewish memoir as a vehicle of return The themes of memory and forgetting are prominent throughout to a Baghdad of the past. She goes on to ask to whom this past might be this issue. At the same time, the essays carry a political charge, particu- useful. Jenny Gheith tells of the unforeseeable obstacles encountered larly for Jewish Americans, so attuned to Iran’s nuclear capacity and its by the artist Michael Rakowitz as he attempted, in a complex work of denunciation of the Jewish state along with, although to a lesser extent, art, to import Iraqi dates—a staple of culinary memories—to Brooklyn. the exigencies of Iraq in what is promised to be the final year of the Ameri- Even as the first shipment of dates spoiled during detention in Jordan can occupation. Perhaps we even reproduce the political field by includ- and Syria, a community grew up around the project. ing an essay about Israeli policy positions on Iran by Brandon Friedman. Shelley Gazin’s photographs and essays by Nasrin Rahimieh and Ultimately, however, issues Jewish rather than political stand at Saba Tova Soomekh provide glimpses into the Iranian-Jewish com- the forefront of this edition. Sergio DellaPergola compares Iranian- munity of Los Angeles. Gazin’s photographs cause Rahimieh to recall and Iraqi-Jewish communities from a demographic perspective, and her Armenian-Iranian school in prerevolutionary Iran and to realize Richard Kalmin writes of how his research on the Persian influence how little she knew about her Jewish-Iranian classmates’ community. on rabbinic culture led to book awards from AJS as well as the Iranian Saba Tova Soomekh’s ethnographic study of Iranian-Jewish women Ministry of Culture. We met Richard Kalmin at the Jordan Schnitzer highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting implicit in the book award ceremony in New York this summer, but it seems that his balance of an American-Jewish-Iranian identity. invitation to the Iranian awards ceremony—over which President As the range of articles shows, with Iraq & Iran we have found Ahmadinejad presides—has been delayed. a topic of relevance to several historical periods and methodologies With incredible precision, the essays of Marina Rustow and Daniel within Jewish studies. We hope that you enjoy it. Tsadik reframe discussions about the formation and dissemination of rabbinic writings. Rustow, for example, shows how Jewish migrations Matti Bunzl University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from Sura and Pumbedita to Baghdad and then from Baghdad west- ward entailed the forgetting of rural traditions as well as the continua- Rachel Havrelock tion of Babylonian practices. University of Illinois Chicago From the President Over the past few months, The Chronicle of Higher Education has pub- erosion of tenure places academic freedom at great risk—and academic lished several articles about the erosion of tenure in American insti- freedom is crucial for the modern university. Non-tenured faculty tutions of higher education, developments that have scared many might be excellent teachers, but higher education without tenure members of the academic community. According to these articles, an means exploitation, lack of academic coherence, and the possibility ever-growing percentage of positions at colleges and universities are of pressure to teach subjects in a way that abandons critical analysis. now held by adjunct faculty—men and women hired to teach one or Why am I so convinced that tenure is necessary for academic two courses, usually at extraordinarily low pay, and who are not on freedom? After all, even tenured faculty have to deal with political the tenure track at all. Indeed, if present trends continue, the major- pressures, and many succumb to intellectual pressure to engage in ity of academic positions will be held by adjuncts rather than tenured interpretations that are trendy at a given moment. Some people who or tenure-track faculty in the not-too-distant future. Such a scenario follow more traditional forms of scholarship feel that it is hard to get a is frightening indeed. It is frightening for students, because most of job or get promoted unless one is engaged in what is currently “all the their teachers will likely have little if any loyalty to the institutions rage.” Informal pressure to conform, however, is not the same thing at which they teach, and they will understandably be exhausted from as a real breach of academic freedom. Tenure protects faculty from running from school to school trying