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Center for Jewish Studies
Our Mission and Vision
At the Center for Jewish Studies, we are dedicated to exploring the important questions about Jewish history and culture from antiquity to the modern age. Our acclaimed faculty, path-breaking research, expanding undergraduate program, and focus on deepening ties within the University attest to the success and ongoing promise of our mission: to foster a new understanding of Jewish culture and history.
We support the academic study of the historical, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, geographic, and religious diversity of the full range of peoples who identify themselves as Jewish, while fulfilling the educational mission of the liberal arts to promote critical thought, reflection on values, and analysis of sources.
Center News
Jewish Theological Seminary to host "Jewish University for a Day" event at the University of Minnesota
Sunday, June 9, 2013
11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
University of Minnesota
Science Teaching and Student Services Building
222 Pleasant Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
General admission, $36
Seniors (62+), $25
Under 35, Free
Financial assistance available
Click here to register
Online registration is open through Thursday, June 6, at 6:00 p.m. After that point, please register at the door.
Spend an afternoon engaged in stimulating study and conversation. This celebration of adult Jewish learning features interactive sessions with top Jewish Studies scholar/teachers.
Film producer/director Noemi Schory to be artist-in-residence at the University of Minnesota
Thanks to the Schusterman Visiting Artist Program supported by the Israel Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies welcomes Noemi Schory, who will be artist-in-residence at the University of Minnesota throughout Fall Semester 2013. A renowned documentary film director and producer, Noemi Schory is active in Israeli and many international co-productions, primarily in the documentary field. She produced A Film Unfinished about the Warsaw Ghetto, which received numerous awards worldwide and was an Emmy nominee after being screened on PBS in 2010. In 2005, Schory was elected president of Input, the international public television conference. She also serves as a museum film director and producer for Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Scripting the Shoah lecture now available on JWST Youtube channel
A video of Prof. Aomar Boum's lecture, "Scripting the Shoah: The Holocaust in Moroccan Official and Public Discourses," is now available to view on our Youtube channel. Please consider subscribing, so you can receive updates about new content.
Click here to view the video.
Scripting the Shoah: The Holocaust in Moroccan Official and Public Discourses
Aomar Boum, Assistant Professor, School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religious Studies Program, University of Arizona
April 11, 2013
Room 1210 Heller Hall
5:30 p.m.
Since the end of WWII, the Holocaust has been a prominent issue in Arab political and intellectual discourse. Although this issue has largely played out in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, it has also been an integral part of the North African debate in general and the Moroccan anti-Israeli and Zionist discussions in particular by the early years of Independence.
Using archival material and ethnographic interviews, Professor Aomar Boum will argue that North African and Moroccan perspectives about the Holocaust are part of what he calls the durable structures of acceptance and minimization. Using Bourdieu's habitus, Boum claims that Moroccan debates about the Holocaust have been framed and ossified in a context of social and political pre-dispositions of minimization of the Holocaust generating typological and conflicting scripts. Therefore, when individuals go against the grain and question this habitus, they are perceived as going against the principles of regular continuity that has governed the Arab/Moroccan critique of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
CJS to Host Symposium, Semi(o)te Txt: Reading Jewishness Between the Text
The Center for Jewish Studies (CJS) at the University of Minnesota is hosting a symposium, “Semi(o)te Xt: Reading Jewishness Between the Text,” on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at the Regis Center for the Arts on the University of Minnesota West Bank. This one-day symposium/workshop will explore how poets and media artists think about, produce, and enact Jewishness in their texts.
The event is being organized by Professors Leslie Morris and Maria Damon. Morris, a faculty member in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch, says that the symposium “will be the first ever event of this kind west of the Hudson. It will be a fantastic opportunity to see and hear some truly cutting-edge performers and thinkers.”
IZUN/MIZAN film series returns to the U
IZUN/MIZAN: A Film and Dialogue Series is a presentation of a series of films focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the creation of opportunities for interfaith dialogue and learning after each screening.
All too often, the contemporary conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Jews and Muslims, in the Middle East are reduced to simple caricatures; proposed solutions are often one-sided formulae; and the communities that have a vital stake in the issues are often polarized. IZUN/MIZAN is born of the conviction that the medium of film is particularly well-suited to unearthing many layers of complexity and bringing viewers to new vantage points in a short period of time.
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IZUN/MIZAN will offer a selection of carefully curated films preceded by an introduction with study questions. The films presented in this series will be chosen for their artistic quality, for their ability to deepen the participants’ understanding of the complexity of the middle-east conflict in Israel and function as segues into inclusive dialogue in the post-film viewing experience.
