Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania

03/17/2026

Book Launch for Prof. Steve Weitzman's Disasters of Biblical Proportions

RELS Colloquium/PSCO/Jewish Studies Cosponsored Event

Steve Weitzman (RELS, Katz Center)
Mar 19, 2026 at 5:00pm - 6:30pm | COLL 319 (reception in COLL 209)

Join the Department of Religious Studies, the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins, and the Jewish Studies Program for a launch of Prof. Steve Weitzman's Disasters of Biblical Proportions: The Ten Plagues Then, Now, and at the End of the World!

A reception will follow in COLL 209.

People have been telling and retelling stories about disasters for as long as they have been telling stories. One of the oldest of such stories is the ten plagues in the book of Exodus, the series of disasters that forced the Egyptians to liberate the Israelites. These plagues packed enough catastrophe to fill a series of summer blockbusters—rivers of blood, invasions of frogs and insects, mass disease, fiery hail, smothering darkness, and a midnight massacre of the firstborn.

The story of the ten plagues resonates today, as we try to make sense of such calamities of modern life as pandemics, climate change, and war. In Disasters of Biblical Proportions, Steven Weitzman explores how people of later ages—artists, writers, activists, philosophers, believers and unbelievers alike—have reshaped the story of the ten plagues to give expression to their own trauma, outrage, guilt, humor, and hope.

Tracing the interpretation and retelling of each plague across time and space, Weitzman uncovers how this ancient tale found new meaning among Jews, Christians, and Muslims and continues to shape how people today understand the present and envision the future. Even as it recounts the history of how the ten plagues have been reimagined, Disasters of Biblical Proportions is also a history of people’s search for shelter from the calamities of their own times—and of humanity’s striving for justice, freedom, and redemption.

Speaker
Steve Weitzman serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and as the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Religious Studies Department. His publications include Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom, published as part of Yale University Press' Jewish Lives series; the Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, awarded a National Jewish Book Award in 2017; and with Leora Batnitzky and Eve Krakowski, the just published Princeton Companion to Jewish Studies.

Respondents
Beth Berkowitz is professor of Religious Studies and the Ingebort Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies at Barnard College
Yosefa Raz is senior lecturer in the English department at Haifa University and a Katz Center fellow.
Jillian Stinchcomb is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
Co-sponsored by the department of Jewish Studies and the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins

02/03/2026

"A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe"

Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan

Tues, Feb 17, 2026 at 5:15pm - 6:30pm | 6th floor, Class of '78 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt Library

In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. A Woman Is Responsible for Everything marshals a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these woman for the first time.

Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach focus their lens on the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue.


Speakers:

Debra Kaplan teaches early modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University. A social historian, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion (2011) and The Patrons and their Poor (University of Pennsylvania 2020; winner of the Rosl und Paul Arnsberg-Preis).

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, at Columbia University. She specializes in the cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the Jews in Early Modern Europe. Her books include The Pursuit of Heresy (1990), awarded the National Jewish Book Award, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Early Modern Germany (2000), and Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (2011), winner of the Association for Jewish Studies Schnitzer Prize.

In-person registration here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SZy1cUIfJkjCOpCjZTc-ay1b1E2KZ4QPiQIBo3iD_Xs/edit

This is the 30th Annual Patricia Braun Silvers and David Silvers Visiting Scholar in the Jewish Studies Program. The Silvers Visiting Scholar Program is endowed by David, C’71, and Patricia, CW’72, Silvers.

Cosponsored by the Penn Department of History and The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies/The Center for Research in Feminist, Q***r, and Transgender Studies.

10/29/2025

"The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust"
Annual Kristallnacht Commemoration Lecture with Lisa Silverman
Mon, Nov 10 at 5:15pm
Class of '55 Room, 248 Van Pelt Library
In person | Free and open to the public

In his influential Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), Jean-Paul Sartre declared, “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” He thereby invested a figural Antisemite – an outsider presumably unconnected to himself or his readers – with the full power to generate and sustain the demonization of Jews. In the postwar decades, this figure became a strategic cultural device, allowing Austrians, Germans, and others to distance themselves from accusations of antisemitism and shape new national self-understandings. The trope’s potency is vividly illustrated by the 1948-1950 trials of Veit Harlan, who was charged with crimes against humanity for directing the N**is’ most successful propaganda film Jud Süss (1940). His eventual acquittal did more than clear his name: it entrenched a public narrative that legitimized Harlan’s authority to identify and define an Antisemite who cast him as its ultimate target. Decades before the N**i persecution of the Jews would emerge as a leading moral paradigm in popular culture, the figural Antisemite became part of a forceful narrative structure – one that allowed prejudices against Jews to persist even as their open expression became taboo.

Speaker:
Lisa Silverman is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She specializes in modern German and Austrian Jewish cultural history, with a focus on gender, visual culture, and antisemitism. In 2022 she served as Michael Hauck Visiting Professor for Interdisciplinary Holocaust Research at the Fritz Bauer Institute for the History and Impact of the Holocaust at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. Her latest monograph is The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust, which was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. She is also author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford, 2012) and co-author with Daniel H. Magilow of Holocaust Representations in History: an Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015; 2nd ed. 2019).

Sponsored by Kutchin Seminar Series in the Jewish Studies Program with the support of the Department of History, and the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies.

10/16/2025

"All Consuming: Germans, Jews and the Meaning of Meat"
Prof. John Efron

Tues, Oct 21, 2025, at 5:15pm - 6:30pm
6th floor, Class of '78 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt Library

Meat is one of the most visible markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. In this talk, John Efron argues that meat has played an especially important role in the formation of Jewish and Christian identities in Germany from the Middle Ages until today. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, the importance of meat is reflected in many realms including the visual arts, literature, religion, politics, commerce, and home life. Studying the history of meat and its multiple meanings in Germany tells us much about the changing nature of German and German-Jewish identity, the links between religion, nationality, politics, and food. Above all, focusing on meat provides us with a singular window into the rich, fraught, and ultimately tragic history of German Jewry.

Speaker bio: John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley, where specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. Among his publications are Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Yale UP, 1994); Medicine and the German Jews: A History (Yale UP, 2001); German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton UP, 2016); The Jews: A Modern History (Routledge, forthcoming 2025); and All Consuming: Germans, Jews and the Meaning of Meat (Stanford UP, 2025).

This is the 41st Annual Joseph Alexander Colloquium in the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Joseph Alexander Foundation and the Mackler Family, with the support of the Katz Center, the Department of History, and Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies.

In-person registration here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SZy1cUIfJkjCOpCjZTc-ay1b1E2KZ4QPiQIBo3iD_Xs/edit

Register for the Zoom webinar here: https://upenn.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bPMkeSk2RwO94rEN2l5xJw #/registration

04/07/2025

German Jews, Political Pluralism, and the History of Compromise

Philipp Nielsen

Apr 7, 2025 at 5:00pm - 6:00pm | Class of 1955 Conference Room, Van Pelt Library
German Jewish politician
Does being a member of a minority community offer particular perspectives on compromise?

This talk will focus on the role played by a number of important German Jews during a period in German history when empire, democracy, and rights were hotly debated. At the center of this story are two legal scholars involved in defining the nature of the regime and formulating their own stances on the question of compromise in the empire: Georg Jellinek, son of the Viennese son of the Viennese rabbi Adolf Jellinek, and from 1891 ordinarius for public and international law at the University of Heidelberg, who wrote the defining “Theory of the Law of State” for the German Empire; and Hugo Preuß, son of a prosperous Jewish family from Berlin, scholar of constitutional law and municipal politician in the capital, who would later be central to the drafting of the Weimar constitution.

Through them we will explore the idea of political compromise, the challenges such ideas face, and the ways in which German Jews navigated their questions and shaped the answers in response.

Philipp Nielsen is a lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has a BSc from London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from Yale University. Nielsen specializes in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of modern Europe, with particular emphasis on German and Jewish history. His first monograph, Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019) traces the involvement of German Jews in nonliberal political projects from the founding of the German Empire to the Nuremberg Laws. He has co-edited volumes on the connection between architecture, democracy and emotions, and emotional encounters in history. He is currently working on a manuscript the history of compromise in German political thought and practice.

This is the 29th Annual Silvers Visiting Scholar Program in the Jewish Studies Program, endowed by David, C’71, and Patricia, CW’72, Silvers, in collaboration with the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, and the Department of History.

The talk will also be a Zoom webinar. Register for the webinar here:
https://upenn.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_01pY054ZQIGyHqTRVo27Jw

10/28/2024

"The Return to Sepharad: History and/as Fiction in Modern Jewish Literatures"
with Marina Mayorski

Oct 29, 2024 at 5:00pm | Cherpack Seminar Room, 543 Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th Street

The persecution and expulsion of Jews from Spain – or Sepharad – played a pivotal role in Jewish history and collective memory. In the modern era, the historical legacy of Sepharad inspired a wide and diverse literary corpus that included prose, poetry, and drama. Fictional accounts of the dispossession of the acculturated Sephardi elite, the terror of the Inquisition, and the secret lives of forced converts offered readers uniquely Jewish tales of romance, violence, and suspense. Blending history and fiction, past and present, Jewish authors liberally drew on images of the Sephardic past to grapple with their own cultural identities and political circumstances, as well as to captivate their audiences and promote their publications. This lecture will trace the fictional afterlives of Sepharad, a hybrid and immensely popular literary corpus that circulated across the modern Jewish world, confounding generic, cultural, ethnic, and national distinctions along its convoluted path.

Speaker:

Marina Mayorski is the 2024-2025 Goldin Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA and MA in comparative literature from Tel Aviv University. She recently received her PhD from the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, titled “Guilty Pleasures: Popular Fiction and the Formation of Jewish Cultural Modernity,“ examines the transnational development of popular literary culture in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is especially interested in the role of translation and adaptation of popular fiction in shaping modern notions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and political belonging. She will also continue working on translation of modern Ladino literature and on developing digital tools for research and pedagogy of Sephardic culture. At Penn, her research will focus on the ways in which Jewish writers and readers used popular literature to imagine their Jewish Others and construct Ashkenazi and Sephardi ethnic identities. She is looking forward to engaging Penn’s faculty and students, especially in contexts of translation theory and practice, history of the book, and digital humanities, and to conducting research in Penn’s extensive Judaica collections.

Light reception to follow.

Sponsors:

The Kutchin Seminar Series in the Jewish Studies Program, with the support of Penn’s Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Program, and Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies.

01/30/2024

“The 1948 War in the Eyes of the World: From the Local to the Global"

Derek J. Penslar (Harvard)

Feb 5, 2024
5:15pm | Zoom webinar

Register here: https://upenn.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_d1MLOtA5QWeGGLoEhCWiPg #/registration

Derek J. Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He is based in the Department of History, where he is the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Center for European Studies and is affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

This is the 28th Annual Silvers Visiting Scholar Program. The Silvers Visiting Scholar Program is endowed by David, C’71, and Patricia, CW’72, Silvers.

More information: https://jwst.sas.upenn.edu/events/2024/02/05/derek-j-penslar-1948-war-eyes-world-local-global

02/08/2021

Research Awards Available for Summer 2021

Goldfein Research Awards, Brenner Special Opportunity Awards, and Schwartz Awards are open to both undergraduate and graduate University of Pennsylvania students, and are intended to cover research projects and study programs in or related to Jewish studies.

Students can apply for funding to support travel, research material, and other assistance related to the research.
The deadline to apply is Friday, March 19, 2021.

For more information, please visit Penn's Jewish Studies Program website at:

Each fall and spring the Jewish Studies Program offers Goldfein Research Awards, Brenner Special Opportunity Awards, and Schwartz Awards to both undergraduate and graduate Penn students.

02/08/2021

Kedma Call for Submissions for Spring 2021 Journal
DEADLINE: February 14th
Kedma is Penn’s undergraduate journal on Jewish thought, Jewish culture, and Israel. Kedma provides a forum for Penn students to discuss, debate, and challenge ideas of intellectual and social significance. We accept academic articles (between 2,500 and 5,000 words) using Chicago-style endnote citations. We also accept book reviews and creative pieces such as poetry, short stories, photography, and other works of art. Please submit your work no later than February 14th to [email protected].

01/20/2021

Translating poetry and literature is an intellectual, artistic, and even political act, according to Emily Wilson, Huda Fakhreddine, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Nili Gold. In this OMNIA feature, they invite readers into their processes.

This article appeared in Penn's Omnia in November 2020. Professor Nili Gold, of the Jewish Studies Program, speaks about translating Hebrew.

Translation is an art that allows us to communicate across cultural difference.

01/20/2021

Announcing Spring 2021 Jewish Studies Meltzer Internships

The Jewish Studies Meltzer Internship Program enables students to explore the intellectual dimensions of Jewish studies outside the classroom. During the semester, interns will develop and organize one event for students. Programs might include a discussion with a scholar, a panel discussion, a performance, or any other event that raises issues relevant to Jewish studies. The Meltzer Faculty Advisor and Grad Coordinator will assist with conceptualization and with clarification of financial and technical needs. Each intern will have a programming budget of around $200 for the Meltzer event, and each will receive a $200 research stipend.

Submit your application via email by Wednesday, February 17, 2021.

The application and further information can be found on our website at

The Jewish Studies Meltzer Internship Program enables students to explore the intellectual dimensions of Jewish studies outside the classroom. During the semester, interns will develop and organize one event for students. Programs might include a discussion with a scholar, a panel discussion, a perf...