From Gold Mountain to Tinseltown: Ethnic Identity in California’s Architectural Vernacular It’s well known that millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe immigrated across the Atlantic to the United States, settling mostly in New York and other large cities. But some Jewish immigrants crossed the Pacific and settled on the West Coast of the United States, in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In this episode, we explore the research of Zoya Blumberg-Kraus, an independent scholar and fellow at the Frankle Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, which ..read more

Jews are no strangers to horror. They’ve encountered and dealt with horrifying events throughout their history - exile, destruction of two temples, expulsion, blood libels, ghettoization, genocide, terrorism. The list goes on and on. And so, it’s perhaps not surprising that Jewish critics and filmmakers have done some really interesting work in the horror film genre, creating what scholar Adam Lowenstein refers to as Jewish horror, although what that term means, exactly, is complicated. In this episode. Lowenstein, a professor of English and film and media studies at the University of Pittsbur ..read more

The rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic agenda during the early 1930s was the beginning of the darkest era of modern Jewish history. For obvious reasons, we tend to not make jokes about it. And yet, at the time, some Jewish writers and artists, including photographers, did exactly that. In this episode, Louis Kaplan, a professor of visual studies and art history at the University of Toronto, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the lives and work of four Jewish photographers–Roman Vishniac, Erwin Blumfeld, Grete Stern, and J ..read more

Since the earliest years of the modern state of Israel, Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, known as Mizrahim, have had to fight for equal rights and opportunities. Mizrahi Jews were looked down upon by the Zionist establishment as primitive–in many ways the very opposite of the image of the New, Western-style Jew that the establishment hoped to foster. And so, Mizrahi activists have for decades struggled to be recognized as full and equal members of Israeli society. But often lost among the larger struggle are the voices and experiences of Mizrahi women, who fought not only for Mizrahi rights bu ..read more

Like most Jews living in Muslim lands, the Jews of Algeria had over the centuries built a vibrant culture, with homegrown traditions, institutions, and religious practices. Tying it all together was the Algerian Jewish community’s unique dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which rendered Arabic in Hebrew script–much like Yiddish, a German dialect written in Hebrew, spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe. For centuries, the Algerian dialect of Judeo-Arabic was spoken and written by Jews as an everyday language, and also had some liturgical function. But starting around the 1860s, Judeo-Arabic began to be used b ..read more

Mizrahiyut, or Mizrahi identity and consciousness, is an Israeli phenomenon, born in the decades after hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and North African lands immigrated to Israel. But recently, a version of Mizrahi identity has taken root in the United States among the sons and daughters of Mizrahi Jews who have relocated to America. In this episode of Frankely Judaic, scholar and Frankel Institute fellow Gal Levy discussed this burgeoning of Mizrahi identity in the US, exploring how and why it developed and what it means for the evolution of Jewish identity in America. The 2022-2023 ..read more

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for treatment, and when their families inquired after them, were told that they’d died; and the Ringworm ..read more

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alex Moshkin Project Title: Russian-Israeli Poetry ..read more

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alessandro Guetta Project Title: "A Common Tongue": Jewish Translation from Hebrew in Early Modern Italy ..read more

2022-23 Frankel Institute Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity Erez Tzfadia Project Title: Mizrahim and the Local Politics of Ethnicity in Development Towns ..read more