Center for Jewish Studies Fall 2026 Newsletter

From the Director's Desk

It is a time of new beginnings. A new academic year has begun. A new first-year class has entered the University. And I have started a new position—as director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

First, some words of deep gratitude. Dr. Natan Paradise has been the Center’s keystone for the last decade, first as associate director, and then the last, extremely challenging four years as director. Thanks to Natan’s remarkable dedication, unerring judgment, and dogged persistence, the Center not only survived the last few years, but it continued to thrive. It hosted thought-provoking public lectures and scholarly talks. It offered a robust curriculum of Jewish Studies courses. And it sponsored fascinating large-scale events, like the upcoming symposium on Global Jewish Food Cultures, to be held in early November. As Natan’s final parting gift to all of us (but especially to me!), he planned the 2026-2027 Community Lecture series, which kicks off in just a few weeks at the St. Paul JCC. Prof. Sander Gilman of Emory University, author of the fascinating new book, Antisemitisms: A History of Jew Hating, will lead us in a conversation about “Antisemitisms and Anti-antisemitisms.”

Natan has handed me a Center in excellent health, and I hope to keep it that way. If I am successful, that is only because of the staunch support CJS has received from Dean GerShun Avilez and the College of Liberal Arts. Thanks to the Dean, the Center continues to enjoy the brilliant organizational and planning services of Marial Coulter, who makes the Center run—and who, along with everything else, is also responsible for this newsletter. Dean Avilez also authorized and funded an exciting new addition to the Center’s leadership team. Dr. Marc Caplan is a distinguished scholar and an experienced educator who joins us as Associate Director and Director of Undergraduate Studies. The Center is truly fortunate to have steadfast partners not only in the Dean and the College, but in Provost Gretchen Ritter and President Rebecca Cunningham. 

The Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota has a long and distinguished history stretching back nearly three decades, and of course the University was privileged to have on staff remarkable Jewish Studies educators and scholars for decades before the Center was established. But, today, the Center is at an exciting inflection point—with brand-new leadership, new Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History Noam Sienna, and a number of relatively newly appointed and newly tenured CJS faculty. 

As director, I hope to build on the strong foundation I’ve been bequeathed. CJS will continue to be a hub of intellectual inquiry and innovative scholarship, ranging across the Jewish experience. CJS will embrace programmatic and educational experiments consistent with our scholarly and pedagogical mission. CJS will continue to bring cutting-edge research to our many supporters beyond the campus’ walls. In this time when academic freedom is under assault, seemingly from all sides, CJS will uphold the traditional, long-prized virtues of the university and values of the Jewish tradition—conducting open inquiry, sponsoring searching debate, grappling with uncomfortable truths, and advancing the scholarly frontier.

This is my 25th year at the University of Minnesota, so I bring some historical perspective when I say that this is a time of unusual financial precarity for and political pressure on the University. But I truly believe in our great, enduring mission—to produce and disseminate scholarly knowledge. I know that you, the friends of the Center for Jewish Studies, share that commitment. If CJS is to grow and flourish even in these challenging times, we will need your support more than ever.

I hope to see you at future CJS events. Please do reach out to me, at [email protected], with your ideas and thoughts (and, in a Jewish spirit, your kvetches too). 

To those of you who celebrate Rosh HaShana, allow me to share with you my heartfelt wish that you should enjoy a sweet and healthy new year. To all, I look forward to connecting with you and hearing from you.

Ron Krebs, Director, Center for Jewish Studies & Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science

Meet CJS' New Associate Director, Dr. Marc Caplan

Dr. Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he received his PhD in comparative literature from NYU. Since then he has held research fellowships and professorial appointments at academic institutions in the US, Israel, Austria, Poland, and Germany. He comes to the Twin Cities most recently from Dartmouth College, where he was a Brownstone Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies. He is the author of two books, How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms--a comparison of Yiddish and African literatures (Stanford, 2011)--and Yiddish Literature in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (Indiana, 2021). His work generally is dedicated to studying Yiddish culture in comparative contexts including literature, music, film, modern thought, and popular culture.

Dr. Caplan is joining the Center's leadership team with the start of the 2026-2027 academic year, and he will be relocating to the Twin Cities in October. You can reach him at [email protected]!

Meet the New Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History, 

Professor Noam Sienna

Beginning this fall, Dr. Noam Sienna joins the University of Minnesota History Department and the Center for Jewish Studies as the new Amos S. Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History. Dr. Sienna’s scholarship sits at the intersection of two fields: the history of Jewish communities in the early modern and modern Mediterranean world, and the history of the book as a material object. His first book, Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana, 2025), won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies and the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. Spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, it examines the work of Jewish writers and printers in the Maghreb, and the books they produced, as integral to their community’s negotiation of evolving relationships with their Muslim neighbors and European colonial powers. You can hear a conversation about the book at the History Book Club.

Save the Date! Prof. Sienna will be giving his inaugural Deinard lecture on November 16, 2026.

The Deinard Chair in early modern and modern Jewish History was established in 2007 with a major donation from the Kelen Family Foundation and gifts from other community members. It honors Amos S. Deinard, a Minneapolis lawyer and civil rights leader, who was a founder of the Minneapolis Human Rights Commission and chairman of the Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices Commission. 

Announcing the 2026-2027 CJS Community Lecture Series:

The Other Jew

Is the “other Jew” the one who goes to the synagogue you wouldn’t set foot in? Is it “The Jews” functioning as outsiders in the societies in which they live? Is it the Ashkenazi to the Sephardi and vice versa? Is it the Jew whose Jewish life is defined as much by gender as by Jewishness? Or by economics? Politics? Social Status? A different Zionism, or lack of it? It is all of these, of course, and more. In this series we look at otherness as a boundary, both internal and external, and the ways in which Jewishness is represented in light of these boundaries, along with the perceptions, divisions, and entanglements that result from them.

View our 2026-2027 Annual Lecture Series Brochure digitally here:

The series kicks off with:

Antisemitisms and Anti-antisemitisms

Sander Gilman, Emory University

Tuesday, October 20, 2026 - 7:30 pm

Minnesota JCC Capp Center, 1375 St Paul Ave, St Paul, MN 55116

Registration: https://z.umn.edu/SanderGilman

Calling All Foodies! Global Jewish Food Cultures

November 4-5, 2026:

This two-day symposium is dedicated to the rich subject of Global Jewish Food Cultures, featuring participants who study food and the practices around it as a lens into the social, religious, cultural and economic life of Jewish communities throughout the world and across time periods. Bringing together scholars from across disciplines, this symposium will explore a variety of exciting themes, from the theological and cultural meanings of the Hillel Sandwich, to Jewish community farms in the United States. In addition to the participants' presentations, the symposium will include a public presentation of food-related historical sources from the University of Minnesota archives, and a public presentation on Sephardic culinary practices in the Medieval period.

Stay tuned for more information!

What Have CJS Faculty Been Up To?

For a full catalog of CJS faculty’s impressive accomplishments in 2025-2026, click here.

Shir Alon published Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2025) as well as an article on “Identity and Cultural Diplomacy of the Abraham Accords.” In fall 2025, Prof. Alon taught an undergraduate class on “Hebrew Literature: Settlement and Ideology.” In May 2026, Prof. Alon was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure!

Patricia Ahearne-Kroll received a College of Liberal Arts Mid-Career Faculty Research Award to support her commentary on "Aseneth," which is believed to have been originally composed by a Jewish author in Hellenistic Egypt around the first century B.C.E. In 2026, Prof. Ahearne-Kroll taught an undergraduate Jewish Studies course on “Sex, Murder, and Bodily Discharges: Purity and Pollution in the Ancient World.”

Marc Caplan published an article in 2026 on “Between Stravinsky and the Shtetl: Oyzer Varshavski’s Polytonal Discourse and the Challenges of Interwar Yiddish Literature.” In 2026-2027, in addition to serving as Associate Director of CJS, Marc will be the Emmanuel Patt Research Fellow at the YIVO Institute, writing a book on the Yiddish theater and politics in the nineteenth century.

Bruno Chaouat published an essay on “On the Use and Abuse of ‘Genocide’ in Postmodern Thought.” He also delivered lectures at the University of Toronto, the Centre for Human and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council, and the Klaus and Renate Heinrich Foundation (Berlin).

Ron Krebs published several articles in 2025-2026 that explored Israel in cross-national perspective, including “Why Populists Love Dead Soldiers and Hate Live Officers,” and “The Soldier in the State: Explaining Public Trust in the Armed Forces”—among others. He delivered lectures on these themes at, among other institutions, the London School of Economics (UK), the University of Cambridge (UK), and Brown University. Prof. Krebs regrettably had to postpone his planned teaching at the Hebrew University in spring 2026.

Bernard Levinson published essays on “Deuteronomy’s Revolutionary Concept of Kingship” and “It’s Tradition! How Deuteronomy’s Reform Permits Non-Sacrificial Slaughter” in 2026. He delivered lectures at, among other institutions, the University of Melbourne (Australia), the University of Greifswald (Germany), and the University of Zurich (Switzerland). In fall 2026, he is offering a new undergraduate class on “Scripture and the Other: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust.”

Hanne Loeland Levinson published an essay in 2026 on “The Creator and Her Creation: The Representation of Ruth Handler as God in the Barbie Movie.” She also presented on “What Makes Eve an Eve? Hybrid Eve Characters in Dystopian Literature" in fall 2025, and gave a workshop on “Metaphor and the Hebrew Bible” at the University of Melbourne (Australia) in summer 2026.

Hernán Matzkevich delivered a talk in March 2026 to the U’s Center for Premodern Studies on “Bodies Outside the Law: Syphilis, Deviance, and Jewish Literary Resistance in the Early Modern World.”

Leslie Morris published in 2026 essays on “Broken Jewish: Plurilingual Poetics in Germany Today” and “Teaching in Jewish: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Place(s) of German Jewish Studies.” Prof. Morris also served on the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Advisory Board and the Editorial Board of Nexus, Journal of German Jewish Studies.

Karen Painter published an essay in 2026 on “Music after Kristallnacht: Cultural Reportage in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt” and composed program notes on various Mahler symphonies for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. She also gave a public presentation at Augsburg College on “Music after Kristallnacht: Mourning and Resilience,” as part of the Voices of Resilience and Hope program.

Noam Sienna published Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana University Press, 2025), which won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies and the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. His essays published in 2026 included “Wrapping the Word: The Textiles of the Torah Scroll” and “Hebrew Typography and Typefaces.” He delivered lectures at, among other institutions, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University. He also curated an exhibition at the University of Minnesota Libraries, titled “Faith in the Press: Jewish Printers and Printing in the Twin Cities, 1890-1950.” In 2026 Prof. Sienna was Lilly Scholar-in-Residence Research Fellow at the Library of Congress.

Rotem Tamir participated in 2026 in the Ras Al Khaimah Biennale and in the group exhibition Dreamsong in Minneapolis. They also participated in a published roundtable in VoCA Journal on deaf* experiences and perspectives in relation to contemporary art, artistic practice, and access. Prof. Tamir was a Visiting Artist at the invitation of the Jewish Studies Workshop at Ball State University. In May 2026, Prof. Tamir was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure!

Community Happenings

Genetic Engineering: Optimizing Our Children?

Sunday, October 25 | 10:00 AM (In Person or Zoom)

Hear from a distinguished panel of experts as they discuss the medical possibilities, ethical boundaries, and Jewish perspectives on genetic engineering:

• Dr. Saul Snowise — Maternal and Fetal Medicine, University of Minnesota
• Dr. Ian Wolfe — Director of Ethics, Children's Minnesota
• Rabbi Elliot Dorff — Professor of Philosophy, American Jewish University

RSVP required for panel discussion. If attending virtually, links provided upon registration.

Register at beth-jacob.org/scientists.

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