In this talk, historian Julia Phillips Cohen discusses the unknown role that Jews from the eastern and southern Mediterranean played in the shaping of modern couture. Following two fashion houses run by an interconnected network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in fin-de-siècle Paris, the talk reveals the participation of these firms in a...
This event has been cancelled. Sunday, May 17, 2026 • James Bridges Theater • 2 PM Occupied City The Barbara Roisman Cooper and Martin Cooper Jewish Film Series
In its fourteenth consecutive year, the ucLADINO conference supports and celebrates the growing preservation of Ladino language and culture in the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. The theme for this year’s ucLADINO conference centers around Ladino and community resilience, exploring the ways that Ladino language preserves cultural memory yet continually adapts and reacts to change. What is the...
What drew Jewish immigrants to the labor movement? How did unions become distinctly "Jewish" spaces - and what happened when they changed? Join historians, organizers, and community leaders for a panel on Jewish labor activism in Los Angeles: from the open-shop battles of the early 20th century to today. Thursday, May 28, 2026 • UCLA...
A dominant trend in scholarship about Jews in the Roman Imperial diaspora emphasizes the Jews' achievement of a successful balance between integration and separation, and regards this happy equilibrium as essentially stable for centuries. I will argue that this view rests on a fundamental misreading of the sources. Asia Minor (modern Turkey) provided the richest...
The phenomenon of “Godfearing”—adoption by gentiles, usually supposed to have been pagan—of Jewish practices including support for local Jewish communities and attendance in synagogues—has loomed larger in scholarship than it does in the sources. But the phenomenon surely existed. Some ancient writers suggest that in the first century most diaspora jewish communities had a “fringe”...
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 • 314 Royce Hall • 4 PM UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Open House Celebration Share a bite with the Leve Center faculty, staff, students, and community friends. Learn about our diverse projects, programs, and courses. RSVP
Zionism in Translation concerns exchanges—primarily of letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemera—sent to or from Jerusalem in the decades around 1948. All were written in German and Hebrew by a fascinating range of literary figures, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul...
It is well known that the French Catholic Church, which opposed Hitler before 1940, silenced itself during the German occupation. But Aliza Luft shows that the Church was more than silent: it was complicit. Behind closed doors, bishops repeatedly assured Jewish leaders of the Church’s support—only to betray their trust amidst the Nazi threat. Aliza...
In this talk, Prof. Boum will develop the concept of aesthetic funds of knowledge to name the embodied, socially transmitted, and commercially usable repertoires through which Sephardic Moroccan Jews built aesthetic and sartorial competence across Debdou, France, and the Americas. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic and archival research in the Moroccan Jewish community in...