On Sunday, November 15, we welcomed over 155 people to the virtual Institute to explore the legacy of Salo Baron. 2020 marks the 90th anniversary of Baron’s arrival at Columbia University and the first chair in Jewish History at any secular university in the United States.
We heard from Bernard Cooperman on Finding the Future in the Jewish Past: Salo Baron at Columbia and Jason Lustig on Salo Baron’s Legacy and the Shaping of Jewish Studies Into the Twenty-First Century. Stay tuned for more on Salo Baron in the coming months.
Bernard Cooperman holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History at the University of Maryland where he has served as Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and of the Center for Historical Studies. His research focuses on the history of Jews in Early Modern Italy, on ghettoization, on the development of rabbinic culture in the western Sephardic diaspora, and on the development of Jewish historiography and the concept of anti-Semitism. Recent papers include “Inventing the Jewish People by Periodizing Jewish Time,” to be published in Chronologics: Periodization in a Global Context, ed. Thomas Maissen, Barbara Mittler and Pierre Monnet (Heidelberg: [2020]), “Cultural Pluralism from the Ghetto—What Might It Have Meant?”in Pierre Savy and Alessandro Guetta, eds., Non contrarii ma diversi (Rome: Viella, 2020), and “Defining Deviance, Negotiating Norms. Raphael Meldola in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Dr. Cooperman is presently at work on a study of Spinoza's attitude towards religious tolerance and a book-length study tentatively titled The Right to Exclude: Jewish Competition, Community, and Self-Government in Early Modern Tuscany.
Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. at the UCLA Department of History, and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. His research focuses on the development of Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine in the twentieth century, the topic of his book manuscript in preparation, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. He also is the creator and host of the Jewish History Matters podcast.
Supported by the Kaye Family.