On January 29, 2023, the Institute welcomed award-winning author and historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein in-person at Kent Hall for the 2023 Yosef Yerushalmi Annual Memorial Lecture.
The lecture honored the memory of Professor Yosef Yerushalmi, who held the Salo Wittmayer Baron Chair in Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University from 1980 until 2008 and directed the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies—which would later become the IIJS—for those 28 years. He established himself as one of the world’s preeminent scholars in Jewish history, leaving an indelible mark on the field with his 1982 book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Prof. Yerushalmi’s scholarship was notable, too, for its commitment to elucidating the history of Sephardic Jewry; his 1971 book From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto is no less than a foundational text in the study of Iberian crypto-Judaism.
This year’s lecture highlighted exciting new research approaches from a scholar building upon Prof. Yerushalmi’s legacy in Sephardic Studies. Dr. Sarah Abrevaya Stein is one of the world’s leading scholars on Sephardic, Middle Eastern, and North African Jewry, as well as the Ladino language. In her lecture, Dr. Stein discussed the novel approach that characterizes her current project: using archival photographs and photo albums to reconstruct Sephardic Jewish daily life in the late Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Balkans. A recording of her lecture, “Eating on the Ground: Picnicking at the End of Empire,” is available to view below.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. The recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Jewish Book Awards, Stein is the author and editor of ten books, many of them award-winning. Her most recent books include Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022) and Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (FSG/Macmillan, 2019), which was named a Best Book of 2019 by The Economist and an Editor’s Choice Book by the New York Times Book Review.
This event was made possible by the generosity of the Knapp and Kaye families.
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