FROM THE DIRECTOR
The
Greenberg Center and the Department of Judaic Studies continue to be a home for compelling public programming and engaging undergraduate courses.
During the 2023 – 2024 academic year, we hosted several events on topics such as the significance of Jewish summer camps in American Jewish life, the comfort of holiday TV movies with a Hallmark screenwriter, and the importance of uncovering the Great Synagogue site located in Vilnius, Lithuania. We also offered a diverse range of courses including the Bible as Literature; Israeli Foreign Policy; Arabic Literature, Culture, and History in Translation; Introduction to World Religions; the History of Gender and Race in American Media; and an internship in Judaic Studies, among other courses.
Greenberg Center faculty considered an internship experience so important for gaining professional skills, that we made it a requirement of the Judaic Studies major when we revamped our curriculum last year. This addition amplifies the “Learning Beyond the Classroom” experience expected of all University of Hartford students. Internships offered through the Greenberg Center are open to all UHart students. Angela Epstein ’25, Nell Sirotin ’24, and Ashley Strollo ’24 interned at the Museum of Jewish Civilization, located in the Mortensen Library on the University of Hartford campus. They conducted research at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford and then designed individual museum exhibits, now on display at the Greenberg Center and Museum of Jewish Civilization. Hilary Bareiss ’25, completed an internship at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford, cataloging their art collection and brainstorming ideas for future exhibitions.
Two of our Judaic Studies minors graduated this year. We wish Irene Santiago ’24 and Nell Sirotin ’24 much success with all that comes next. And to our continuing students and community members, I look forward to seeing you at our fall 2024 public programs.
Amy Weiss
Director, Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies
Director, Museum of Jewish Civilization
Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History, and Maurice Greenberg Chair of Judaic Studies
FROM THE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
As I finish my second year teaching at the University of Hartford, and associate directing the Greenberg Center, I remain so grateful for my wonderful colleagues, our inspiring students, and our warm and welcoming community partners.
Together, Professor Amy Weiss and I spent the 2022 – 2023 academic year revamping our Judaic Studies curriculum, and it’s been wonderful seeing the fruits of this labor begin to pay off. This year, students had the opportunity to explore a variety of subjects within the realm of Judaic Studies, as we offered courses on the Bible, world religions, as well as modern Jewish history and politics. Our enrollment numbers continue to steadily increase, as more students are learning about all the academic and extra-curricular opportunities the Greenberg Center has to offer. This year, we also opened an exhibit in the Museum of Jewish Civilization featuring curation projects conducted by students from my Modern Jewish History course in the spring of 2023, and it’s been such a pleasure to show off their work to our UHart and greater Hartford communities.
Next year, I will be leading the University of Hartford’s 2024 Humanities Center Honors Seminar and Lecture Series, which will be a wonderful opportunity to continue our work of building bridges between the Greenberg Center and other programs on campus. The Humanities Center brings together faculty and students across the university to explore vital topics in the humanities. For next year, I have chosen to center the series on the theme of Banned Books and Censorship, a topic that has been of vital importance throughout Jewish and American history and continues to be a pressing issue to this day. Both Professor Weiss and I will be giving lectures as part of this series, which we hope many of you can attend!
Ayelet Brinn
Associate Director, Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies
Philip D. Feltman
Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History
GREENBERG CENTER PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
The Jews
of
Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America
Sandra Fox (New York University), in conversation with Amy Weiss (University of Hartford), explained how residential summer camps became an integral part of American Jewish life. The Jews of Summer illuminates how a sense of cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage for Jewish children across the United States. The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, the Mandell Jewish Community Center, and the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life co-sponsored this program.
The
Secrets of the Great Synagogue of Vilna Filmmaker Loïc Salfati presented his documentary about an international team of researchers, including the late Richard Freund, who uncovered the Great Synagogue site in Vilnius, Lithuania. Avinoam Patt (New York University) shared recollections of Richard Freund’s time as Director of the Greenberg Center at the University of Hartford (1999 – 2019). Samuel Kassow (Trinity College) offered commentary on the importance of the Great Synagogue and put the documentary into historical context. The Emanuel Synagogue, the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, and the Jewish Hartford European Roots project co-sponsored this program.
A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press
Ayelet Brinn, Steven Rosenthal, Rachel Walker, and Amy Weiss (all from the University of Hartford), celebrated the publication of Professor Brinn’s book, A Revolution in Type, with a roundtable discussion. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by women writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributes most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn argued that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, they must be viewed as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.
Holiday TV Movies
Julie Sherman Wolfe, a Hallmark screenwriter, and Amy Weiss, Director of the Greenberg Center at the University of Hartford, enjoyed a lively conversation about holiday TV movies. They discussed why these movies are so popular, what it’s like to see a story come to life on television, and why Connecticut makes for a great fictional holiday setting. The Avon Free Public Library co-sponsored this program.
Opening the Gates of Opportunity: Access to Higher Education, Then and Now
Mark Oppenheimer, creator of the podcast “Gatecrashers” about Jews and the Ivy League, and Walt Harrison, President Emeritus of the University of Hartford, discussed how Jews fought for entry into elite institutions of higher learning in the twentieth century. This struggle to diversify college campuses—and the fight for inclusion—transformed American society. Understanding this history helped provide context for the current moment, especially following the recent Supreme Court ruling over college admissions practices. Amy Weiss (University of Hartford) moderated the discussion. University co-sponsors included the Presidents’ College and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement. External co-sponsors included the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford and the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life.
Analyzing Propaganda and Teaching Media Literacy: The Holocaust As A Case Study
In this educators’ workshop, participants examined the events of the Holocaust through the lens of media. They examined propaganda deployed by the Nazis to discriminate against Jews and other minorities. Educators, guided by Erland Zygmuntowicz, explored how to facilitate classroom discussions on the role and impact of Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust and learned how to teach their students to critically analyze media in today’s world.
EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT AWARD
Elizabeth Graver
The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States.
The annual award recognizes an author whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for American Jewish history and culture.
The Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies named author Elizabeth Graver as the winner of the 2023 Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Graver is a Professor of English at Boston College and is the author of Kantika: A Novel (Macmillan, 2023). The award ceremony took place at the Greenberg Center on Monday, April 15, 2024.
Kantika is an American Jewish novel centered around Sephardi immigrants
to the United States, and is inspired by the author’s grandmother’s story. As the Wallant Award judges note: “Moving around temporally and geographically— Istanbul, Cuba, Barcelona, New York—the novel is, as the title suggests, a song. It is both a lament for lost worlds, but also a love song, a prayer for the future. This is a novel about exile, about the diasporic nature of loss. But so too, this is a novel about the rich intersections of cultures, languages—French, Ladino, Hebrew, English—and lives. Graver, in navigating worlds, temporalities, and generations, explores the possibilities for selfreinvention amid the turmoil of change.”
Audience members listen to Elizabeth Graver discuss her book, Kantika: A Novel, during the Edward Lewis Wallant Award ceremony on April 15, 2024.
STUDENT AWARDS
The Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies is pleased to recognize students who received awards for their research and academic distinction. The following list recognizes student award recipients for the 2023 – 2024 academic year.
Beth S. Kaplan Endowed Scholarship
Irene Santiago ’24
Elaine Lampert Memorial Scholarship for Judaic Studies
Colin Nichols ’25
George J. Sherman and Lottie K.
Sherman Endowed Scholarship
Noah Kell ’24
Jack and Tillie Bayer Judaic Scholarship
Hilary Bareiss ’25
Jerome E. Caplan Memorial/
Rogin Nassau Endowed Scholarship
Max Auerbach ’26
Judith P. Wolfson Memorial Endowed Scholarship
Diego Huaman ’25
Juliana Mancini ’26
Dylan Thomas ’24
Millie and Irving Bercowetz
Judaica Scholarship
Avital Lichtenfeld ’26
Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies
2023-2024
Noah Kell ’24 and Professor Ayelet Brinn
From left to right: Greenberg Center Office Coordinator Susan Gottlieb, Professor Amy Weiss, Max Auerbach ’26, Hilary Bareiss ’25, Noah Kell ’24, Irene Santiago ’24, and Professor Ayelet Brinn
MUSEUM OF JEWISH CIVILIZATION
The Museum of Jewish Civilization, an enterprise of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, is located in the Mortensen Library on the University of Hartford campus. The featured exhibit in the Bruce Singer Gallery during the 2023 – 2024 academic year was “Fighting for Hartford: Connecticut Jews on the Home Front and Battle Front during World War II.”
This exhibit explored the history of Jews from the greater Hartford area who served in World War II. Drawing on the collections of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford, Central Connecticut State University’s Veterans History Project, and materials donated by the family of Philip D. Feltman, it recounts the experiences of Hartford residents who served in a variety of capacities in the armed services, from stenographers and cartographers to nurses and medics. Together their stories reveal how patriotism and Jewish identity influenced the experiences of wartime recruits as well as how their time in the service would go on to shape their careers, families, and Jewish identities for the rest of their lives.
In the spring of 2023, students enrolled in Professor Brinn’s Modern Jewish History course spent the semester learning about the experiences of Jewish veterans of World War II from the Hartford area. Each student was assigned a veteran who had been interviewed as part of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford’s Oral History Project. In the panels
Top: Mark Zocco ’23, Professor Ayelet Brinn, and Susan Gaeta
Bottom: Susan Gaeta, pictured with her father’s army uniform
featured on one of the museum walls, students distilled the highlights of these oral histories into brief synopses for museum visitors as part of the 2023 – 2024 exhibit.
To celebrate the successful run of the “Fighting for Hartford” exhibit, the Greenberg Center hosted a museum lecture and exhibit tour on April 1, 2024. Jessica Cooperman, Associate Professor and Chair of Religion Studies and Director of Jewish Studies at Muhlenberg College gave a talk titled “Fighting for America: Jews, Military Service, and the Reshaping of Religion.” Cooperman shared how the experiences of military service in World War I and World War II challenged and reshaped American ideas about religion, and about the place of Jews and Judaism in American history and society.
Mark Zocco ’23 views the exhibit
Professor Jessica Cooperman and Professor Ayelet Brinn
DEPARTMENT OF JUDAIC STUDIES
CORE FACULTY
Ayelet Brinn
Amy Weiss
Department Chair
ADJUNCT FACULTY
Hazza Abo-Rabia
OFFICE COORDINATOR
Susan Gottlieb
FACULTY NEWS
2023–24 Academic Year
Ayelet Brinn, assistant professor of Judaic Studies and History and the Philip D. Feltman Professor in Modern Jewish History, published her first book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press, in November 2023 with New York University Press. It has since been named a finalist for the 73rd Annual National Jewish Book Awards. In addition to talks related to her book, Professor Brinn co-organized a symposium on the history of the American Yiddish Press at the Center for Jewish History in January 2024 and presented conference papers at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference in San Francisco in December 2023 and the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Conference in New York in May 2024.
Hazza Abo-Rabia, adjunct instructor of Judaic Studies, translated Titus Tobler’s Nazareth in Palestina into Arabic (Al-Hakim Press, 2023). He presented conference papers at the 2023 and 2024 meetings of the International Conference for Language and Culture. One presentation examined the role of literature in forging Arab national identity, while the second one investigated Egyptian Jewish journalist Yacoub Sannu’s efforts to counter British influence in Egypt in the 1860s.
Amy Weiss, assistant professor of Judaic Studies and History, and the Maurice Greenberg Chair of Judaic Studies, published “A Very Merry Hanukkah: Secular Tensions and Christian Hegemony in Hallmark’s ‘Countdown to Christmas’” in Critical Perspectives on the Hallmark Channel: Countdown to Romance (Routledge, 2024). She presented conference presentations at the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference in San Francisco in December 2023, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference in Boston in March 2024, the Organization of American Historians Annual Conference in New Orleans in April 2024, and the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Conference in New York in May 2024. She gave several talks for the University of Hartford’s Presidents’ College, including a three-part series on “The Evolution of American Jewish Literature” and a separate lecture titled “From the Catskills to Comedy Central: Jewish Humor, Then and Now.” Weiss received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to complete work on her book on American Jews, evangelicals, and Israel. In the past year, she also received a Greenberg Junior Faculty Research Grant, two Richard J. Cardin grants, a Dr. Lawrence H. Kanter Grant from the Southern Jewish Historical Society and a Charleston Research Fellowship sponsored by the Pearlstine/ Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston, all to support her research. Weiss also appeared on an episode of Connecticut Public Radio’s Where We Live podcast, discussing the Museum of Jewish Civilization’s role in narrating the historical past through material objects.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Please join us for a lively lineup of programs taking place during the 2024 – 2025 academic year, which are free and open to the public. A more complete schedule can be found on the Greenberg Center website. hartford.edu/greenberg
WEBSITE
Monday, September 16, 2024
7 p.m.
Wilde Auditorium, University of Hartford
The Counterfeit Countess tells the astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat. This program is made possible through the generosity of the Rose and Arthur Fallmann Endowment.
September 2024 through May 2025
Museum of Jewish Civilization, University of Hartford
Jews in Space: Members of the Tribe in Orbit
An exhibition created by the Center for Jewish History and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. CT Humanities, the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford have generously funded this exhibit.
Contact Amy Weiss, Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at amweiss@hartford.edu or Sean Meehan, Associate Vice President for Development, at 860.768.2440 or smeehan@hartford.edu
