Jewish Studies Program

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Faculty Director's Welcome    

Welcome to Jewish Studies at Stanford! The Taube Center for Jewish Studies explores a wide range of topics related to Jewish peoples, including their cultures, religions, histories, literatures, and languages. Our diverse course offerings span the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, Music and the Arts, and Stanford Law School. Students in Jewish Studies benefit from access to world-class faculty and extraordinary archival collections, ranging from American Jewish cookbooks to medieval coins. Each year, the Taube Center invites scholars, authors, and artists to campus for public events open to the entire Stanford community. These events reflect the breadth of Jewish Studies and engage with essential questions about Jewish identity in its broadest sense: What makes a historical moment, a work of fiction, a film, or a language "Jewish"? We study together and reflect on the experiences of Jewish individuals and communities across time and space. To address pressing issues in the present moment, we also engage in a series of conversations around the question of Being Jewish Today. Our new postdoctoral fellow, Daniela Tolchinsky, will expand our conversations on contemporary issues through her work in political theory and political theology. We have a long list of courses, events, and other activities scheduled for this year, and I would like to highlight a few new areas of focus. We are initiating a new format for our graduate student conference, which this year will be devoted to the topic of "Correspondences" within the Jewish world and beyond. We will also have a special focus on the Bible, with an international conference devoted to The Bible and Wonder: Literary, Philosophical, and Visual Encounters with the Extraordinary, as well as seminars and talks throughout the year. We are especially pleased to welcome Marc Brettler of Duke University as our visiting scholar in Bible, complementing the range of courses on the Bible and antiquity that we will be offering this year. Another strong focus this year will be Ladino language, history, and literature. Visiting fellow Rachel Kaufman will teach two courses on the topic, while Stanford alum Dina Danon (Binghamton University), an expert on Ladino-speaking Jews in the Ottoman Empire, will return to campus to lead a session. We are also thrilled to welcome award-winning fantasy novelist Leigh Bardugo, whose work engages with Ladino, for a conversation with another Stanford alum, Devin Naar (University of Washington). This year will mark our second Jewish Studies Winter Fellows Program, designed to enhance our teaching, strengthen our conversations, and events, and we encourage you to become involved in Jewish Studies in whatever way is most meaningful to you. For those who cannot join us in person, we will make some of these conversations available online. 

With warm wishes for a wonderful new academic year,

Shana tovah, 

Vered Karti Shemtov, Ph.D.

Department of Comparative Literature

Faculty Director, Taube Center for Jewish Studies

Building 260, Room 214, Stanford University

Editor-in-Chief, Dibur Literary Journal

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