"Jews Around the World" lecture series begins this week

Eli Rosenblatt, visiting assistant professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, presents the first of three presentations in this year’s Emerging Scholars Lecture Series sponsored by the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies at Youngstown State University and the Jewish Studies Program at Kent State University.

The virtual lecture, titled “Creole Israel: The Jews of Suriname (1900-1960),” will be 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 16. Register here.

The other two lectures are: 5 p.m. March 15, with C. Tova Markenson, C. Tova Markenson, assistant professor, Academy for Jewish Religion, “Jewish Feelings: Performing Tsuris (Troubles) at the Yiddish Theatres in Buenos Aires (1880-1940),” register here;  and 5 p.m. April 12, Elly Moseson, visiting professor of Eastern European Jewish Studies, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, “Protecting House and Hearth: Jewish Domestic Magic in Pre-Modern Europe,” register here.

All lectures are in an online, virtual format and are free.

In the first lecture, Rosenblatt will explore a Caribbean Jewish society on the northeastern coast of South America, among the oldest continuously existing Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere. He will argue that the Jews of Suriname, though distinctly situated in their tropical environment and largely unknown outside the Dutch sphere today, are the “relatives” of all American Jews. 

Rosenblatt’s research focuses on modern Judaism, with a particular emphasis on Ashkenazic and Atlantic Jewish cultures in the 19th and 20th centuries. He holds a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He has taught at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and UC-Berkeley.