This was a productive year at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies as we continued to meet the challenges of our present time. We fostered many opportunities for research and learning engagement on campus, in Columbus, and across Ohio to enrich our work in Jewish studies, bolster our community, and advance our collective knowledge. We formalized research exchanges, grew our Community Text Study program, and continued meetings of our ad-hoc antisemitism working group to continue Samuel Melton’s vision to foster the study of all aspects of the Jewish experience on campus and in the community.
Our center members accomplished great things this year through new scholarship and artistic production, grants, and awards recognizing their accomplishments. We are pleased to welcome new faculty Saul Zaritt (Germanic and Slavic) and Laurie Katz (Teaching and Learning) into the Melton Center. We are thrilled to congratulate Melton faculty member Harriet Fertik (Classics) on her tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor. We celebrated and bid farewell to Lori Botnick Fireman, who retired after serving the Melton Center for nearly 20 years. You will find introductions to and celebrations of these center members in the pages of this report.
Our students are doing exciting work and introducing new ideas into Jewish studies. The Melton Center awarded multiple scholarships and awards to our students this year, as we do every year, thanks to the support of our generous donors. You can read descriptions of their fantastic projects over the next few pages.
Our programming spanned the breadth of Jewish studies. In this year’s Thomas and Diann Mann Symposium Series called “Jewish Migrations and Cultural Production,” Ari Ariel (University of Iowa) presented a cooking demonstration on Jewish foodways and a lecture on Yemeni Jewish culture, and Renana Gutman (Longy School of Music of Bard College) presented a piano recital focused on Jewish identity. In our Thomas and Diann Mann Israel Lecture Series, we learned from Rachel Harris (Florida Atlantic University) about the role of the IDF in the Israeli film industry, and from Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University) about the history of emotions related to the 1967 War. We welcomed Lynn Kaye (Brandeis University) for the Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law, focused on lay people’s court cases in the Talmud.
We collaborated with the Department of Classics and Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies on lectures and seminar-workshops with Alan Verskin (University of Toronto) on the life of David Reubeni, and Mika Ahuvia (University of Washington) about ancient Jewish diasporas and enslavement. We kicked off a two-year Thomas and Diann Mann Symposium Series on Jewish Leadership with a lecture by Sarah Federman (University of San Diego) on the French National Railways during and after the Holocaust. We co-sponsored many programs with our community partners in film, literature, religious studies, and history. Our new Faculty Research Works in Progress sessions brought Melton Center members together to discuss new topics in Jewish studies and give feedback on faculty work in progress.
We were pleased to co-host, with Ohio State’s Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, the first of what we hope will be annual exchanges of the Ohio Jewish Studies Workshop. We welcomed colleagues from institutions across Ohio to campus for research exchange, networking, and discussions of current issues related to Jewish studies in Ohio.
In the upcoming year, in addition to our regular programming, we are excited to begin a two-year collaboration with Ohio State’s Middle East Studies Center and Center for Ethics and Human Values supported by a Centers and Institutes Grant from Global Arts and Humanities at Ohio State. Our project, Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Multi-Ethnic Cultural Production in the Middle East, engages questions about minoritized communities in the Middle East through collaborative research, dialogue, and artistic productions. We will bring artists and scholars to campus to share their models of engaging questions and difficult conversations that push the boundaries between Jew and Arab, Israel and Palestine to challenge flattening narratives about minoritized communities in the Middle East more broadly. We hope you will join us for these and our other events this year, whether in person or online.
I look forward to seeing you at a program or two this year, and I encourage you to come visit our library to experience one of the best Judaica collections in the country. Your support is vital to the work that we do. If you are in Columbus, I am happy to meet you for coffee or a nosh. Do not hesitate to get in touch.
Shanah tovah u’metukah and warmest wishes for a happy, healthy and sweet year ahead.
— Hannah Kosstrin
Director, Melton Center for Jewish Studies
