Shabbat Morning

Torah Blessings

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for treatment, and when their families inquired after them, were told that they’d died; and the Ringworm Affair, which subjected thousands of Mizrahi immigrants to multiple radiation doses as a treatment for the fungal skin infection ringworm–a treatment that raised the risk for cancer and other diseases.

In this episode, legal scholar Inbal Blau, a legal scholar and assistant professor at the Ono Academic College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, examines how tort law has enabled the victims of these affairs to gain a measure of compensation, and questions to what extent monetary compensation can help right past wrongs, known in legal scholarship as “transitional justice.”


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Inbal Blau, "Mizrahi Discourse on Transitional Justice"

Mizrahiyut, or Mizrahi identity and consciousness, is an Israeli phenomenon, born in the decades after hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and North African lands immigrated to Israel.

But recently, a version of Mizrahi identity has taken root in the United States among the sons and daughters of Mizrahi Jews who have relocated to America. 

In this episode of Frankely Judaic, scholar and Frankel Institute fellow Gal Levy discussed this burgeoning of Mizrahi identity in the US, exploring how and why it developed and what it means for the evolution of Jewish identity in America.


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Gal Levy, "What kind of diversity are we?": Mizrahiut from the Occident

Like most Jews living in Muslim lands, the Jews of Algeria had over the centuries built a vibrant culture, with homegrown traditions, institutions, and religious practices. Tying it all together was the Algerian Jewish community’s unique dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which rendered Arabic in Hebrew script–much like Yiddish, a German dialect written in Hebrew, spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe.

For centuries, the Algerian dialect of Judeo-Arabic was spoken and written by Jews as an everyday language, and also had some liturgical function. But starting around the 1860s, Judeo-Arabic began to be used by Jews throughout the Muslim world for writing and commenting about the modern world of ideas and politics.


In this episode of Frankely Judaic, historian Avner Ofrath, a lecturer in modern history at the University of Bremen, in Germany,  and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, explores the rise and fall of Judeo-Arabic political writing, delving into what drove the phenomenon, the impact it had on Algerian-Jewish life and culture, and why it matters today.


The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Avner Ofrath, "A Language of One’s Own: Writing politically in Judeo-Arabic, c. 1860-1914"

Since the earliest years of the modern state of Israel, Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, known as Mizrahim, have had to fight for equal rights and opportunities. Mizrahi Jews were looked down upon by the Zionist establishment as primitive–in many ways the very opposite of the image of the New, Western-style Jew that the establishment hoped to foster.

And so, Mizrahi activists have for decades struggled to be recognized as full and equal members of Israeli society.

But often lost among the larger struggle are the voices and experiences of Mizrahi women, who fought not only for Mizrahi rights but also for the rights of Mizrahi women to prosper and determine the course of their own lives.

This episode of Frankely Judaic features Yali Hashash, a social historian and head of the gender and criminology program at Or Yehuda College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Hashash’s book, Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism, explores the lives of Mizrahi women throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and culture as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Yali Hashash, "Whose Daughter Are You?: Ways of Thinking about Mizrahi Feminism"

2023-24 Frankel Institute "Jewish Visual Cultures"
Today's Guest: Deborah Dash Moore
Project Title: “Camera as Passport”

During the 1930s, ‘40, and ‘50s, throughout the great depression and into the post-WWII era, photographers who were members of the NY Photo League, many of whom were Jews, documented working-class street life in New York City. And without quite realizing it at the time, they pioneered a new form of photography.

In this episode, University of Michigan historian and Jewish Studies scholar Deborah Dash Moore tells the stories of these photographers, whom she chronicled in her latest book, Walker in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-century New York. The episode contains rich descriptions of photographs by Sol Libsohn, Dan Weiner, N.J. Jaffee, and other prominent Jewish members of the New York Photo League, whose self-imposed mission was to capture and ennoble the lives of working-class New Yorkers.

The 2023-24 Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, led by co-head fellows Deborah Dash Moore and Richard I. Cohen includes twelve scholars from four countries who are exploring various aspects of Jewish visual imagination. This exploration encompasses different periods and regions of the world and touches on interactions among the written word, sound, and image.

Deborah Dash Moore - Camera as a Passport

The rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic agenda during the early 1930s was the beginning of the darkest era of modern Jewish history. For obvious reasons, we tend to not make jokes about it. And yet, at the time, some Jewish writers and artists, including photographers, did exactly that.

In this episode, Louis Kaplan, a professor of visual studies and art history at the University of Toronto, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the lives and work of four Jewish photographers–Roman Vishniac, Erwin Blumfeld, Grete Stern, and John Heartfield–who use visual wit, irony, and satire to create photos that resisted and satirized the antisemitic bluster and menace of the Nazi regime.

Louis Kaplan, Jewish Photographic Humor in Dark Times: Visual First Responders to the Third Reich

From Gold Mountain to Tinseltown: Ethnic Identity in California’s Architectural Vernacular

It’s well known that millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe immigrated across the Atlantic to the United States, settling mostly in New York and other large cities. But some Jewish immigrants crossed the Pacific and settled on the West Coast of the United States, in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In this episode, we explore the research of Zoya Blumberg-Kraus, an independent scholar and fellow at the Frankle Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, which looks at how West Coast Jewish communities used architecture to express their identities as both fully American while also retaining vestiges of their Jewish origins.

Zoya Brumberg-Kraus, "Ethnic Identity in California’s Architectural Vernacular"

This mix combines acknowledging Gd’s all-knowing nature, with a traditional Passover song that enumerates fundamental aspects of Jewish faith. The pairing underscores a shared reverence for divine wisdom and the mysteries of faith.

Katonda Oyo Nalimana x Echad Mi Yodea

Celebrates brotherhood and unity within the Jewish community. It’s a joyful recognition of the beauty of people coming together in harmony.

Hinei Ma Tov

The history of European fashion typically focuses on singular, Christian European geniuses who conjured bold designs and created cutting-edge garments. But in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa played important roles in shaping European tastes in fashion.

In this episode, Devi Mays, an associate professor of Judaic Studies and history at the University of Michigan, and Julia Phillips Cohen, an associate professor of Jewish Studies and history at Vanderbilt University, tell the story of the rise and fall of the Babanis, an Ottoman Jewish family with origins in Istanbul, Tunis, and Algiers, who built a fashion house that counted scored of prominent celebrities and socialites among its clients

Julia Cohen & Devi Mays, "Global Threads: An Alternative History of Fin-de-Siecle Parisian Fashion"

In this episode, Debora Kantor, a lecturer at the National University of San Martin, Buenos 

Aires, discusses her research on the representation of Jews and Jewishness in Argentine modern and contemporary cinema. She delves into her specific project on Argentine nonfiction films about Israel, examining how these films reflect both collective and personal understandings of Jewish identity. The discussion includes her analysis of autobiographical turns in contemporary Argentine cinema and the transformation of Jewish portrayals in this context. Cantor highlights significant films and directors, illustrating how they address themes such as the imagination of Israel, the intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust, and the depiction of Jewish spaces in Buenos Aires. She provides detailed insights into specific films like Nicolás Abruj's 'Us, Them and Me', Ivo Eichenbaum's 'The Automatic Part', and Flora Resnick's 'Peromaisk', among others, elaborating on their thematic exploration of political utopia, left-wing melancholia, and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Jewish diasporic identity.


The music used in this episode, "Moisesville", by Argentine Jewish musician Jevel Katz, is the name of one of the most important Jewish agricultural colonies settled by the Jewish Colonization Association in Argentina and his music is very relevant to the cultural heritage of Argentine Jews.

Debora Kantor, "Examining Jewish Identity in Argentine Cinema: Nonfiction Films on Israel"

A Jewish Studies podcast series featuring the research of Frankel Institute fellows at the University of Michigan.

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