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Summer School for Graduate Students in Jewish Studies

Applications are now open for the annual Summer School program, which will take place in Philadelphia, June 28–July 2, 2020. The theme is Troublemakers: Rebels, Radicals, and Rascals in Jewish History and Culture. Click for more details.
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A Center for Scholarship

A residential fellowship program supports innovative, interdisciplinary research into all aspects of Jewish history, thought, and culture, structured around an annual theme.
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A Global Hub

At the Center's core is a residential fellowship program that supports research into all aspects of Jewish history, society, thought, & culture. The fellowship is built around an annual theme designed to stimulate the best new thinking across discipline.
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A Library

The Library at the Katz Center maintains extraordinary rare book and Judaica holdings, and its visionary librarians are on the forefront of open-access, digital, and collaborative efforts.
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A Publishing Engine

From the flagship journal the Jewish Quarterly Review to the Jewish Culture and Contexts book series published with the University of Pennsylvania Press, the Center supports the publication of outstanding scholarship.
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Twenty-First Century Learning

Promoting learning for its own sake, the Center partners with a variety of institutions and uses digital media to make the best scholarship available and meaningful beyond the academy.
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A Field Builder

Through mentorship, graduate programs, and support for early-career scholars, the Center is committed to transmitting scholarship across generations and securing a solid foundation for the future of Judaic studies.
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Coming Up

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Fellowship Theme

The Jewish Home: Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial, and the Lived-In

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The 2019–20 fellowship program takes as its focus the study of the home, and seeks to advance research that will shed light on this most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life. The fellowship will support scholarship on the Jewish home across many different thresholds and look back out from the home into the broader world.

Fellowship Info

Blog

  • Medieval Frenemies: Jewish and Christian Martyrs Had a Lot in Common

    Jewish Quarterly Review

    Wednesday Jan. 15, 2020

    "Do not be saddened or troubled, good sister. Your brother will die today as a good Jew." These are the words reportedly spoken by a fourteenth-century mendicant friar, just before taking his own life. He had declared his conversion to Judaism, and despite his sister’s tearful entreaties, he chose a public and violent death over forcible return to his order. One Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, whose dramatic and literally iconoclastic antics made him the subject of at least three contemporary reports, did the same.

  • Beyond the Politics of Anti-Semitism

    Monday Jan. 6, 2020

    During the holiday of Hanukkah this year, when Jews were celebrating a moment of triumph over those who would eliminate them, there was an alarming rash of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area. It is hard not to situate such episodes within a larger surge of anti-Semitic attacks and harassment observed nationally and internationally in recent years.