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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

  • Examples of Safrut from the Penn Libraries Manuscript Collections

    Tuesday Oct. 15, 2019

    A Sofer is a Jewish ritual scribe, and Safrut is the ritual writing penned by a Sofer. Ritual writing follows a strict set of rules, and very small details can disqualify the item from ritual use. A misspelled word, certain misshapen letters, disorderliness, and even beginning certain columns with the wrong word can sometimes disqualify an entire scroll. Disqualified Torah scroll fragments, for example, are permitted for study purposes only, but not for ritual contexts.

  • Why Yahuda? Why the forum? Why in a Wissenschaft issue? A conversation between Michal Friedman and Allyson Gonzalez

    Jewish Quarterly Review

    Monday Oct. 14, 2019

    Michal Friedman and Allyson Gonzalez ask the history of Wissenschaft des Judentums to embrace to a fascinating and influential player whose legacy has, until now, been resigned to the periphery: A. S. Yahuda.