Celebrating the Publication of Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World (Penn Press, 2025)
Zoom Webinar
Originating from the Katz Center’s 2018–19 fellowship year Jewish Life in Modern Islamic Contexts, the volume Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World was released in February. Volume editors Nancy E. Berg and Dina Danon welcome you to a webinar engaging the contributors—key voices in this vibrant and growing field of research—on the book’s central and intersecting themes.
Longing and Belonging investigates the lives of Jews among Muslims in the modern age, both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire and after its demise. Here, modern Jewish protagonists are revealed as active participants in an expansive Islamic civilization, reflecting a mutuality and cross-fertilization in the region that raises new lines of inquiry and offers enduring lessons for the world today.
This collection both foregrounds the experiences of Jewish communities that have long been relegated to the margins of historical and literary studies and, critically, uses these experiences to complicate prevailing narratives from both Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies. By following communities from the coffeeshops of Cairo to the villages of Yemen, from the local marriage market in Izmir to the global commerce of the Sassoons, readers gain intimate insight into a world that resists a simple understanding of the modern Islamic world and of the place of Jews within it. Just as much as the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience complicates prevailing paradigms in the study of Jewish modernity, so too does it enrich understandings of modernity across Muslim societies. The volume tells a story of longing, belonging, and longing to belong, of multiple affinities in a world that no longer exists.
Contributors: Esra Almas, Nancy E. Berg, Dina Danon, Keren Dotan, Annie Greene, Alma Rachel Heckman, Hadar Feldman Samet, Joseph Sassoon, Edwin Seroussi, Alon Tam, Alan Verskin, Mark Wagner
Longing and Belonging is a part of the Jewish Culture and Contexts series, which is published by Penn Press in collaboration with the Katz Center.
Featuring
Nancy E. Berg
Washington University St. Louis
Nancy E. Berg is professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches courses in Israeli literature, Hebrew, and Jewish and Middle Eastern studies. While much of her scholarship focuses on the literature of Iraqi Jews, she has also researched Israeli women’s writing, memory, and food.
Berg earned her PhD in Modern Hebrew and Arabic Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo.
Dina Danon
SUNY, Binghamton
Dina Danon is an assistant professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton University. While her teaching interests span the full range of Jewish history, she focuses on the Sephardi and Mizrahi communities of the Mediterranean world. Currently, she is researching the nature, function, and historical significance of the marriage marketplace in the Sephardi world during the late Ottoman period.
Danon received her PhD from Stanford University and was recently selected as one of six emerging scholars to participate in the Paula E. Hyman Mentorship Program of the Association for Jewish Studies.