Jews and Health: Gems from the Archives

Inspired by this year’s theme of Jews and Health, I’ve spent the summer combing through the Katz Center’s archives looking for hidden gems on the subject to share on social media. As you might imagine, I found a quite a wide variety of voices and topics coming from some exciting scholars. Please find a wide selection below, mostly drawn from our blog, but if you scroll to the end of the list you’ll find a taped lecture on a fascinating judeo-arabic medieval medical miscellany—this one from fifteenth-century Sicily. Enjoy learning about anything from the impact of housing on Jewish public health to recipes for fighting demons and wrapping dumplings.

From the Blog

A forum series on “Pandemic and Plague” from a range of perspectives:

• Echoes from the Jewish Past (Susan L. Einbinder, Joshua Teplitsky, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Rhona Seidelman)
• Theological and Philosophical Reflections (Tamar Ross, Martin Kavka, Randi Rashkover, Aryeh Cohen, Laura Levitt, Zachary Braiterman)
• Literary Encounters (Laurence Roth, Lital Levy, Hana Wirth-Nesher, Sunny Yudkoff, Avner Holzman)

The Haredi Moment: An Online Forum (David Myers, Ayala Fader, Samuel Heilman, Shaul Magid)

Jewish Affordable Housing Projects in Late Tsarist Russia: Urban Housing, Public Health, and Communal Responsibility (Cecile Kuznitz)

Transforming Jewish “Science” (Annette Yoshiko Reed)

Q&A: Katz Center Fellow Julia Watts Belser on the Talmud, Disability Studies, and Environmental Humanities

Aviva Ben-Ur’s “Kabbalistic Pharmacopeia”

Stews, Soaps, Spells, and Salves: On the Jewish Recipe (Natalie Dohrmann, Marina Rustow, Lennart Lehmhaus, Noam Sienna, Sasha Stern, Agata Paluch, Andrea Gondos, Anna Shternshis)

From our YouTube channel

Tales of Three Texts, a Lecture by Y. Tzvi Langermann on UPenn Ms Codex 1649

(and a related blog post...Object of Desire)