Announcing the 2020–2021 Fellows
It is my pleasure to announce the Katz Center fellowship cohort for the 2020–21 academic year, tackling the theme of “America's Jewish Questions.”
New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Winter 2020
Update: this issue is free online without a subscription through June 30, 2020.
JQR 110.1 is now available, online* and in print.
In this issue:
Daniel Reifman uses semiotic theory to account for the fact that legal rationales play a relatively peripheral role in the construction of rabbinic legal discourse.
New Rare Judaica Acquisitions at the Penn Libraries!
The Library at the Katz Center is one of the world’s largest and richest resources on the history and culture of Jews. Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Arthur Kiron has recently announced the acquisition of a variety of new holdings, ranging from medieval Hebrew manuscript leaves re-used for binding Latin poetry to Holocaust-era texts belonging to Jewish refugees in Shanghai.
New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Fall 2019
JQR 109.4 is now available, online and in print.
Announcing The Jewish Philanthropy Research Initiative
In a newly published study that draws on the first comprehensive data set of US-based Jewish philanthropic organizations, Hanna Shaul Bar Nissim and Mathew Brookner show that such organizations gave more than $46 billion in grants in the period between 2000–2015. Beyond what it reveals about the amount of money American Jews invest in philanthropy, the data is full of yet-to-be-tapped insights into the nature of American Jewish life today, including the importance of foundations in setting the Jewish communal agenda.*
Alumni Awards
This awards season, scholars in the Katz Center’s network have much to brag about...
Alumni Books
Alumni of our fellowship program published a spate of books in 2018. Here is just a taste...
Janus-Faced January
It is with sadness that the Center says goodbye to four extraordinary fellows...
Katz Center Fellows Reach out through Community Partnerships
Last week, current fellow Chen Bram (Hebrew University) sat down at Penn Hillel with a group of students interested in multiculturalism in Israel. In a ninety-minute discussion he offered them a taste of the graduate course he teaches in Jerusalem on the city’s complex intergroup relations. Inviting the students to comment and raise concerns as he spoke, Bram joked that as an Israeli he is more comfortable with direct confrontation than passive silence.
