Program
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A Multi-Rooted Movement — Devin Naar on Sephardic Memory and Jewish Futures
What gets lost when Jewish history is told from a single root?
Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington, has spent two decades recovering the Ladino-speaking Jewish world that American institutional memory mostly left out. His scholarship draws on multi-rootedness, a concept describing communities that come from more than one lineage at once, rather than the familiar frame of a single homeland and a single dispersal. That idea offers a different starting point than the usual diaspora and homeland narrative, one shaped by Mediterranean Jewish socialism, Sephardic illegibility within American racial categories, and a long tradition of solidarity built sideways rather than upward.
Join Andy Kahn and Devin Naar for a conversation about Sephardic memory, Ashkenormativity in Jewish left spaces, and what new Jewish institutions can look like when they draw on more than one root.
This is a recorded, virtual conversation. Registrants will receive the Zoom link ahead of the event.
Devin Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He founded and chairs the UW Sephardic Studies Program, which has built one of the largest collections of Ladino source materials in the country, drawn largely from the Seattle Sephardic community.
His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016 and won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material. Naar has written for The Washington Post, Jewish Currents, the Jewish Review of Books, and Tablet, and his work centers Sephardic and Ladino-speaking Jewish history as a challenge to Ashkenazi-default narratives of Jewish memory and community. He is descended from Sephardic Jews from Salonica.
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