Join the Norman E. Alexander Library on Zoom on Thursday, December 5, at noon for Brawls, Sickbeds, and Barnard: The Annual Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections with Prof. Rowan Dorin of Stanford University, Dr. Edward Loss of University of Bologna, Dr. Pavel Sládek of Charles University, Dr. Cynthia Francis Gensheimer, and Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, Michelle Margolis.
This event features Inquisition documents from Bologna, a personal narrative shedding light on the Jews of Prague, and a local story about a late nineteenth-century attempt to create scholarships for young Jewish women at the newly established Barnard College.
The program will include the following talks:
Blood and Money: Jews and Justice in the Archives of a Late Medieval Italian City (Rowan Dorin, Stanford University)
The story of illness and recovery of Isaac Poppers of Prague (1772) from a previously unknown manuscript (Pavel Sládek, Charles University, Prague)
"To raise the standard of Jewish women:" 1890s Scholarships for Jews at Barnard? (Cynthia Francis Gensheimer, Independent Scholar)
Rowan Dorin is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, where he is also Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and core faculty of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. His recent book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton UP, 2023), was awarded the American Academy of Jewish Research's Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish Studies.
Edward Loss is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medieval Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Bologna, where his research focuses on the institutional and archival history of late medieval Bologna.
Pavel Sládek is an associate professor in the Hebrew and Jewish studies program at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. His research interests and publication topics include sixteenth-century rabbinic literature, the history of Jewish book culture, and practices of reading in the early modern period. He has held fellowships at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies and at Houghton Library of Harvard University. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Czech Science Foundation and the Oxford Bibliographical Society. He is a co-founder of the Prague Centre for Jewish Studies.
Cynthia Francis Gensheimer is a PhD economist who has worked at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C., and taught economics at Vassar College. As vice president of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, she decided to look to the past to try to understand how to motivate Jews to be more philanthropic. Drawn in this way to the study of American Jewish history, she has focused on the religious, charitable, and educational lives of 19th century Jewish women. She is now writing a book about the Jews who attended the Seven Sisters colleges at the turn of the twentieth century.
Michelle Margolis is responsible for developing the current library collections, both rare and general, as well as supporting research in Judaic and Israel Studies from around the world and in all languages. Ms. Margolis is also available to help with any level of questions in research of Judaic or Israel studies. Michelle represents the library to students and faculty. Columbia Libraries' Judaica collection includes materials from the 10th to the 21st centuries, and represents Jews from across the globe. Columbia's Judaica manuscript collection is the third largest in the United States A 2012 exhibition highlighted some of the most important manuscripts in the collection, and an exhibition in 2016 displayed highlights from Columbia’s Yiddish collection. More information about Judaica in the libraries, including subject specific guides to the collection, can be found here.