Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants Book Roundtable
Tuesday February 28th
1-3pm (EST) on Zoom [Recording can be found at the bottom of this page]
Roundtable moderated by Jo Labanyi (New York University). Featuring the co-editors of the book, Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor along with the following presenters: Alfons Aragoneses, Devin E. Naar , Rita Ender, Michal Rose Friedman, Charles A. McDonald, Uluç Özüyener, and Victor Silverman. Bios for all are provided below.
More information about the book, which is available for purchase, can be found here.
Moderator Bios:
Jo Labanyi is Professor Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, having previously taught in the UK. She is the founder of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and the Journal of Romance Studies, and is General Editor of the Berghahn Books series Remapping Cultural History. She was elected to the British Academy in 2005. A specialist in the cultural history of modern Spain, she is currently completing A Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War for Reaktion Books and a co-authored oral history of cinema-going in 1940s and 1950s Spain.
Coeditor Bios:
Dalia Kandiyoti is Professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, and the author of The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press 2020), Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures (Dartmouth College/University Press of New England 2009), and numerous articles on contemporary Sephardi, Latinx, and migration/ diaspora literatures. With Rina Benmayor, she collected oral histories of Sephardi descendants applying for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship (Benmayor and Kandiyoti, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (18:2020)
Rina Benmayor is Professor Emerita at California State University Monterey Bay. She has authored Romances judeo-españoles de Oriente [Eastern Judeo-Spanish Ballads] (Gredos 1979) and coauthored and coedited Latino Cultural Citizenship (Beacon 1997); Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke 2001); and Memory, Subjectivities, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain (Palgrave 2016). With Dalia Kandiyoti, she collected oral histories of Sephardi descendants applying for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship (Benmayor and Kandiyoti, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (18:2020). She is currently working on a collection of memoir stories about her Greek Sephardi families.
Presenter Bios:
Alfons Aragoneses lectures in legal history at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and is associate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History, Frankfurt/Main. He has recently been named as General Director of Memoria Democrática for Catalunya. He has written on French and Spanish private law, Francoist law, and memory laws. His recent research is on the links between memory, law, and collective identity in Spain. He coordinated the Database of Spanish Deportees to Nazi Concentration Camps and has assisted the Catalan government on legislative and public policies regarding remembrance projects.
Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. He is founder and chair of the Sephardic Studies Program. His book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, received the National Jewish Book Award and the Modern Greek Studies Association Award. His current project investigates the multifaceted experiences of Sephardic Jews regarding race, class, and politics in the United States.
Rita Ender graduated from Marmara University Law School in 2008. She has master’s degrees from Galatasaray University and Panthéon-Assas University (Paris II). As a lawyer, she does extensive work in the field of minority rights. Ender has written for a variety of newspapers and magazines in Turkey and is the author of five books, including İsmiyle Yaşamak [Living with This Name, 2016], Aile Yadigarları [Family Heirlooms, 2018], Madam Amati (2019), and Bir Avazda—Hamilelik Söyleşileri [All at Once—Pregnancy Interviews, 2021].
Michal Rose Friedman is the Jack Buncher Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She was postdoctoral fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (2015), and at the Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford (2016). She is coeditor of “Genealogies of Sepharad” a special issue of Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (2020) and a forum on Sephardi scholar Abraham Shalom Yahuda (Jewish Quarterly Review 2019).
Charles A. McDonald is a Scholar-in-Residence at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University and the Managing Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. He has PhD in anthropology and historical studies from the New School and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University, Rice University, and visiting research positions at universities and research centers in Madrid and Barcelona. He is currently working on a book about the return of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Spain.
Uluç Özüyener is the author of the memoir, Hayat Kaç Kere Başlar? [How Many Times Can Life Begin?] (Çatı 2013) and Paslı Anahtar [Rusty Key] (Büyükada 2018), a historical novel based on family stories. He is a member of a crypto-Jewish community called Sabbateans and the first to become a Spanish citizen. An IT professional living in the United States, he is the cofounder and president of the Society for Sabbatean Studies.
Victor Silverman is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker and historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at Pomona College. A scholar of US and international studies, he was the Fulbright/García Robles US Studies Chair at ITAM in Mexico City in 2022. He is currently writing a book titled, “The Three Voyages of the Benjoyas: Exile, Revolution, and Hope Across the Modern World,” about his Sephardic Jewish family, thrown upon the oceans of history by ethnic cleansing searches for justice and belonging in the new and old worlds.