Sponsored by
The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies
The Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Center for Persian Studies
University of Maryland, College Park
and
The Hebraic Section and Near East Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress
EVENT:
Beginning with the Achaemenid period and lasting beyond the emigration of a portion of Iran’s Jewish population to the State of Israel in 1950s, Jews have had a complex interaction with the Persian state and culture. The Jews of Iran comprise not only one the oldest populations of Jews in the world, but also one of the most ancient threads in the multifarious fabric of the ancient Iranian community. While recent events in the Middle East have raised the relationship of Jews and Israel to the Islamic Republic in the news as fodder for political scientists and pundits, the rich history of intertwined Jewish and Persian cultures and of Muslim and Jewish Iranians has received little, if any, attention from scholars and other investigators. In deed, it remains one of the enigmas in both Jewish and Iranian Studies that the Jews of Iran stand, still, as one of least studied, least known subcultures of world Jewry.
This interdisciplinary conference encourages investigations not only with an eye on contemporary socio-political dynamics, but further, and more importantly, with the aim gradually to fill some of the lingering gaps in our knowledge about Iranian Jewry, ultimately to enrich both fields of Iranian and Jewish studies. In this spirit, the conference welcomes a broad range of investigations into previously unexamined or under-explored historical and cultural contributions of Iranian Jews to Persian and/or Jewish cultures. These might include, but are not be limited to, inquiries pertaining to the concept of religious impurity (nejāsat) and forced or voluntary conversion; considerations of the role of Iranian Jews in 20th-century Iran; explorations of contemporary Iran-Israel relations; and investigations into what it has meant to be Jewish-Iranian before 1948 and after inside and outside Iran.
Speakers:
Shaul Shaked, Yakov Elman, Miriam Macuch, Daniel Tsadik, Hadieh Sahim, Nahid Pirnazar, David Menashri, Trita Parsi, Daniel Levy, Izra Malakov, Parvaneh Pourshariati, Maria Subtelny, Vera Moreen, Peggy Pearlstein, Herad Dinavari, Judith Goldstein, Shalom Sabar, Evan Rapport, Orly Rahimiyan, Jaleh Pirnazar,
Monday, November 3rd Sessions will be held at The Library of Congress, James Madison Building, Mumford Room (6th Floor)
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