Northwestern Events Calendar

Feb
19
2021

Faculty Colloquium: What Does It Take to Return? Citizenship, Conversion, and Modern Jewish Spain

When: Friday, February 19, 2021
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM CT

Where: Online

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Spanish and Portuguese   (847) 491-8249

Group: Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Category: Academic

Description:

Lecture by Charles A McDonald, Sava Ranisavljevic Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

In this talk, Charles McDonald will discuss his  current book project, Return to Sepharad: Jews, Spain, and Europe’s Moral Order. The book is an ethnographic account of political projects that seek the return of Jews and Judaism to Spain more than five centuries after they were forced to convert to Christianity or be expelled. Some of these projects—like the 2015 Spanish “Law of Return” that offered citizenship to Sephardi descendants in the diaspora—have garnered global attention. Others—like the liberal Jewish congregations that are helping Spaniards “return” to Judaism as converts—are less well-known. The book asks what it takes to return to a place or a people, and how the bifurcated history of conversion and exile is worked out in the present by those who consider themselves its heirs. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with citizenship applicants, converts, and the authorities who evaluate their claims, Charles McDonald argues that these otherwise disparate and often incompatible projects have something in common: they are upending the very categories of belonging that “return”—as a mode of politics—promises to stabilize and reproduce. As the “return to Sepharad” continues to unfold, it is reconfiguring old debates about who counts as a Jew or a Spaniard and leaving new transnational collectives in its wake.

For more info please contact Charles A McDonald.

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