Description:

"Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy – A Conversation with Author Yaron Ayalon and Orit Bashkin"

Yaron Ayalon, Associate Professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Ayalon is a historian of Sephardic Jews, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East, and the author of Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy (Brill, 2024) and Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (Cambridge, 2014) and over 20 articles. He earned his BA from Tel Aviv University in 2002 and his PhD from Princeton University in 2009. 

Orit Bashkin, Mabel Greene Myers Professor in The Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Bashkin received her Ph.D. from Princeton University (2004), and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University.  Her publications deal with Iraqi history, the history of Middle Eastern and Iraqi Jews, modern Arab cultural revival movements, and the connections between history, memory and literature. Her current research project is a cultural history of Jewish life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. She is the author of the books: Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (2017); New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012); and The Other Iraq – Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (2009), all with Stanford University Press. She is the coeditor of the volumes: Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, with Joshua Levinson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, and others (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Co-hosted with The Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program Buffett Institute for Global Affairs