Forthcoming

Jewish Africa: Portraits in Film and Photography

Peter Decherney — Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Chair in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania.

Jewish communities are growing in nearly every country in Africa — some with lost-tribe narratives, others with recent converts. Filmmaker, photographer, and Penn professor Peter Decherney has been chronicling these communities in a series of award-winning films and a new photography book, Endless Exodus: The Jewish Experience in Ethiopia (Gefen). He will share photographic and film portraits of African Jewish life across Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Morocco, and discuss his approach to partnering with African Jewish communities to amplify often little-known stories.

Director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute. Decherney’s films include The Days Between, The Cave Synagogue, Dreaming of Jerusalem (Discovery+), and Postigo Express. A former U.S. State Department Arts Envoy.

Format Public talk; informal conversation; book signing.

The Izhbitzer Tradition

J. H. (Yossi) Chajes — Sir Isaac Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought, University of Haifa.

Professor J. H. Yossi Chajes, one of the world’s leading authorities on the history and legacy of Jewish mysticism, brings the Izhbitzer tradition to life in a lecture-performance with guitar. Founded by Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica in nineteenth-century Poland and preserved in his Mei ha-Shiloḥa, the tradition is among the boldest and most psychologically searching currents of Hasidic thought. Its torahs probe freedom and destiny, divine will and human desire, religious certainty and moral ambiguity, often refusing easy piety in favor of a more unsettling encounter with God, self, and sacred text.

With Mei ha-Shiloḥa in hand, Chajes invites audiences to hear these teachings not only as ideas, but as living words: sung, spoken, questioned, and felt.

Chajes (Ph.D., Yale 1999) holds the Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair in Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa. His research centers on the intersection of Kabbalah, magic, and science in Jewish cultural history; he has written on spirit possession and exorcism, egodocuments, women’s religiosity, Jewish attitudes toward magic, and the visualization of knowledge. His 2022 book, The Kabbalistic Tree, has been called “a monumental achievement that will be valuable to scholars and general readers interested in Judaism, religion, and art history.” For over a decade he has directed the Ilanot Project, an unprecedented attempt to research the history of kabbalistic diagrams; with the University of Göttingen he is building Maps of God, a critical-edition platform for kabbalistic trees online.

Background Chajes’s 2023 Sitomer Lecture →

Italy 2027 — Rome, Venice, Florence, Padua

Led by the Director; co-faculty to be announced.

JWST 110 returns in Spring 2027 with a semester course on the Jews of Italy — tracking the intertwined histories of Rome, Venice, Florence, and Padua, from the ancient Roman community to the cosmopolitan Venetian ghetto, Florentine humanism, and Padua’s university and rabbinic networks. Travel to the four cities during Spring Break, with student support drawn from the Grinspan Travel Fund.

See also Travel.

A Mediterranean Jewish Table — Foodways, Diaspora, Practice

Hanna Geller ’97 — Building Feasts; London-based cook, recipe writer, and host.

Hanna Geller returns to Vassar — a member of the Class of 1997 — for a day on Jewish foodways across the Mediterranean — the long arc that runs from the spice routes of the Sephardic dispersion through Italy, the Maghreb, and the Levant, and into the contemporary London kitchens where those traditions now reassemble. An architect by training who founded Building Feasts after two decades in design, Geller has built her practice around the proposition that a table is a structure — planned, layered, made to hold people together — and her cooking carries the diversity of London’s neighbourhood markets into recipes that are at once historically literate and pragmatic for a cook with four children at home. She hosts a Central London supper club and cookery school, writes the long-running Building Feasts blog, and has hosted London book launches for Helen Goh, Meike Peters, and Rupy Aujla, among others.

The format moves across the day: a midday seminar on Jewish foodways and the historiography of diaspora cooking; an afternoon hands-on demonstration; an evening Mediterranean Jewish supper, prepared with students, drawn from the Western Sephardic, Italian, and North African repertoires the Program has been studying through its liturgy and travel work. Mezze, slow-cooked stews, and the breads and sweets that anchor a Shabbat or festival meal in the four-city Sephardic world.

Format Open seminar; demonstration; ticketed evening supper with limited seating, with priority to students in JWST courses.

See also The Western Sephardi Liturgy · Travel.

Online buildingfeasts.com · @buildingfeasts

Religious Liberty & Constitutional Law

Zalman Rothschild — Cardozo Law; 2026 Fishman Family Visiting Scholar.

By unanimous request of the students who attended his Fishman Lecture in April 2026, Professor Rothschild returns to Vassar for sustained seminars on religious liberty and constitutional law — investigating internal matters in the Israeli and American legal landscape, and comparing the discontents and strains on legal systems in the context of burgeoning autonomies that are — as yet — still democracies.

Background Rothschild’s 2026 Fishman Lecture →