The Divergence of Judaism and Islam: Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil

List of Contributors

Contributors Dalit Atrakchi is a PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her dissertation deals with the status of women in Moroccan politics between 1956 and 2000. In 2010 she conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research in Morocco. Y. Michal Bodemann (PhD, Brandeis University) is professor of sociology and affiliated with the Joint Initiative of German and European Studies at the University of Toronto. At present, his areas of interest and teaching include race and ethnic relations, classical sociological theory, qualitative methods, Jewish studies, and especially German-Jewish relations and memory. He has published numerous articles and books on Jews in Germany. His book Gedächnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung (Theater of memory: The Jewish community and its German invention) was listed as one of the ten best nonfiction books in Germany in June 1996. His most recent monograph is A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (2004). He is the co-editor of Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos and Citizenship and Immigrant Incorporation: Comparative Perspectives on Western Europe and North America (with Gökçe Yurdakul, 2006 and 2007). His most recent edited book is New German Jewry and the European Context (2008). Hanita Brand (PhD, Columbia University) of blessed memory, who passed away in April 2011, wrote her dissertation on the semiotics of drama and theater: Western and Middle Eastern plays side by side. She researched both Arabic and Hebrew culture and literature from a theoretical perspective. Until 1999, she taught modern Hebrew literature, culture , and language as well as Middle Eastern literature at the University 330 · Contributors of Pennsylvania. Subsequently Dr. Brand taught modern Arabic culture and literature at Bar-Ilan University. She has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Edebiyat, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Nashim. She coauthored Adwaa daniyah, a book for teachers of Arabic literature in Israel (2002). Julia Phillips Cohen (PhD, Stanford) is assistant professor in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of History at Vanderbilt University . Her current project focuses on the imperial loyalties and local identities of Ottoman Jews in urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean. Her publications include “Conceptions rivales du patriotism ottoman: les célébrations juives de 1892,” in Itinéraires Sépharades, ed. Esther Benbassa (2010), “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100 (Summer 2010) (with Sarah Abrevaya Stein), and several entries on late Ottoman JudeoSpanish print culture in The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, ed. Norman A. Stillman (2010). Alanna E. Cooper (PhD, Boston University) is a cultural anthropologist. She has held a senior fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, a Posen Fellowship in the Study of Cultural Judaism at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a research fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. Her work has also been supported by grants from the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture , and the United States National Security Education Program. She has conducted ethnographic research among Bukharan Jews in Uzbekistan, New York, and Israel and has published on their contemporary situation as well as on their history. Her forthcoming book, Bukharan Jews and the Global Jewish Diaspora, will be published by Indiana University Press. Her articles on this topic include “Reconsidering the Tale of Yosef Maman and the Bukharan Jewish Diaspora,” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2004); “Looking Out for One’s Own Identity: Central Asian Jews in the Wake of Communism ,” in New Jewish Identities, ed. Zvi Gitelman, (2003); “Feasting, Memorializing, Praying, and Remaining Jews in the Soviet Union: The Case of the Bukharan Jews,” in Jewish Life after the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (2002); and “Rituals in Flux: Courtship and Marriage among Bukharan Contributors · 331 Jews” in Bukharan Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. Ingeborg Baldauf, Moshe Gammer, and Thomas Loy (2008). Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman (PhD, UCLA) is chair of the Department of History , Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. She is also editor of Hamizrah Hehadash, journal of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI). Eraqi Klorman serves on the MEISAI board and on several academic committees. Her fields of research include history and culture of the Jews in the Muslim world, especially in Yemen; Mizrahi Jews in Palestine and in Israel; messianism-ideology and movements...