Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Contributors

ix Contributors Edna Aizenberg is professor emeritus of Hispanic studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. One of the founders of Latin American Jewish studies in the United States and a world-renowned Borges scholar, she is copresident of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). She is also the author of pioneering studies on literary Sephardism in Latin America. Her numerous books include Borges, the Aleph Weaver (1984); Borges el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos: del hebraísmo al poscolonialismo (1997); Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts (1990); Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff’s “Los gauchos judios” (2000); and Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine Jewish Writers (2002). Monique R. Balbuena is associate professor of literature in the Honors College at the University of Oregon. From 2006 to 2011 she served as the secretary of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). She was a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University and a Frankel Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan . Balbuena sits on the editorial boards of the Journal for Jewish Identities, the Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry, the Levantine Review, and the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, which she joined as the modern literature editor. Balbuena is also the author of Poe e Rosa à luz da Cabala (1994) and Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (2012). Margalit Bejarano teaches history in the Department of Romance and Latin American Studies at Hebrew University and is the academic director of the Divisions of Latin America, Spain, and Portugal and the former director of the x  Contributors Oral History Division of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and a Fellow of the Liwerant Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her major fields of research are Sephardic communities in Latin America and the history of the Jews in Cuba and of the Cuban and Latin American Jews in Miami. Her publications include La comunidad hebrea de Cuba: la memoria y la historia and La historia del buque San Luis: La perspectiva cubana. Susana Brauner teaches twentieth-century world history and Latin American history in the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE) and is researcher and teacher of the MA Diversity Culture Studies in the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero (UNTRF). Her numerous publications on Syrian Jews and their descendants in Argentina include Los judíos de Alepo en Argentina and Ortodoxia religiosa and pragmatismo político: los judíos de orígen sirio. Judith R. Cohen teaches ethnomusicology and medieval music at York University , Toronto, and is the general editor of the Alan Lomax Spanish Recordings and the first recipient of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center. She is author of many articles on Sephardic music and on Crypto-Jewish traditions in Portugal and is also a singer, with several CDs of traditional Sephardic and related music. Jane Gerber is professor of history and director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many publications include Sephardic Studies in the University (1995), The Jews of Spain (National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Studies, 1993), Jewish Society in Fez 1450–1700 (1980), The Jews in the Caribbean (2013) and the forthcoming Cities of Splendor in the Shaping of Sephardic Jewry. Gerber was formerly the president of the Association for Jewish Studies and co-chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History in New York. She heads the advisory board of the American Sephardi Federation. Henry A. Green is the former director of Judaic and Sephardic studies at the University of Miami, Florida. He has served as a visiting fellow at Oxford University , the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Toronto and has published extensively on Israel and American Jewry. Currently, he is professor of Contributors  xi religious studies at the University of Miami and director of Sephardic Voices, an international effort dedicated to collecting testimonies of Jewish refugees from Arab and Islamic lands. Yael Halevi-Wise is an associate professor of English and Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal. She is the author of Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (2003) and...