Chira Wins NEH Collaborative Grant

Congratulations to Dr. Adriana Chira, Associate Professor of History, on receiving a Collaborative Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project “Value, Self-Worth, and the Market in the Black Spanish Caribbean in the Age of Slavery.” Dr. Pablo F. Gómez, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is the co-leader of the project. The more than $170,000 award will support the preparation of a co-authored book on Black negotiation of bodily value in the Spanish Caribbean and its economic and political implications from 1680 to 1790. Chira’s first book, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP, 2022), recently received the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from Association for Caribbean Historians.

Lipstadt Addresses Antisemitism and Jewish Traditions in NY Times

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, recently published an op-ed in The New York Times. Titled “Want to Fight Antisemitism? Embrace Jewish Traditions,” the piece endorses combating antisemitism through an embrace of core tenets of Judaism itself, including (as Lipstadt writes) “its values, its moral teachings, its pursuit of justice.” Ambassador Lipstadt advances this argument in her role as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism and in the midst of a surge in antisemitic violence across the globe. Read an excerpt from Tthe New York Times article below, along with the full piece here.

“Combating antisemitism requires a shift in perspective, I explained. It must sprout from a positive place. We must know what we are protecting from assault. We must be motivated far more by our love for the insights, wisdom and joy embedded in Jewish culture than by the fight against those who harbor an insane hatred of it.”