McGill.CA / Jewish Studies מדעי היהדות

The Department of Jewish Studies is proud to present many exciting guest speakers and events throughout the year. For past events, please see the sidebar.

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Upcoming Events

"Jews on the Roman-Sasanian Frontier: The Politics of Loyalty"

Simcha Gross (University of Pennsylvania)


Late antiquity culminated in shocking episodes of violence both against and by Jews, accompanied by the spread of stories and accusations that would profoundly shape Jewish reputations among Christians and, in time, Muslims. This lecture examines these developments as part of a broader transformation in how communities came to be evaluated through the lens of loyalty. Situating this transformation within the longue durée of inter-imperial competition in the Near East, it traces how geopolitical rivalries made the presumed political allegiances of entire communities newly consequential and became deeply insinuated into everyday social relations within and between groups. Jews occupied a particularly prominent, though not unique, place in both the lived realities and imaginative constructions of these encounters. By examining the wider process through which loyalty became a means of evaluating and categorizing groups, the lecture argues that late-antique conflicts helped establish durable ways of interpreting communal difference.

Bio: Simcha Gross is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies Jews across the first millennium CE in their Roman, Persian, and Islamic contexts. His first book, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity, received the National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship and the AAJR’s Baron Book Prize. His next book, Communities, Empires, and Loyalty on the Roman-Sasanian Frontier, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in early 2027.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies and the School of Religious Studies.

"Translating Yiddish Joy: Re-Reading the Work of Sholem Aleichem"

Sunny Yudkoff (University of Wisconsin–Madison)


The following lecture examines the meaning of the Yiddish term nakhes. Translated most frequently as “parental joy,” the term comes to bear an alternative connotation in the work of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. As I will explore, for Sholem Aleichem the term bespeaks a restive concern for literary futurity. This lecture reads Sholem Aleichem’s monologue, “The Joy of Children” (“Nakhes fun kinder”), in conversation with two parodic versions of the text written by others. These readings will textualize a new understanding of joy in Yiddish.

Bio: Sunny S. Yudkoff is associate professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she currently holds the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professorship of Jewish Studies. Her first book, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing (Stanford University Press 2019) was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize for outstanding first book in Jewish studies. Her work has appeared in Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Comparative Literature, Literature and Medicine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her second monograph, On Yiddish Joy, from which the present lecture derives.

"'Subjects of the Country': Rethinking Jewish Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire"

Jessica Marglin (Harvard University)


This talk offers a new approach to the history of Jews’ citizenship in the Ottoman Empire. The standard narrative presumes that Ottoman Jews lacked citizenship before 1856, when their status as dhimmis (protected non-Muslim monotheists) was abolished. Many historians, both Jewish and Ottoman, thus follow the model of European Jewish historiography in framing the abolition of dhimmi status as a form of “emancipation.” Instead, Marglin argues that Jews did have a form of citizenship in the early modern Ottoman Empire. As subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, they bore the duties and privileges that signaled their legal belonging to the empire. Drawing on insights from historians of citizenship in early modern Europe, Marglin focuses on the history of Jewish immigrants from the Italian Peninsula in order to better understand how Ottoman and consular officials understood Jewish legal belonging in the Ottoman Empire. She shows that “European” Jews who integrated into local Jewish communities became, in effect, naturalized Ottoman subjects, even if they were sometimes granted consular protection under the Capitulations. In showing that Ottoman authorities considered Jews—both immigrants and locals—to be full subjects of the Empire, this talk concludes by calling for a new understanding of modern Ottoman Jewish citizenship as distinct from the emancipation offered to Jews in Europe.

Bio: Jessica Marglin is Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She earned her PhD from Princeton and her BA and MA from Harvard. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on law. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Jewish Studies, the Institute of Islamic Studies, and the Faculty of Law. With support from the Office of Provost and Executive Vice-President.

"The Ottoman World of Sports: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Shared Culture Sports Culture"

Murat C. Yıldız (Skidmore College)


How do we write a history of urban centers in the late Ottoman Empire in which we study Muslims, Jews, and Christians through a single frame? Focusing on his new book The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026), historian Murat C. Yıldız explores the creation of a shared sports culture among Turks, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews at the end of empire in the political center of the Ottoman Empire. The talk reconsiders the history of late Ottoman Istanbul and its lived urban space through a focus on the activities, spaces, and discourses of “the Ottoman world of sports.” Yıldız examines how gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, runners, coaches, teachers, journalists, and fans reconfigured communal boundaries and pursued a civic project that blended fitness, aesthetics, morality, and community.

Murat C. Yıldız is Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College. His book The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026) tells the story of the role played by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sports aficionados in the making of a shared sports culture in Istanbul during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He's an assistant editor of the Arab Studies Journal and an editorial board member of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

A joint program of the Department of Jewish Studies and the Institute of Islamic Studies.

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