Dr. Graizbord is the Shirley Curson Professor of Judaic Studies and Director of the UofA's Arizona Center for Judaic Studies. A historian of early modern and modern Jewish identities, Dr. Graizbord's research focuses mostly on the Western Sephardi Diaspora of the seventeenth century. In particular, Dr. Graizbord's writing approaches questions of religious, social, and political self-definition as these questions shaped the lives of so-called "New Christians" or "conversos" from the Iberian Peninsula who became Jews in exile. He has also written about Judeophobia and the culture of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; marginality and dissidence in Jewish and Ibero-Catholic societies of the seventeenth century; ethnicity and religion among Sephardim from medieval times to the 1700s; and converso trading networks in the Atlantic. More recently, Graizbord published The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish National Identity, and Israel, which probes the place of Zionism in the lives of American-Jewish "Millennials." Graizbord's third book, Early Modern Jewish Civilization: Unity and Diversity in a Diasporic Society, is forthcoming from Routledge.
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Currently Teaching
RELI 332 – The Holocaust: Witnesses and Representations
This course explores Holocaust memory and representation in Europe, Israel and the United States through various media and genres from diaries, memoirs and oral testimonies to Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, second generation graphic novels and film to memorial gardens and resistance monuments, archives and museums. We engage with some of the most fundamental questions of memory and Holocaust trauma from multiple perspectives and contexts. Is it possible to communicate the horrors of the concentration camp? Who has the right to speak about the Holocaust? How does "Jewish" memory of the Holocaust shape our understanding of the history of Nazism, genocide, World War II and its aftermath? In what ways, has Holocaust memory become associated with movements for historical justice and human rights, in particular, in the United States?
This course explores Holocaust memory and representation in Europe, Israel and the United States through various media and genres from diaries, memoirs and oral testimonies to Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, second generation graphic novels and film to memorial gardens and resistance monuments, archives and museums. We engage with some of the most fundamental questions of memory and Holocaust trauma from multiple perspectives and contexts. Is it possible to communicate the horrors of the concentration camp? Who has the right to speak about the Holocaust? How does "Jewish" memory of the Holocaust shape our understanding of the history of Nazism, genocide, World War II and its aftermath? In what ways, has Holocaust memory become associated with movements for historical justice and human rights, in particular, in the United States?
This course explores Holocaust memory and representation in Europe, Israel and the United States through various media and genres from diaries, memoirs and oral testimonies to Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, second generation graphic novels and film to memorial gardens and resistance monuments, archives and museums. We engage with some of the most fundamental questions of memory and Holocaust trauma from multiple perspectives and contexts. Is it possible to communicate the horrors of the concentration camp? Who has the right to speak about the Holocaust? How does "Jewish" memory of the Holocaust shape our understanding of the history of Nazism, genocide, World War II and its aftermath? In what ways, has Holocaust memory become associated with movements for historical justice and human rights, in particular, in the United States?
RELI 387 – The History of Anti-Semitism
This course examines various definitions of anti-Semitism and traces the history of anti-Semitism (or "anti-Judaism") from the earliest arguments between Christianizing Jews and Judaizing Christians to the birth of Islam, through the period of Muslim expansion and the Crusades, to the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and the Holocaust. It looks at the differences among various types of Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, and Jewish anti-Semitism, and concludes with a look at contemporary forms of anti-Semitism.
This course examines various definitions of anti-Semitism and traces the history of anti-Semitism (or "anti-Judaism") from the earliest arguments between Christianizing Jews and Judaizing Christians to the birth of Islam, through the period of Muslim expansion and the Crusades, to the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and the Holocaust. It looks at the differences among various types of Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, and Jewish anti-Semitism, and concludes with a look at contemporary forms of anti-Semitism.
This course examines various definitions of anti-Semitism and traces the history of anti-Semitism (or "anti-Judaism") from the earliest arguments between Christianizing Jews and Judaizing Christians to the birth of Islam, through the period of Muslim expansion and the Crusades, to the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and the Holocaust. It looks at the differences among various types of Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, and Jewish anti-Semitism, and concludes with a look at contemporary forms of anti-Semitism.
This course examines various definitions of anti-Semitism and traces the history of anti-Semitism (or "anti-Judaism") from the earliest arguments between Christianizing Jews and Judaizing Christians to the birth of Islam, through the period of Muslim expansion and the Crusades, to the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and the Holocaust. It looks at the differences among various types of Christian anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, and Jewish anti-Semitism, and concludes with a look at contemporary forms of anti-Semitism.
RELI 454 – The Spanish Inquisition
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context.
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context.
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context.
RELI 554 – The Spanish Inquisition
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context. Graduate-level requirements include graduate students studying more deeply the economic, social and demographic context of the Inquisition, through more scholarly reading, discussion and writing.
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context. Graduate-level requirements include graduate students studying more deeply the economic, social and demographic context of the Inquisition, through more scholarly reading, discussion and writing.
The Inquisition in Spanish, European, & ethnic history: its bureaucracy and procedures; its festivities, its victims, New and Old Christians; and witches. Social, economic, and demographic context. Graduate-level requirements include graduate students studying more deeply the economic, social and demographic context of the Inquisition, through more scholarly reading, discussion and writing.
RELI 372B – Early Judaism and Christianity: One Book, Two Religions Second Temple Judaism and its Legacy
This course surveys scriptures and stories, wisdom texts, histories and apocalyptic visions that Jews living in the Persian and later Greco-Roman worlds produced and circulated in Second Temple period (539 BCE -135 CE). Examining Jewish history and writings of the Second Temple period is key to understanding an important time not only in Jewish religious formation but also the emergence of early Christianity, first as a Jewish sect and later, as a separate religion.