This year, CJS' Graduate Student Intercultural Cook-In Series was
chosen to participate in One Day for DU, a 24-hour crowd-sourced funding campaign held in Sprig 2017.

The Graduate Student Intercultural Cook-In is a diversity-enhancing, community-building, interdisciplinary project of the Center for Judaic Studies, The Office of Graduate Studies & the Fritz Knoebel School of Hospitality Management (with a number of other campus co-sponsors). Piloted with 3 events in 2016-17, this exciting project brings together grad students from across DU for an afternoon of intercultural cooking lessons with Knoebel Teaching Chefs followed by a reception open to the entire community where the culturally diverse foods they have prepared are enjoyed by all!

In addition to featuring delicious graduate-student-prepared foods, the community-wide reception also includes slides about the featured foods and cultures as well as conversation prompts to help get people talking about food-memories connected to their own cultural identities and experiences.

Our 3 pilot events – featuring Sephardic+Latino, Indigenous Southwestern, and Middle Eastern foods – have been a huge success. Graduate students appreciate how much the events have gotten them thinking about other cultures AND how effectively the events have gotten them meeting and talking with more interdisciplinary graduate students from across campus than in any other context during their time at DU.

The project truly enhances campus-wide diversity and inclusivity outcomes while helping graduate students build community around an evening of interdisciplinary and intercultural learning and conversation. The reception opens up the event even further to undergraduates, faculty, staff, and community members near and far!

For a 90-second video featuring student quotes about what this series has meant for students across campus, as well as photographs from past cook-in events, please click here.

On May 17, students from Prof. Amy Balogh's new Judaic Studies course Creation & Humanity (cross-listed with Religious Studies) spent their class period working in the DU Bridge Community Garden, while learning about permaculture and sustainability with Prof. Julie Morris from the Department of Biology.

After watching our campus bee-hive, weeding, and planting, the students spoke about the effects of the work on their stress level, and how connecting to nature, even in a small way, was of great benefit to their general sense of health and well-being.

"The students loved a day in the dirt, and so did I! In addition to their diverse academic interests and majors, students bring a wide-variety of experiences to this course — from growing up on a farm, to never having potted a plant — and so to see them all equally excited to get their hands dirty was a delight. It was also great to work cross-campus with the Dept. of Biology and the Sustainability Program toward increasing student awareness of our innate connection to nature." —Prof. Balogh

Thanks to a new partnership, HAI and Veterans Affairs (VA) have worked together to bring Holocaust education to the clients of the VA Office of Community Care. In addition to curating and loaning a trunk of materials for a month-long exhibit on Holocaust history during the month of April, centered on the question "How can life go on?," HAI also donated 26 books in the areas of Holocaust and Judaic Studies to the VA's Diversity Library.

VA and HAI also worked together through the HAI Survivors Speakers Bureau to bring the powerful story of Ms. Sara Moses to an audience of veterans and relatives of veterans. Liberated from Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp by U.S. troops at the young age of 7, Ms. Moses has a special place in her heart for our veterans — and thanked each of them individually as people lined up after the event.

For information about our HAI Survivors Speakers Bureau, or how HAI can support your school's or organization's Holocaust education goals, email us at HAI@du.edu.

CJS is proud to spotlight David Krouwer, an alumni of our Hebrew Program, for his work as an archaeologist-in-training in the M.A. Program at the Nadler Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.

To hear a 2.5-minute clip about David's experience in Israel, and how his work with CJS Hebrew Professor Sari Havis prepared him for his studies, please click here: 

When the automotive industry began to boom in the 1920s, two Colorado Jews — Henry Winter (president) and Adolph Weiss (secretary) — started a modest truck body manufacturing business in Denver. Before long, the Winter-Weiss Company became a leading regional and national specialist in custom automotive body work. 

They created ambulances from cutting a passenger car in two and adding a section, manufactured the first motor-driven delivery vans for Coors and Denver Rainbow Bread Company, and in the 1930s built the first bookmobile for the Denver Public Library. They also built the first gas-engine trains to climb Pikes Peak.

Beginning in the 1940s, Winter-Weiss manufactured drilling equipment for the oil industry, and became a defense contractor for the U.S. army during World War II.

The photographs on the left feature women sitting on Indian motorcycles with Winter-Weiss custom sidecars, one in the shape of a milk bottle and the other in the shape of a house. Both photographs were taken at an auto-show at Madison Square Gardens in NYC in the early 1930s.

For a closer look at the photos, click here.