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 Spring 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 Education & 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 [email protected].

Congratulations to Dr. Amy Balogh on the publication of her first book, Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Lexington/Fortress).

In Moses among the Idols, Amy draws from the fields of Assyriology, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, and Comparative Religion to make the argument that when it comes to understanding the special status of Moses as YHWH's mediator, the best analogy the ancient Near East provides is that of the idol — the most common form of mediation between divinity and humanity for most of religious history.

For more information on Moses among the Idols and Amy's other work, visit www.amylbalogh.com.

CJS congratulates Prof. Jonathan Sciarcon, Associate Professor of Jewish History, on two recent accomplishments! First, congratulations to Prof. Sciarcon on his recent promotion to the tenured position of Associate Professor of Jewish History.

Second, congratulations to Prof. Sciarcon on the publication of his new book Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israelite Universelle's Girls' School in Ottoman Iraq, 1895-1915 (SUNY Press, Aug 2017), a history of the French schools that pioneered female education in Ottoman Iraq's Jewish communities. Click here for more information and to order Educational Oases today.

Congratulations, Prof. Sciarcon!