专业描述

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the website of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, one of the most active centers of its kind in the nation. The Center has 27 affiliated faculty from more than ten disciplines, offering nearly 70 undergraduate and graduate courses in Jewish studies annually, enrolling more than 2,000 students. We are very pleased to be able to touch so many lives by bringing the riches and diversity of the Jewish tradition to new generations of students for these twenty one years. The 2014-15 academic year features thirty five lectures, symposia and three international conferences, and the launch of several new exhibitions in the Mapping Jewish LA project. The Center will also be sending two of our graduate students to China as part of a new exchange program with the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute of Jewish Studies at Nanjing University, as well as welcoming two of their graduate students to UCLA, where they will participate in a graduate student conference on future directions in Jewish Studies. A suite of four service learning courses for undergraduates will be offered with the support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles: the first on the Iranian-Jewish experience in Los Angeles, the second on the Holocaust and eyewitness testimony, the third on interfaith dialogues between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the fourth on the history of Jewish political and social activism in LA. As one of the nation’s top universities with a public mission, UCLA is solidly committed to fostering a deeper, more universal understanding of the Holocaust and other genocides. The Center is grateful for a major gift of nearly $1 million from Ellen Goodhill, whose parents fled Nazi-occupied Europe by way of Shanghai. The gift will provide for the Fritz, Jenny and Gustav Berger Fellowship in Holocaust Studies to support graduate student research and will seed a planned Institute for Advanced Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Center remains steadfast in its support of critical inquiry, path breaking research, and innovative teaching of all aspects of Jewish culture and civilization. As a vital community resource and intellectual beacon, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies resonates deeply with UCLA’s public service mission. We invite you to browse our events, attend programs, and contribute to the Center at a time in which education could not be more vital for our shared future. Please do not hesitate to contact me (presner@ucla.edu) to discuss our work and/or your interests.