Marni Davis examines American Jews’ complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity: the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer. Alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities -- both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

Divahn features the Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jewish Music of Galeet Dardashti.

http://www.divahn.com/ 

Iranian-descended singer Galeet Dardashti leads Divahn's edgy all-female power-house ensemble. The group has engendered an international following, performing in venues ranging from international concert halls to the most prestigious clubs in NYC. Infusing traditional and original Middle Eastern Jewish songs with sophisticated harmonies, entrancing improvisations, and funky arrangements, Divahn's thrilling live shows feature lush string arrangements, eclectic Indian, Middle Eastern, and Latin percussion, and vocals spanning Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Persian, Arabic, and Aramaic. “Divan,” a word common to Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic, means a collection of songs or poetry. Through their music, the group creatively underscores common ground between diverse Middle Eastern cultures and religion.

American Book Award winnder Emily Raboteau will read from and discuss her most recent work "Searching for Zion:  The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora"

Sponsored by African American & Africana Studies Program, English Creative Writing Program, Jewish Studies Program, and Social Theory Program.  

This lecture will examine the historical foundations of U.S. relations with and approaches to Iraq that influence the dynamics of the current events and crises in that country and its region.

As a research scholar, Professor Hahn specializes in U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East since 1940. His publications include Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq since World War I (Oxford University Press, 2011); Historical Dictionary of U.S.-Middle East Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Potomac Books, 2005); Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945 (co-edited with Mary Ann Heiss, Ohio State University Press, 2001); and The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

Professor Hahn’s research has been supported by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Truman Library Institute, the John F. Kennedy Library, the Lyndon Johnson Foundation, the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, the Office of United States Air Force History, and the U.S. Army Center of Military History. He has lectured across the United States and in Canada, Britain, France, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Israel.

Professor Hahn is committed to undergraduate and graduate instruction. In collaboration with Ohio State colleagues, he has advised or co-advised more than two dozen doctoral dissertations in U.S. foreign relations history and has helped to launch new undergraduate study abroad programs on World War II and its impact on the modern world.    

Since 2002, Professor Hahn has served as Executive Director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, a professional society of some 1,600 members in four dozen countries.  In 2010, Governor Ted Strickland appointed Professor Hahn to a five-year term on the State of Ohio’s War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission. Professor Hahn served as associate editor of Diplomatic History in 1991-2002.