Professor Lior Sternfeld (Penn State University) will discuss the making of the Iranian Jewish diaspora community in Israel and the US (especially in Southern California). The two communities were established under profoundly different circumstances and in two distinct periods of the 20th Century. By juxtaposing the two instances, the talk analyzes the circumstances under which each community arrived, the collective memories, the national and religious identities, and the role in creating diasporic culture.
Lior Sternfeld is the William J. and Charlotte K. Duddy University Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University. He is a social historian of the Middle East and modern Iran, and Jewish histories of the Middle East. His first book, titled Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines, against the backdrop of Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, the development and integration of Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the last century. In 2022, Sternfeld co-authored with Hassan Sarbakhshian and Parvaneh Vahidmanesh Jews of Iran: A Photographic Chronicle (Penn State University Press, 2022), and together with Honaida Ghanim and Tamir Sorek, he established the journal Palestine/Israel Review, where he serves as the Associate Editor. Sternfeld’s research was supported by the NEH, the Jewish Memorial Foundation, and the JDC, among others.
