Interview starts at 4:03. Bestselling fantasy author Leigh Bardugo ("Shadow and Bone") discusses her new novel, “The Familiar,” with faculty member Canan Bolel in this December 8, 2024, conversation at the University of Washington.

In the novel, Bardugo follows the struggles of a “converso” heroine — from a family forced to convert to Christianity and keep its Jewish heritage secret in 16th-century Spain — who draws magic from her family’s secret language, Ladino, and the refranes (sayings) that preserve Sephardic Jewish wit and wisdom across time.

In the conversation, Bardguo discusses what drew her to this story and setting, how she wove Ladino into her narrative, the family history that inspired her, and the collaboration with Bolel that led to the selection of refranes included in the book.

Spanish & Portuguese Citizenship Oral Histories: Colette Capriles by UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

Present-day discussions of anti-Semitism often involve Israel and the Zionist movement... but before the 20th century, Jews' and Jewish scholars' understandings of anti-Semitism were completely connected with Europe and Christianity.

In the final episode of the season, guest Liora R. Halperin looks at how 19th-century Jewish settlers to Palestine were influenced by the anti-Semitism they had experienced in the Russian Empire: how it shaped their perceptions of their new home (or didn't), and what we can learn from their story today.

Can Jews be anti-Semitic against other Jews? In this episode, guest Devin E. Naar looks at the history of Jewish prejudice against other Jews in the United States, from the very first American Jewish settlers in the 1600s to twentieth-century efforts to exclude Jews from the Muslim world from Jewish institutions — as the American Jewish community struggled to hold on to its "precarious whiteness."

Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time?

In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo explores these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and "conversos" (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, explaining how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents, in a conversation that spans medieval medicine, forbidden breastfeeding, decoy hams, official guides to Jewishness, and the expulsion of Jews in 1492.

We generally connect Germany with anti-Semitism, but in the early twentieth century, Germany was actually considered one of the best places in the world to be Jewish. How and why did the progressive Weimar Republic give way to the genocidal Nazi regime... and could it happen here?

In this episode, guest Laurie Marhoefer explains the rise of the Nazi party in one of the one progressive places in the world, detailing the swift and dramatic shift in government, efforts to resist, and troubling echoes of these events in the present day.

The United States was the country where Jews came to finally be free from anti-Semitism... or was it? Historians of the modern era tend to think of the U.S. as an exceptional place for Jews — a place where Jewish people have been able to exist in relative freedom from violence and prejudice.

But is this common understanding of the United States as "the exception" accurate? In this episode, guest Susan A. Glenn discusses the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., touching on the Second Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford, the "mother of all conspiracy theories," the secret rehabilitation of Nazi war criminals, and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the U.S. in the present day.

In this five-part inaugural season of "Jewish Questions," the Stroum Center's podcast series, hosts Laurie Marhoefer and Noam Pianko delve into the causes and consequences of anti-Semitism across history with faculty experts from the University of Washington.