Editor’s note: This event has already taken place.

Skidmore College has scheduled a public conversation, “Modernity and Jewish Life at the End of the Ottoman Empire: A Conversation,” for Tuesday, Feb. 10, at 5 p.m. in the Wyckoff Center in Case Campus Center, Saratoga Springs. The program is free and open to the public.

The discussion will feature Dina Danon, associate professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University, and Murat C. Yildiz, associate professor of history at Skidmore. They will discuss and review Danon’s book The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History and her co-edited volume Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World.

Danon’s research focuses on the eastern Sephardi diaspora during modern times and draws heavily on previously unexplored Ladino language archival material. Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise prevailing scholarship not only on the Sephardi world, but on Jewish modernity as a whole.

Yildiz is author of The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026). He serves as assistant editor of Arab Studies Journal and as an editorial board member of International Journal of the History of Sport.