DINA DANON & MURAT C. YILDIZ

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.

Dina And Murat

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.

This presentation is part of the Jacob Perlow Series sponsored by the Office of Special Programs and co-sponsored by the departments of history, international affairs, and religious studies. Funding is provided by endowments established by Jacob Perlow and by Beatrice Troupin. Perlow, an immigrant to the United States in the 1920s, was a business man deeply interested in religion and philosophy, and a man who was committed to furthering Jewish education, His estate supports annual lectures and presentations to the college and Capital District community on issues broadly related to Jews and Judaism.