This symposium celebrates the forthcoming 38-chapter volume The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film edited by Olga Gershenson. This volume offers the first comprehensive survey of the flourishing interdisciplinary field, while challenging the geographic and conceptual boundaries of Jewish cinema. For too long, the field has circled around a narrow set of places and stories, about immigration, assimilation, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. This Handbook proposes a broader, more capacious understanding of Jewish film—one that moves past the assumption that Jewishness on screen must be mimetic, historical, or tied to the US, Europe, and Israel. Highlighting new research on Jews on and off screen in India, Ethiopia, Turkey, Mexico, the Arab world, and beyond, the contributions show how Jewishness operates as a global interpretive mode rather than a fixed set of themes. This expanded lens reveals how Jewish frames of thinking, cultural practices, and historical experiences structure filmmaking and spectatorship across wildly diverse geographies and contexts. The result challenges old stereotypes and opens up a bigger, more complex world of Jewish film.

This symposium is an experimental and experiential format. Instead of formal presentations, we will have three kinds of sessions: Salons, Classrooms, and Screenings.

There will be two film screenings as part of this symposium in the Rackham Graduate School Amphitheater: "Sabbath Queen" on April 20, and "My One and Only" on April 21.

Full schedule coming soon.