We would like to thank everyone who attended this year’s Padnos Public Engagement Lecture on Jewish Learning. The lecture and discussion between Dr. Mostafa Hussein, Assistant Professor (University of Michigan), and Dr. Eric Covey, Professor (Grand Valley State University), and facilitated by Frankel Center's Interim Director for 2025-26, Deborah Dash Moore, centered on the history of Jewish and Arab relations in the late Ottoman Palestine. We especially want to thank Peg and Jeff Padnos, and the rest of the Padnos family, for their continued support of public Jewish scholarship in Michigan!
Drawing from his upcoming book, Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine, this lecture explored how Jewish writers in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine utilized Arabo-Islamic culture. In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab cultures while navigating their evolving identities as settler colonists. Hebrew Orientalism challenges the conventional view that Hebrew thinkers were dismissive of Arabo-Islamic culture, revealing how they both adopted and adapted elements of it that enhanced their aims.
This event, established by a gift from the Stuart and Barbara Padnos Foundation, facilitates annual public educational activities in Jewish Studies throughout the State of Michigan with a focus on the western part of the state. The lecture is planned in collaboration with the GVSU Kaufman Institute and takes place on Grand Rapids on Grand Valley State University's campus. Each event is followed by a dessert reception where attendees have the opportunity to engage with the speakers.
