Ben-Ur, Aviva

Aviva Ben-Ur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Adjunct to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of History. She earned her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1998 and her M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from Columbia University in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Where Diasporas Met: Sephardic and Ashkenzai Jews in the City of New York-A Study in Intra-Ethnic Relations, 1880-1950 . She began teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in Fall 2000. Her published books include Sephardic Jews in the United States: Where Diasporas Met, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs and A Ladino Legacy: The Judeo-Spanish Collection of Louis N. Levy . She was awarded a 2007 American Council of Learned Societies fellowship to conduct research for her book Jewish Identity in a Slave Society: Suriname, 1660-1863, which has not yet been published. She translated and analyzed response and Hebrew and Ladino medieval literature for Andree Aelion Brooks’ book, The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Dona Gracia Nasi, a Jewish Woman Leader During the Renaissance . Her articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Journal of Southern History, American Jewish History, American Jewish Archives, Jewish History, Journal of Jewish Studies, and Studies in Bibliography and Booklore .

In addition to the American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Fulbright Program; the University of Washington, where she was the Hazel D. Cole Fellow in Jewish Studies 1999-2000; and the John Carter Brown Library, among others. She has taught at the National University of Ireland, Galway; the University of Washington; and Queens College.

She has served on the Advisory Boards of Sephardic House, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Religious Heritage, and on the Academic Councils of both the American Sephardi Federation and the American Jewish Historical Society. She has been a Fellow of the University of Massachusetts Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas, a Lilly Teaching Fellow, and the recipient of both a University of Massachusetts Center for Teaching Course Enhancement Grant and Faculty Research Grant.

From the guide to the Papers of Aviva Ben-Ur, 1923-2009, (American Sephardi Federation)