Thursday, November 17, 2026 12:30 to 1:30 PM CST
Spertus faculty member Dr. Mika Ahuvia leads this interactive session.
When we tell the story of Judaism’s origins, we picture priests in the Temple and sages in the academy — yet most Jews were neither, and the synagogue and the ordinary people who filled it rarely make the cut. So how did they make meaning? Join Dr. Mika Ahuvia to meet the exiled, the enslaved, the manumitted, and the women who left traces of themselves everywhere — in cuneiform tablets, Greek inscriptions, synagogue mosaics, and even a rare prayer preserved in the Talmud.
The takeaway reframes where Judaism actually comes from: not a single sacred center run by elite men, but a diverse, decentralized, diasporic tradition built by many hands — a question of whose story counts that resonates well beyond Jewish history.
Dr. Mika Ahuvia is an Associate Professor of Classical Judaism and the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University and her M.A. in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan. She previously served as Director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.
Dr. Ahuvia researches the formative history of Jewish communities in the ancient Mediterranean world, with particular focus on angels, ritual-magic, gender, and late antique archaeology. She is also committed to public scholarship and her writing can be found on My Jewish Learning, Pasts Imperfect, and Ancient Jew Review; her online lecture on Jews, Jewish history, and antisemitism has been viewed over a quarter of a million times across 190 countries.
Presented by Spertus Institute and JPro Chicago, Connect & Learn is an online, community-building, professional development series.
Connect & Learn workshops offer participants around the world a chance to join Spertus students and alumni for lively sessions on topics key to Jewish professional life today.
Build skills you can apply immediately to your life and work. Become part of a network of learners and Jewish community leaders. Sessions are online, live, interactive, and collaborative. Each session includes time to connect, network, meet new colleagues, and strengthen relationships. Sessions are free of charge thanks to the generosity of our sponsors.
Programs take place via Zoom.
Connect & Learn is presented in partnership with JPro Chicago.
This is the 2026 Norman Asher Memorial Program.
Spertus Institute’s Center for Jewish Leadership is supported in part by a generous grant from the Crown Family.
Spertus Institute is a partner with the Jewish United Fund in serving our community.
If you can, we encourage you to make a gift to support this free program and others like it!