The College of Idaho will welcome Dr. Devin Naar to speak as part of the Neilsen Lecture Series in Judaic Studies on October 24, 2025. The lecture will take place at 12:30pm in the Simplot Holsinger room, with a lunch buffet provided for all attendees.
Dr. Naar will give a lecture titled The Fate of the “Jerusalem of the Balkans”: Salonica’s Jews between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek Nation-State, based on his award-winning book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Here is a brief description:
“From 1492 until the twentieth century, the port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki)--once part of the Ottoman Empire and today the second biggest city in Greece--was home to the largest community of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the world. This talk focuses on how this once-thriving Jewish community grappled with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Greece in the decades prior to the devastation of the Holocaust.”
Dr. Naar will also read an excerpt of his poem, Tres Solukes – Three Breaths. “It was inspired by an experiment: the night my oldest son (then only five years old! He is nine now) and I decided that we would speak to each other only in Ladino,” says Dr. Naar. “The poem not only reimagines that night in verse but also offers an assessment of why Ladino has become endangered and what the language has to offer not only to my son but also to all of us today. We were – at the time – the only family in the world primarily speaking Ladino at home.” The poem was published in Aki Yerushalayim, issue 114, p. 91. Ladino, also referred to as Judeo-Spanish, is a Jewish language that dates to the medieval period and was spoken widely by Sephardic Jews (Jews of Iberian descent) in Salonica and other places around the Ottoman Empire.
Dr. Naar is the founder and chair of the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. His book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, was published in 2016 by Stanford University Press, and won the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards in the category of Writing Based on Archival Material and the 2017 Modern Greek Studies Association Edmund Keeley Book Prize.
This lecture is thanks to the generosity and support of The Craig H. Neilsen Foundation. The foundation and its chairman, alumnus Ray Neilsen ’88, were major supporters of the College’s initiative to fund the first full endowed chair in Judaic Studies in the Intermountain West.
“I am always looking to expose our campus and broader community to the types of work that people are doing in Judaic Studies and to highlight how that work is being done and who is doing it,” says Nick Underwood, Assistant Professor of History and Berger/Neilsen Chair of Judaic Studies at the College. “It is a vast and fascinating field and, with each invitation, I am hoping to give our community a taste of the exciting research, art and culture that is being done in this exciting area of study.”
All events in the Neilsen Lecture Series in Judaic Studies are free and open to the public. These events bring Jewish scholars, dignitaries, and public figures to campus to speak about tolerance, diversity, history, culture, and current events.