Padnos Public Engagement Lecture: Land, Language, and People: Arab and Jewish Imagination in the Late Ottoman Empire (INT 100/201 Approved)

Thursday, October 16, 2025
7:00 p.m.
Health Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students

Land, Language, and People: Arab and Jewish Imagination in the Late Ottoman Empire.

The 5th Annual Padnos Public Engagement Lecture on Jewish Learning, featuring:

Mostafa Hussein, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Drawing from his upcoming book, Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine, Dr. Hussein will explore 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.

Join us for a conversation between Dr. Hussein and GVSU Professor Eric Covey, facilitated by Frankel Center's Interim Director for 2025-26, Deborah Dash Moore. Their discussion will be followed by a dessert reception.

This event is held in partnership with the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

From Dr. Hussein: I am a historian specializing in modern Israel-Palestine and the neighboring Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East (19th-21st centuries), with a focus on the subfield of Jewish-Arab/Muslim studies. Trained in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, I employ intellectual history, cultural history, and literary analysis to examine the multifaceted relations—religious, cultural, intellectual, and social—between Jews and Arabs/Muslims from medieval to modern times. A central aim of my research is to illuminate how Arab and Jewish scholars in the modern Middle East have reappropriated and repurposed their communities’ shared histories and interwoven legacies. Engaging with these historical interactions provides a rich context for understanding the enduring influence of tradition, history, and language on contemporary concerns in the region. My scholarship thus spans multiple fields and disciplines, reflecting its interdisciplinary and comparative nature.

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Location Information

GVSU Cook-Devos Center for Health Sciences (CHS)
301 Michigan St NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503

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Contact Information

[email protected]

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This event was added to the calendar by Kyle Kooyers (kooyersk@gvsu.edu) on Monday, August 4, 2025 and was last updated on Thursday, August 21, 2025 at 9:37 a.m.