News from

Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations

Reset All Filters
46 Results
Finding community in the Jewish High Holy Days
A cut apple and pomegranate surround a honey jar with a wooden honey stick on top. An uncut apple and pomegranate are in the background.

Finding community in the Jewish High Holy Days

Three cultural and academic leaders at Penn consider how a return to experiencing Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in person offered physical and spiritual healing.

Kristina Linnea García , Michele W. Berger

The story the bowls tell
penn museum incantation bowl being examined

Gross and Elitzur-Leiman are studying some intact, pristine bowls and others, like the one above, that are in pieces. “The sherds tell a story, too,” says Blanchard.

The story the bowls tell

In an ambitious new project, historian Simcha Gross and Harvard’s Rivka Elitzur-Leiman are studying hundreds of ancient incantation bowls housed at the Penn Museum. They hope to better understand the objects and eventually, build a database of all these bowls worldwide.

Michele W. Berger

The ‘music’ of one poet’s words, translated
Huda Fakhreddine holding the poetry book outside

(Homepage image) As a scholar, Fakhreddine works hard to retain as much of a poem as possible when it moves from Arabic to another language. “It’s a challenge that all translation involves. We talk about what’s lost and what’s gained,” she says. “It’s all exaggerated here with these short musical pieces. Their meaning is ground in their sound.”

The ‘music’ of one poet’s words, translated

With help from her daughter, scholar Huda Fakhreddine published an English version of 30 poems for children written by her father in Arabic, paying tribute to their endearing and enduring subject matter and to the musicality and richness of their sound.

Michele W. Berger