Dr. Hannah Pressman is affiliate faculty and Communications Director for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

She received her Ph.D. in Modern Hebrew literature from New York University. She is co-editor of the anthology Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture (2012).

Pressman’s writings on culture, language, and religion have appeared in Tablet, Lilith, the Jewish Daily Forward, eSefarad, and MyJewishLearning.com.

Currently, she is crafting a memoir about the quest to uncover her family’s Sephardic legacy, focusing on her great-grandmother Estrella, a French teacher on the island of Rhodes.

“Estrella, My Savante: On Shifting Languages and Landscapes” (Weds-131), 9:00 – 10:15 A.M.

The story of my great-grandmother, Estrella Leon Galante, has fascinated me for over a decade. One of eight children, she grew up on the island of Rhodes and trained to become a French teacher at a Paris seminary.

My project traces Estrella’s journeys from Rhodes to France and then to southern Africa in the early 20th century. Her shifting landscapes and languages lie at the heart of my discussion.

Among the questions I pose:

• What choices did Estrella have, or not have, as a Sephardic woman at a time of colonialism and rapidly changing world events?
• How can I best utilize the documents and correspondence that I possess in order to reconstruct her life?
• What’s at stake for members of my generation who are trying to learn Ladino and access their family’s past?

Category: Beginning genealogists

Topics: Immigration and migration over the ages, Jewish history and culture, Organization and preservation, Sephardic research