Digital Stories of Cleveland Synagogue Dispersion: Moving Pieces of Congregational Life.
Alanna E. Cooper (Department of Religious Studies)
2020–2021 Freedman Faculty Fellow
Alanna E. Cooper serves as the Abba Hillel Silver Chair in Jewish Studies, housed in CWRU's Department of Religious Studies. She is the author of "Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism" (Indiana University Press) and is currently writing "Preserving and Disposing of the Sacred: America's Jewish Congregations" (under contract with Penn State University Press). Alanna is excited to work in collaboration with the Freedman Center in her research on the relationship between group identity and sacred material culture.Her 2020-2021 project examines the bits and pieces of synagogue buildings that congregations take with them when they leave their old structures to merge into or build new ones. This particular aspect of the study focuses on synagogues in Greater Cleveland, and is designed to develop best-practices for collecting, organizing and comparing data on a national scale.
