The Adult Education Committee of Temple Concord and Temple Israel will hold a program and brunch on Sunday, January 12, from 10 am-noon, at Temple Israel, 4737 Deerfield Pl., Vestal. Professor Dina Danon will offer a talk called “The Transformation of the Marriage Market in the Eastern Sephardi Diaspora.” The entire community is welcome to attend. There is a suggested donation of between $5-20 per person. For more information and to RSVP, contact Temple Israel at 607-723-7461 or Temple Concord at 607-723-7355 by Friday, January 3, so enough refreshments can be prepared.

Danon will speak about transformation of the Jewish marriage market in the Ladino-speaking Diaspora during the modern age. Her talk will provide an overview of the traditional marriage market and discuss the various ways in which it changed in the late Ottoman period (late 19th and early 20th centuries), focusing specifically on forms of bridal capital such as dowries and trousseaux. Danon’s talk will draw on the research she conducted last academic year at the National Library of Israel and the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, and will showcase Ladino-language sources such as matchmaking registers, trousseau inventories and press articles.

Danon is an associate professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton University where she teaches courses on Sephardi Diasporas, Jews and Muslims, modern Jewish history, and gender and Jewish history. Her research focuses on the eastern Sephardi Diaspora during modern times and draws heavily on previously unexplored Ladino language archival material. Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise prevailing scholarship not only on the Sephardi world, but on Jewish modernity as a whole. 

Her first book, “The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History” (Stanford University Press, 2020), was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture. She has begun work on her second book, which explores the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage and divorce in the modern Ottoman Sephardi world, as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.