About

Alanna E. Cooper serves as CWRU’s Abba Hillel Silver Chair of Jewish Studies.  She is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Professor Cooper is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in Judaism as a lived religion in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union.  Her work is motivated by the question of how social upheaval impacts religious expression, and how macro cultural shifts shape individuals’ relationships with the sacred.

Cooper’s current book project, Preserving and Disposing of the Sacred: America’s Jewish Congregations (to be published with Pennsylvania State University Press) is woven from ethnographic encounters with synagogues that are downsizing, merging and dissolving.  The work follows congregations’ decision-making around dispossession of their sacred objects including stained glass windows, Torah scrolls, memorial plaques, and the synagogue buildings themselves.  The ways in which these items are cast off and the stories told about them as they move into the custody of others, highlights the anxieties, imaginaries, and legacies of loss and hope released in these acts of disentanglement.

For essays on the subject see:

• A Rust Belt synagogue ‘Runs out of People’ and Gathers to Bury its Past
• When an Old Synagogue Downsizes, What Do You Do with All its Stuff
• A Queens Synagogue is Moving, and the Fate of its Storied Ark is in Limbo
• Future in Question for Chicago Loop Synagogue and its Monumental Stained-Glass Window
• Windows without a Home

Cooper’s first book, Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2013) draws on research she conducted in Soviet Central Asia as the USSR was dissolving. The work attends to the ways Bukharan Jews’ practices evolved in relationship to the Muslim cultural worlds of which they were a part.  Building on this ethnographic account, the book expands its gaze outward, investigating the dynamics of global diaspora.  Drawing on archival sources, the historical narrative explains how this community – at the geographical edge of the Jewish world – retained ties to important centers of Jewish life through trade, pilgrimage, charitable networks, and the circulation of teachers and texts.  Finally, the book documents Central Asia’s Jews’ mass migration from their centuries-old home, bringing to an end one of the world’s longest chapters of diaspora history.

For essays on this population movement and loss, as well as communal memory and material decay see:

• Remembering Home and Exile: Memoirs by Jews of Muslim Lands
• A Dying House in Samarkand
• Jews of Bukharan Helped Me to Understand Personal History
• Muslim Couple Preserves Remnant of Jewish Life in Uzbekistan

Cooper’s courses include:

• Anthropology of Jews and Judaism
• Introduction to Judaism
• Jewish Art and Architecture
• Religion the Internet: Digitizing the Sacred
• Interpreting Religion (Religious Theory and Methods)

Cooper is a popular speaker whose public lectures include:

• Saying Goodbye to Synagogues in America’s Hinterland, and the Objects left Behind
• Museum Collecting Amid Dispersion and Loss
• History of American Synagogue Stained-Glass
• Jewish Brides and Grooms, Merchants and Craftsmen in Central Asia
• Central Asia’s Bukharan Jews: A Long History at the Jewish World’s Geographical Edge
• Remembering the Dead: From Bronze Yahzeit Plaques to Digital Memorialization
• Holocaust Torah Scrolls as Repositories of Memory
• Photographing of Jewish Life in Muslim Central Asia, 1870
• Where Have all the Jews Gone? : Mass Migration, Uzbek Independence, and Jewish-Muslim Relations

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