Welcome Judith Lin, Fortunoff Fellow

Please join us in welcoming Judith Lin, as a Fortunoff Fellow, thanks to funding from Christie's Americas.

Lin is a writer and researcher of the Sephardic Holocaust experience. She completed her PhD as a Rachel Winer Manon Jewish Studies fellow at the University of Virginia. After many years working with face-to-face with survivors, Judith has developed listening strategies that rely on trust, multilingualism, and co-created memory. Judith’s work combines analysis of oral testimonies with archival papers and collected writings in Ladino. Her first monograph, Belonging to Exile: Sephardic Homelands through Poetry, discusses the different national geographies that appealed to Sephardic Holocaust survivors after the war. Her second book-length project, Membranza: Listening to Sephardic Voices touched by the Holocaust, explores relationship between language and visceral memory in testimonies that have been recorded in Ladino.

Cultural genocide is of special concern to the Sephardic community because the Ladino language is endangered. Judith’s work studies the (im)possibilities of salvage regarding both the orality and the materiality of Sephardic remnants. Examining cases like Salonika/Thessaloniki, Judith is interested in how oral testimonies reflect (in both words and silences) the experience of physical erasure due to Aryanization, including the eradication and misappropriation of property, gravesites, and cultural and literary artifacts.