The Joel Barkan Memorial Lecture is part of the annual Provost’s Global Forum at the University of Iowa.

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026
Time: 2 p.m.
Location: Old Capitol Senate Chambers

Over the past decade, Black Jewish characters have been increasingly appearing as major characters in streaming and television series starting with Orange is the New Black (2015) and Chicago Med (2025) and more recently in Long Story Short (2025) and Boston Blue (2025). First, this talk will examine the demographic, media-driven, and political reasons why this is occurring. Then it will analyze whether these depictions of Black Jews constitute “shallow representations” which reduce them to either one-dimensional stereotypes of Blacks and Jews or substantive portrayals of the backstories and hybrid identities of Black Jews.

This lecture is part of the Provost's Global Forum: Cinematic Connections in a Polarized World: How movies bring us together.

Professor Emeritus Lawrence Baron held the Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University from 1988 until 2012 and directed its Jewish Studies Program until 2006. He received his Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with George L. Mosse. He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He has authored and edited four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005). He served as the historian and as an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (The Free Press: 1988). In 2006 he delivered the keynote address for Yad Vashem’s first conference devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust. His contribution to Holocaust Studies was profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge: 2010). In the fall semester of 2015, he taught as the Ida King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton University of New Jersey.

Past Lectures