Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo

'Sacred Places Tell Tales' explores the history of Egyptian Jewry through the lens of Cairo’s synagogues, treating them as “living archives” of Jewish life from 1875 to the present. Examining their architecture, locations, and social functions reveals the heterogeneity of Cairo’s Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities and the diverse ways modern Jewish identities were formed. The talk also considers contemporary efforts to preserve Jewish heritage—synagogues, cemeteries, and cultural memory—within Egypt’s shifting political and social landscape.

Skarlet Olivera

I am an MPhil student in Politics (Comparative Government) at the Department of Politics and International Relations. My primary research areas are broadly embedded in the comparative political economy of institutions and the political economy of development. These include state capacity, political institutions, inequality, and state-building in Latin America and Africa. I also work with mixed methods techniques, combining time series, case studies, and game theory.

Who Gets Protection from Protectionism? Evidence from the Buy American Act

Contemporary protectionist policies in the U.S. are often initiated by the executive branch but enforced unevenly across firms. We argue that such uneven enforcement arises because legislators—with both institutional capacity and local motivation—shield connected firms from executive protectionist measures. We test this claim using the Trump administration’s Buy American Act (BAA), which penalized firms reliant on foreign, especially Chinese, suppliers. Combining firm-level data on federal contracts, supply chains, and campaign contributions, we analyze 1,958 firms (2015–2019).

Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany

Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is notoriously challenging due to preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda. We introduce a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. Our empirical analysis draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets.
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