Dr. Gregory Lee Cuéllar will speak on Crypto-Jewish Practice in 18th Century Colonial Mexico, on Thursday March 26th, at 3:30 pm.
Gregory Lee Cuéllar is Adjunct Professor of Old Testament at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University and Resident Fellow at B. H. Carroll Theological Institute in Dallas, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in biblical interpretation from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, his Master of Divinity with Biblical languages from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and his B.A. from Texas A&M-Kingsville. Dr. Cuéllar is a three-time grant fellow of the Hispanic Theological Initiative and has presented at numerous academic conferences in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He is the author of Passages in the New World: Books and Manuscripts from Colonial Mexico 1556-1820 (2006).
David Gonzalez will speak on Alternatives for Integration into the Jewish Community, on Friday March 27th at 3:00 pm.
David Gonzalez was born in Monterrey, Mexico a city founded by Sephardic Jews. David studied Judaism at the Religious Studies/Anthropology Department of the University of Houston. He has been researching the rise of Anti-Semitism and ways that Anusim/Descendents of Crypto-Jews can reintegrate into the Jewish community. He is the author of Alternatives for Integration into the Jewish Community.
Rabbi Peter Tarlow, Ph.D., will host and open this year's conference
on Thursday March 26th at 2:00 pm.
Peter Tarlow has been the rabbi at Texas A&M Hillel since 1983. In that capacity he has worked with Jewish students and faculty, taught courses on Jewish ethics and has served as a chaplain for the College Station Police Department. Tarlow is also an expert specializing in the impact of crime and terrorism on the tourism industry, event risk management, and in tourism and economic development. Tarlow earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Texas A&M University. He also holds degrees in history, in Spanish and Hebrew literatures, and in psychotherapy. Since 1990, Tarlow has been teaching courses on tourism, crime & terrorism to police forces and security and tourism professionals throughout the world.
Tarlow works with US government and international agencies such as the US Park Service at the Statue of Liberty, The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, The Smithsonian's Institution's Office of Protection Services, Philadelphia's Independence Hall and Liberty Bell and New York's Empire State Building. He has also worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the United Nation's WTO (World Tourism Organization), the Center for Disease Control (Atlanta, Triangle Series). Tarlow speaks throughout North and Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. Some of the topics about which he speaks are: the sociology of terrorism, its impact on tourism security and risk management, the US government's role in post terrorism recovery, and how communities and businesses must face a major paradigm shift in the way they do business. Tarlow has trained numerous police departments throughout the world in TOPS (Tourism Oriented Policing Skills) and offers certification in this area.
Tarlow is a member of the Distance Learning Faculty of "The George Washington University" in Washington, DC. He is also an adjunct faculty member of Colorado State University and the Justice Institute of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Tarlow is also an honorary professor at the Universidad de Especialidades Turisticas (Quito, Ecuador), the graduate school at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Canada), of the Universidad de la Policia Federal (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and on the EDIT faculty at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, (O'ahu). Tarlow lectures on security issues, life safety issues, and event risk management at numerous other universities around the world including universities in the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Pacific Islands, and the Middle East.
Tarlow's fluency in many languages enables him to speak throughout the world (United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, and the Eastern Pacific). Tarlow also lectures on current and future trends in the tourism industry, rural tourism economic development, the gaming industry, issues of crime and terrorism, the role of police departments in urban economic development, and international trade. Tarlow has done extensive research on the impact of school calendars on the tourism industries, on tourism crime, and on terrorism. Tarlow is also well known in the area of rural tourism having lectured on this subject in numerous states throughout the United States. Tarlow publishes extensively in these areas and writes numerous professional reports for US governmental agencies and for businesses throughout the world.
Tarlow has appeared on National televised programs such as Dateline: NBC and on CNBC. Tarlow organizes conferences around the world dealing with visitor safety and security issues and with the economic importance of tourism and tourism marketing. He also works with numerous cities, states, and foreign governments to improve their tourism products and to train their tourism security professionals.
Michael S. Pincus will speak on Custom Data Mining for Crypto-Jewish Research, on Friday March 27th, at 1:45 pm.
Michael S. Pincus is an Information Technology executive, strategist, and content analyst, who has given professional counsel to government, defense, and commercial enterprises in many fields over the last 25 years. Operating through his US company Mnemotrix Systems, Inc., (a full service Enterprise Systems Company) begun in 1986 as a B2B technology developer and integrator for Advanced Information Systems applications, he provides custom intelligent agent database, and information mining, fusion and analysis services hosted and distributed over the Internet to corporate clients world-wide. His work includes advanced methods in data mining and fusion, for retrieving and correlating text and images using concepts and ideas and in natural language. He is an expert in devising data and information mining algorithms which locate and automatically connect ideas, metaphors, concepts and themes to other similar ideas and motifs in news, creative literature, technical, scientific and medical material, and many other bodies of mission-critical and strategic data including the extraction of sentiment and trends from social media. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Texas A&M Hillel Foundation.
Mr. Pincus has a background of many years of hands-on experience in high performance information search and analysis. Having founded Thunderstone Software/Expansion Programs International, Inc. in 1981, which became a world leader in advanced information technology, (search technology of eBay and Dogpile) he went on to design and implement advanced text and computing applications for NASA, the US Dept of Agriculture, the Dept of Energy, the Dept of Defense and other branches of the U.S. Government, for private corporations and educational institutions worldwide, and contributed to much of the early R&D in Artificial Intelligence in the field of Information Mining and Data Fusion.
Mr. Pincus has built and hosted over 250 Business Intelligence, Market Trend Analysis and Social Media Sentiment Extraction Systems for Leading Fortune 1000 companies. In 2006 working established Imaginative Access Ltd, focused on building and hosting Smart Art Image, Film/Animation and Sound library applications using "Imaginative Access" technology for the Art, Film and Music merchandising industry as well as New Media applications for the entertainment industry overall in film script and literature analysis. In 2008 he went on to create SmoothSlice technology to augment the process of converting New Media products into knowledge-based vertical Internet accessible applications in association with Metropolitan Pictures of Hartsdale, NY.
Mr. Pincus's career spans over twenty-five years working with world class CEO's, opinion leaders, scientists, and industry professionals to improve their strategic analysis skills, effectiveness, and competitive advantage.
Dr. Stanley M. Hordes will speak on The Sephardic Legacy in New Mexico: A History of the Crypto-Jews, on Friday March 27th at 9:00 am.
Dr. Stanley M. Hordes, Adjunct Research Professor at the Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexico, received his B.A. in History from the University of Maryland in 1971, his M.A. in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico in 1973, and his Ph.D. from Tulane University in 1980. His doctoral dissertation, "The Crypto-Jewish Community of New Spain, 1620-1649: A Collective Biography," was based on research conducted in the archives of Mexico and Spain, supported by a Fulbright dissertation fellowship.
His study on the secret Jews of Mexico revealed a considerable amount of information about the religious customs and career patterns of the descendants of those Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of these conversos continued to practice their old ancestral faith in secrecy, and moved to the Spanish colonies in the New World in order to avoid detection by the Inquisition.
When Dr. Hordes assumed the position of New Mexico State Historian in 1981, he began to encounter Catholic and Protestant Hispanic New Mexicans whose families observed customs suggestive of a Jewish background, such as maintaining dietary laws, celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday, performing ritual male circumcision, etc. Interviews with several dozen informants revealed that while many of these people engage in these practices without knowing why, others, indeed, express an awareness of a Jewish heritage, and regard themselves as secret Jews. Preliminary documentary evidence, conducted in the archives of New Mexico, Mexico, Spain and Portugal, indicate that some of these individuals descend from secret Jews who had been persecuted by the Inquisition in Mexico and Spain.
Dr. Hordes's book, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, was published by Columbia University Press in 2005 with a generous grant from the estate of Eva Feld. In 2006 the book was awarded the "Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Prize" by the Historical Society of New Mexico for outstanding historical publication of the year. In 2007, the book won the Southwest Book Award, given by the Border Regional Library Association.
Consuelo Luz will speak on "Finding My Mazal, a Crypto-Jewish Musical Journey", on Friday March 27th, at 10:15 am.
"A shining star in the firmament of Sephardic music" is what David Steinberg of the Albuquerque Journal calls Consuelo Luz. Her music has been heard around the world and her songs included in popular and prestigious international compilations such as Buddha Bar and the Putumayo series.
Consuelo performs internationally, exploring the transformational power of music, and weaving in Crypto Jewish history, mystical wisdom & personal stories of her journey from a Cuban-Chilean Catholic upbringing to discovering and owning her Jewish roots. Following her critically acclaimed album of Sephardic Ladino music, "Dezeo," in her latest CD "Adio" she continues adapting ancient Jewish prayers and ballads from Spain, the Mediterranean and the Middle East into a passionate marriage of Jewish and Latin soul.
Consuelo was a cantorial soloist of Sephardic sacred music at Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe for fifteen years and sings regularly at Santa Fe's Congregation Ha Makom. Past venues include:
- Parliament of World Religions in Barcelona, Spain
- Les Orientales Sacred Music Festival in France
- World Expo in Germany
- Sephardic Arts Festival in Los Angeles
- National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque
- San Fernando Cathedral and Temple Beth El in San Antonio, Texas
- Lensic Theater, Santa Fe, New Mexico
- BB Kings Blues Club in New York City
- Café de la Niña, Isla Negra, Chile
Consuelo is the first in her family to explore and celebrate her Sephardic ancestry, in her case, the history of those who emigrated from Spain and settled in Latin America and in the US Southwest, some secretly maintaining their traditions, others forgetting.
Phone: 505-470-5377, www.consueloluz.com
Rafaela Acevedo-Field will speak on The Role of Women in the Crypto-Jewish Community in Early Seventeenth Century Mexico, on Thursday March 26th, at 2:20 pm.
Rafaela Acevedo-Field is a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was raised in Mexico City and came to the United States at the age of twelve. She obtained a B.A. from the University of California, Davis in Spanish and History in 1995 and went on to earn a M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Latin American and Iberian Studies in 2000. In 2004 she began work on her doctorate in history also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is writing a dissertation on the lives of the Crypto-Jews tried by the Inquisition in Mexico throughout the decade of the 1640s and their role in the transatlantic world in the seventeenth century.
Last summer she conducted research in Spain at the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) in Madrid and at the Archivo de Indias (AGI) in Sevilla through funding from the James R. Scobie Memorial Award for Preliminary Ph.D. Research granted by the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), the AHA-affiliated organization of Latin American historians. In February 2009 she conducted further research at the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City.
Bennett Greenspan will speak on DNA and Crypto Jews
on Friday March 27th, at 11:30 am.
Since its inception, in April of 2000, Family Tree DNA has been
associated with the Arizona Research Labs, led by Dr. Michael Hammer,
one of the world's leading authorities in the field of Y-DNA
genetics. Family Tree DNA has other renowned scientists on its
advisory board and is the world leader in the field of genetic
genealogy exploration. With over 195,000 records, Family Tree DNA
has the largest database of its kind in the world.
Family Tree DNA and other cooperative ventures, including the
National Geographic Society's Genographic Project and AfricanDNA.com,
now comprise the largest non-medical DNA testing program in the
world. Family Tree DNA was founded in 2000 by Mr. Bennett Greenspan,
an entrepreneur and life-long genealogy enthusiast, turning a hobby
into a full-time vocation. His effort and innovation created the
burgeoning field now known as genetic genealogy.
Mr. Greenspan, a Nebraskan native who received his B.A. from the
University of Texas, spent years investigating the ancestors of his
maternal grandfather, an obsession which eventually led to the
founding of Family Tree DNA and the beginning of a new kind of
genealogy.
As a serial entrepreneur, his business career has spanned
photographic equipment and supplies, real estate, the pro-college
website GoCollege.com, Family Tree DNA, and is now also involved in
DNATraits.com, a new medical genetic testing company.
Despite the long hours and frequent travel, Mr. Greenspan is still
married and enjoys returning home to his wife and two children.
Carlos Larralde will speak on A History of J.T. Canales, on Thursday March 26th, at 4:30 pm.
Dr. Carlos Montalvo Larralde is an independent scholar who has written
several monographs and articles in Mexican American studies and
Crypto-Jewish Studies. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the
University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Larralde's doctoral
dissertation is entitled Chicano Jews in South Texas (1978).
In his dissertation, Dr. Larralde argued for a Crypto-Jewish
presence in south Texas that stretched back to the colonial period.
He is one of three co-authors of the book Juan N. Cortina and the
Struggle for Justice in Texas (2000).
