The Bruce Greenburg Lecture Series Purim will hold “Carnival in the Caribbean” on Tuesday, March 24, as the event will explore Jewish history and culture in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

This free event will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the University of Florida’s Pugh Hall Ocora Room (296 Buckman Dr., Gainesville).  Click here to reserve a spot.

The lecture series, sponsored by the UF Bud Shorenstein Center for Jewish Studies, commemorates the ancient story of Jewish survival in Persia and is still celebrated today with community gatherings each spring. Around the world, these celebrations merge into local customs.

In the Caribbean, where Jewish communities began settling in the late 17th century, Purim celebrations grew into vibrant festivals marked by music, masquerade and shared public celebration.

In this lecture, Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur will explore how Purim in the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Curaçao and Suriname evolved into a two-week celebration that brought together Jewish and non-Jewish communities and saw free and enslaved people celebrating together. Using Purim as a lens, Ben-Ur will trace the rich and complex history of the Caribbean’s Jewish communities and their deep connection with the region’s broader African-diaspora cultures, revealing how a single holiday created opportunity for cultural exchange, shared festivity and intertwined histories.

Ben-Ur is a professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a historian specializing in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora. She is the author of “Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).