City Tech Professor Mushabac Named 2011 Scholar on NYCCT Campus for her Sephardic Short Story: Pasha

“Pasha,” she says, “is a Turkish word -- it means a high-ranking official and represents a kind of machismo. My fiction based in this culture in Turkey and the U.S. provides a way of exploring gender, identity and survival. ‘Pasha’ is a Spanish story, also a Turkish story, a Jewish story, an immigrant story and an American story -- but mostly it is a story about manhood.”

After a brief introduction to place the story in the context of Turkish-Jewish culture, Dr. Mushabac, who teaches literature and writing at City Tech, will perform it rather than simply read it. “Just as I encourage my creative writing students to get into the roles they read, I wanted to experience the fun of performance art,” she says.

This unusual work exemplifies Dr. Mushabac’s multidisciplinary approach. She was inspired to delve into her Sephardic culture, she says, because, “It was my life. From the songs my father taught me, from studying Spanish in high school, from my mother saying, ‘Let’s do a Sephardic cookbook,’ I was in the culture. I wanted to communicate what was distinctive.”

Dr. Mushabac’s work in print includes the critically acclaimed Melville's Humor: A Critical Study (Archon, 1981) and (with Angela Wigan) A Short and Remarkable History of New York City (Fordham University Press, 1999, Fifth printing, 2008), selected as one of the “Best of the Best” university press books in 2000 by the American Association of University Presses.

She has also published essays in periodicals and scholarly journals, including “Notes on Teaching Moby-Dick,” in the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick (1985). Her writing has been translated into German, Russian and Bulgarian. “Pasha” and “New Jersey” (a story that was published in Chautauqua in May 2010) will soon be available in French.

As a historian, Dr. Mushabac appeared in the television documentary, “Diamond at the Rock: 75 Years of Radio City Music Hall,” which premiered on NBC-TV, and also created a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded podcast audio tour, “Civil War Stories,” on Walt Whitman and the Civil War. As an NEH Faculty Fellow at City Tech, she participated in the faculty development initiative “Retentions and Transfigurations: The Evolution and Social Histories of Five New York City Neighborhoods.”

As a creative artist, Dr. Mushabac has written a radio play, Mazal Bueno: A Portrait in Song of the Spanish Jews, which was broadcast on NPR and is available as a CD on Western Wind Records. Her monologue “Joya Gormezano” is performed by Tovah Feldshuh in her one-woman show Tovah: Out of Her Mind! and has been seen by audiences in many cities here and abroad, including at Lincoln Center.

Dr. Mushabac was selected as a 2007–2008 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for fiction at The CUNY Graduate School’s Center for the Humanities for work on her novel, The Hundred Year Old Man, an episode of which is set in Brooklyn. She also has been awarded fellowships from the American Association of University Women and Harvard University as well as three PSC-CUNY grants for her fiction and essays about Judeo-Spanish characters and culture.

Recently, her article, "Is 'Sephardic' a Name Brand?" was published in Conversations, the journal of The Institute of Jewish Ideas and Ideals, and has stirred discussion on the topic of Sephardic Jewry in the U.S.

A Manhattan native, Dr. Mushabac is a longtime Upper West Side resident and the co-founder and board member of the 1,000-strong Safe Haven West Side Basketball League for children. She received a BA magna cum laude with distinction in all subjects from Cornell University, an MA from Harvard and a PhD from The CUNY Graduate Center, all in English.

The largest public college of technology in New York State, New York City College of Technology of The City University of New York enrolls 15,400 students in 62 baccalaureate, associate and specialized certificate programs. Located at 300 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn, City Tech is at the MetroTech Center academic and commercial complex, convenient to public transportation. Source: newswise.com