In Dawson City, by the Yukon River, up north in Canada, there is a bar where you can order a shot of whiskey garnished with a real, dehydrated human toe. The ritual known as the “Sourtoe Cocktail” started more than forty years ago and has become almost like a rite of passage for visitors to Dawson City.

The story goes that back in the 1920s, a rum-runner named Louie Linken and his brother Otto ran into an awful blizzard, and Louie got his big toe frozen solid. In order to prevent gangrene, Otto chopped off his brother’s frostbitten toe. The two then preserved the amputated toe in a jar of alcohol as a memento. Fifty years later, a Yukon local named Captain Dick Stevenson found the jar containing theKrause of Boston College and Ora Szekely of Clark University.

Last fall UConn’s Center for Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies in Stamford hosted a conference on the region’s issues that included leading experts on al-Qaida and Iran; and in early March noted author and humorist Sayed Kashua visited Storrs to discuss his life as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. On May 1, the Middle East Studies program will be a co-sponsor of a workshop on the region for Connecticut teachers at the Hartford Seminary.

The Center for Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies at UConn’s Stamford campus has been organizing full day conferences on Middle Eastern affairs since the early 1980s, where keynote speakers have been world-renowned political scientists and policy analysts.

“We were able to attract both our students and the