lecture
Lunchtime Lecture: Magda Teter on Early Modern German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom
Magda Teter will discuss early modern German-Jewish history.
As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.
About the Speaker:
Magda Teter is a Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2005), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation(2011), Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism(2023), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her essays have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Public Seminar, the JTA, and others. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Ronald Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Her new book, Blood Libels, Hostile Archives: Reclaiming Interrupted Jewish Lives was published in April 2025. Teter has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, HF Guggenheim Foundation, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Cullman Center at the NYPL, the NEH, and others. She is currently the President of the American Academy of Jewish Research.
Ticket Info: Free
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lecture
panel discussion
New Trends in YIVO Scholarship – Live on Zoom
Since 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been a pioneer in the field of Jewish studies. At the core of YIVO since its founding was its commitment to scholarship which supported the Jewish “folk.” This manifested in a variety of initiatives, including youth autobiography contests and a youth research division (yugfor), an Economic-Statistical section (ekstat), and the establishment of various YIVO branches. These YIVO's activities continue to pique the interests of scholars, who have recently produced new scholarship analyzing these initiatives through the lens of new pioneering research methods.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion sharing new research on these historic YIVO initiatives featuring presentations by William Pimlott, Kamil Kijek, and Nicolas Vallois, followed by a conversation led by Jessica Kirzane.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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panel discussion
lecture
“Nafkes on the Stoop”: Prostitutes’ Impact on the Lower East Side of New York in the Early Twentieth Century – Live on Zoom
This lecture will explore the intertwined lives of prostitutes with the larger Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side in the early-twentieth century. It will discuss the ways that prostitutes’ neighbors negotiated the realities of living among prostitutes – including increasing their own income by performing domestic labor or other services for sex workers, handling the noise and foot traffic in their buildings from the men coming and going, and the tensions of the use of space in the streets of New York. It will also explore themes of family and family business and look at the ways prostitutes constructed their families around the sale of sex as well as other illicit activities. Prostitutes claimed space on the streets and in the tenements of the Lower East Side and in doing so, shaped the urban environment and the Jewish immigrant experience.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
concert
Pride Party! With Special Concert Appearance by BETTY – In-Person Event
Consisting of Alyson Palmer (vocals, bass, guitar) and sisters and Amy Ziff (vocals and cello) and Elizabeth Ziff (vocals, guitar, electronic programming), BETTY was founded in the late 1980s outside Washington, DC. Amy and Elizabeth are proudly Jewish, and Aly proudly advocates for Jewish and Black relations.
BETTY has received numerous awards for their work in television, movies, and theater. They have toured the world, playing in Jewish museums, concert halls, clubs and festivals.
This concert is for all ages and is a celebration of Pride Month.
Kosher food by Lox Café will be available for purchase at a pop-up cafe in the Great Hall from 10:00 am - 5:00 pm.
Ticket Info: $45 general admission; $35 CJH members; $25 seniors/students/children; click here to register
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concert
film screening
Im Land Meiner Eltern - In-person Program
“Had it not been for Hitler, I would have been born a German-Jewish child, more German than Jewish, in a small village in the South of Germany.” – Jeanine Meerapfel
On June 16, 2025, LBI will screen Im Land Meiner Eltern (In the Country of My Parents) a documentary by acclaimed German-Argentine director Jeanine Meerapfel. In this deeply personal film, Meerapfel follows her family’s German roots in search for her own Jewish identity.
You can learn more about the film here.
This event is co-sponsored by Friends of Freiburg University. The screening will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.
Ticket Info: Free
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film screening
conference
YIVO in America – In-person Event and Live on Zoom
Join us for a celebration of YIVO’s 100th anniversary with a conference focusing on how YIVO’s founding vision for Jewish social sciences has been realized in America since its headquarters shifted to New York City in 1940.
The destruction of East European Jewry during the Holocaust—including YIVO’s original headquarters in Vilna—challenged fundamental ideas about Jewish peoplehood and the Yiddish language’s role in it that had animated YIVO since its founding. Despite this, YIVO continued to publish scholarly works in America, support the study of Yiddish linguistics and folklore, and serve as a repository documenting East European Jewish history and culture. YIVO also developed new ventures, helping to create the field of Holocaust studies, playing a pioneering role in the teaching of Yiddish as it ceased being the mother tongue of the Jewish masses, and bolstering the development of Jewish studies more broadly.
In this conference, scholars will discuss YIVO’s work since 1940 touching on how YIVO’s purpose shifted in the American context, major achievements of YIVO’s work in America, YIVO’s role in the post-war evolution of Yiddish and Jewish studies, and what work lies ahead for YIVO and Jewish studies more broadly.
Scholars featured in this conference include Jonathan Brent, Leyzer Burko, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Eric Goldstein, Itzik Gottesman, Stefanie Halpern, Cecile Kuznitz, Rebecca Margolis, Anita Norich, Samuel Norich, Naomi Seidman, Mark Smith, and Kalman Weiser.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
conference
conference
YIVO in America – In-person Event and Live on Zoom
Join us for a celebration of YIVO’s 100th anniversary with a conference focusing on how YIVO’s founding vision for Jewish social sciences has been realized in America since its headquarters shifted to New York City in 1940.
The destruction of East European Jewry during the Holocaust—including YIVO’s original headquarters in Vilna—challenged fundamental ideas about Jewish peoplehood and the Yiddish language’s role in it that had animated YIVO since its founding. Despite this, YIVO continued to publish scholarly works in America, support the study of Yiddish linguistics and folklore, and serve as a repository documenting East European Jewish history and culture. YIVO also developed new ventures, helping to create the field of Holocaust studies, playing a pioneering role in the teaching of Yiddish as it ceased being the mother tongue of the Jewish masses, and bolstering the development of Jewish studies more broadly.
In this conference, scholars will discuss YIVO’s work since 1940 touching on how YIVO’s purpose shifted in the American context, major achievements of YIVO’s work in America, YIVO’s role in the post-war evolution of Yiddish and Jewish studies, and what work lies ahead for YIVO and Jewish studies more broadly.
Scholars featured in this conference include Jonathan Brent, Leyzer Burko, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Eric Goldstein, Itzik Gottesman, Stefanie Halpern, Cecile Kuznitz, Rebecca Margolis, Anita Norich, Samuel Norich, Naomi Seidman, Mark Smith, and Kalman Weiser.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
conference
lecture
A Turning Point in Remembrance: YIVO in the 1940s – Live on Zoom
Shortly after the start of World War II, YIVO’s New York branch was designated as its temporary central headquarters, assuming that the Institute would return to Europe after the war. But by 1943, scholars from the Vilna YIVO who had recently moved to New York realized that there would be no going back; New York City would now be the Institute’s permanent home. How did YIVO’s leaders reconfigure its mission in the wake of the Holocaust and in response to their American home? This talk by Jeffrey Shandler will examine some of the Institute’s undertakings during this crucial decade—including unrealized plans to create a Museum of the Homes of the Past—as its leaders forged a new sense of purpose in response to their radically altered circumstances.
Buy Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum.
About the Speaker
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Yiddish: Biography of a Language(Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and translator of Emil and Karl (Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006), a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Rachel Cockerell – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (New York Times bestselling author and journalist ) sits down with author Rachel Cockerell. Rachel’s recent book Melting Point is centered around the Galveston Movement, a long-forgotten project that brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas pre-WWI – led by her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. The book is constructed entirely of primary sources, one flowing into the next, so long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell a story with novel-like vividness and detail. During the process of writing the book, Rachel’s research took her to Texas, Ohio, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. She has spoken about her work on CNN, the BBC and at TEDx.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
lecture
The Poetry of Chaim Grade – Live on Zoom
Joshua Price | Delivered in Yiddish.
This lecture will provide an overview of the poetry of Chaim Grade (1910-1982). Though he is known today as one of the greatest postwar Yiddish prose writers (and justifiably so), he also published ten volumes of poetry which deal with the most pressing issues of his life and times: departing the world of the Mussar yeshiva and entering a world “already descending from its cross”; the imperative to create his “own yizkor book” in none other than his “tortured Yiddish tongue”; and the rise of his “quiet Holy City,” Jerusalem, in the old-new Israel. Grade’s poems will be read with the help of Grade himself, on the basis of his archive at YIVO and an interview with Avrom Tabatshnik (1955).
About the Speaker
Joshua Price is a Senior Lector in Yiddish at Yale and has been teaching in the YIVO Summer Program since 2018. He received his Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University (2020) with a dissertation on the translation of world literature into Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work has appeared in In geveb, Jews and Slavs, and Afn shvel. He is currently at work on a study of Yiddish and/as world literature for the forthcoming edited volume Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Yiddish Memories of Small-Town Jewish Life in Ukraine – Live on Zoom
Jeffrey Veidlinger | Delivered in English.
Drawing from some four hundred Yiddish-language interviews conducted by the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories project, Jeffrey Veidlinger will explore how elderly Yiddish speakers in Ukraine described their memories of Jewish life in the Soviet shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism.
This exploration will help us understand how despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, these interviews infused with memories of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life, even within the shadow of the shtetl.
About the Speaker
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies and Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan. His most recent book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Ukrainian Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (2021), won a Canadian Jewish Literary Award and the Stan Vine Book Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the Lionel Gelber Award, and the Wingate Literary Prize. He is also the author of the award-winning books: The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (2000), Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2009), and In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (2013). Veidlinger is Vice-President of the American Academy for Jewish Research, Past Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, and a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
lecture
Kine un kloglid – The Yiddish Art of Lamentation in Early Modern Ashkenaz – Live on Zoom
Diana Matut | Delivered in Yiddish.
In this lecture, Diana Matut will delve deep into the history of Yiddish song cultures. Yiddish or bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish laments, dirges, or elegies in early modern Ashkenazi society were both individual and communal. Mourning through song offered ways of coping and establishing patterns of memory. Through it, history was being narrated and interpreted. In turn, lamenting about past or present experiences helped to form the identities of Jewish communities and to keep memory alive. Laments were part of establishing wider societal norms of ethics and behavior, often with the ultimate objective of preparing the singer or reader for the end of their lives.
This lecture will also explore the more “entertaining” sides of the lament, namely, in parodies and Purim plays between 1500 and 1800.
About the Speaker
Dr. Diana Matut teaches Old Yiddish and Jewish Music at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Formerly a lecturer for Jewish Studies at Halle University, she is now director of the Old Synagogue — House of Jewish Culture in Essen. She was the Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow in East European Jewish Arts, Music, and Theater at YIVO (New York) and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (three times). From 2019 to 2020, she was the convenor of the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies and led a research group focusing on "Jewish Musical Cultures in Europe, 1500-1750." In 2021, she was awarded the Mare-Balticum-Fellowship of the University of Rostock. In 2019, Matut, together with American composer/arranger Josh Horowitz, led the Henech Kon Project, which brought the only surviving pre-war Yiddish opera from Europe back on stage (omaworks.eu/triangle-orchestra).
Various musical projects are the result of her cooperation with Yiddish Summer Weimar, among them the Young Kadya Choir, a German-Israeli project which became the focus of a documentary; a CD with rediscovered Yiddish children’s songs called Far dem nayem dor – For the New Generation; and the Glikl-oratorye, focusing on the life of early modern Jewish woman Glikl of Hameln, which Matut wrote together with Alan Bern (www.glikl.eu).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Family History Today: Strategies to Analyze Endogamous DNA – Live on Zoom
This lecture will discuss how best to weed out false-positive DNA Matches that test-takers from endogamous groups face daily. Participants will learn about segment analysis and threshold manipulation to determine which matches are worth pursuing. The benefits and drawbacks of each testing platform will be covered, and finally the use of tools such as DNA Painter will be demonstrated. Presented by Alec Ferretti.
About the Speaker
Alec Ferretti is a New-York-City-based professional genealogist, who has worked for the Wells Fargo Family & Business History Center, researching family histories for high-net-worth clients. Alec specializes in the genealogy of 20th century immigrants to the United States. He is a regular lecturer at genealogical societies and conferences. He serves as the President of the New York Genealogy & Technology Group, serves actively on the Board of Directors of the Association of Professional Genealogists, and on the Board of Reclaim the Records, a nonprofit dedicated to wrangling public records from obstinate government agencies.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish with a minimum of $5 per ticket; register here
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
“You had buried me, and I’ve come back!”: Manipulation, Lies, and the Archives of the Cinematic Dybbuk – Live on Zoom
Zehavit Stern | Delivered in English.
This talk explores how stories are told—and sometimes fabricated—through film. Our starting point is the 1937 Yiddish film The Dybbuk, based on S. An-sky’s celebrated play (1914–17), a cornerstone of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater. This classic film is juxtaposed with the 2017 German-Polish documentary The Prince and the Dybbuk, which traces the enigmatic life of the art film’s director, Michal Waszynski. As archival traces blur into cinematic invention, the documentary raises deeper questions about memory, identity, and loss. The talk thus reflects on the haunting legacy of a lost Eastern European Jewish world and on how film can preserve, possess, or lay claim to possession—revealing as much about our present desires as about the past it seeks to recover.
About the Speaker
Zehavit Stern is a scholar of Yiddish theater, film, literature and folklore, and of Hebrew literature. She holds an MA in Yiddish culture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). She has taught at the University of Oxford (2011-2015), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University and is currently the Academic Dean, head of Honors Program and assistant professor of theater studies, at Emuna Academic College of Arts and Education. She has published and lectured extensively on Eastern European Jewish culture. Among her publications are “The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, and “On Dubbing the Dead: The Dybbuk 1937-1917,” in TDR/The Drama Review (vol. 63:2, 2019). Her forthcoming book, titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Folk Performance: Eastern European Jewish Culture and the Invention of a National Dramatic Heritage examines the emergence of the narrative that views the Purim-shpil and other formerly rejected folkish expressions as the origins of Jewish theater.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish Warsaw on the Hudson – Live on Zoom
Ofer Dynes | Delivered in Yiddish.
The 1930s saw the immigration of a cohort of Yiddish writers from Poland to the United States that included Israel Joshua Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadya Molodowsky, Nachman Meisel, Melech Ravitch, and Aaron Zeitlin. Unlike many of their American contemporaries, they were all established writers prior to their emigration. This talk will explore how these authors' shared experience as immigrant writers shaped their understanding of the role of Yiddish in American cultural life, how this vision evolved during the World War II, and how their reimagining of Yiddish literature’s significance for American Jewry influenced their writings.
About the Speaker
Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at Harvard University (September 2016) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2016-2018). Before coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught classes in eastern European Jewish literature and history and served as the head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the 18th to 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the nexus of literature and political thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (1772–1848). He has also recently co-edited a special volume of Prooftexts, entitled The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe,with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto). Dynes is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New-York based workgroup for scholars in Hebrew Literature.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
lecture
The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth – Live on Zoom
Rebekka Voß | Delivered in English.
Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, and red-bearded Jewish warriors clad in red attire, the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are referred to as “Red Jews” (royte yidlekh) in Yiddish. This unique figure is a creation of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany and became a shared motif among both Jews and Christians, circulating in both Yiddish and German. These two linguistic communities interpreted the Red Jews in different ways, each contesting their significance and viewing them through varying shades of red.
This lecture by Rebekka Voß will trace the journey of the Red Jews through both Jewish and Christian imaginations, from their medieval origins to their presence in Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish literature. Focusing on select stories of the Red Jews, the lecture will explore their intertextuality, illustrating how this popular literary motif engaged with canonical texts, including the Bible, works of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (such as Toledot Yeshu, the polemical counter-story of the life of Jesus, and the romance Viduvilt), as well as medieval German literature.
About the Speaker
Rebekka Voß teaches Jewish history in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in early modern Europe, with special attention to cultural transfer between Jews and Christians.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Yiddish of Jerusalem: The Old Yishuv in the Research of Mordecai Kosover – Live on Zoom
Yaad Biran | Delivered in Yiddish.
In the 1930s, Mordecai Kosover, the young researcher of Yiddish from Vilna, lived in Jerusalem and recorded his observations about the local Yiddish of the Old Yishuv’s residents. This was part of a larger project of his: to demonstrate that the history of Jews of the modern-day Land of Israel began not with Rishon LeTzion (the 1882 first settlement of the New Yishuv), but decades earlier, and that, furthermore, the Jewish community of the Land of Israel was not a world apart but was in fact very connected to a worldwide “Yiddishland.”
About the Speaker
Dr. Yaad Biran received his Ph.D. in Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He teaches Yiddish language and culture at Beth Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv, at Haifa University and in the Tel Aviv summer course. He is a writer and a translator, the author of a short stories book "Laughing with Lizards" (Hebrew) and the writer of "Esther's Cabaret," a contemporary Yiddish Cabaret in Tel Aviv. He also guides Yiddish tours in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
book talk
Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America – In-Person Program
In this presentation, Michael Rom will explore the participation of Brazilian Jews in political movements throughout the Cold War. From Zionist and communist activists who fought against antisemitic immigration restrictions and the presence of Holocaust perpetrators in Brazil’s postwar democracy (1945-64), to Jewish students who were part of underground organizations that sought to overthrow the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85), Brazilian Jews have consistently played central roles in Brazilian political movements. Through this political activism, they sought to affirm and define belonging in their nation-state, ethnic community, and generation, while grappling with national myths about race, transnational political ideologies, and local and global forms of state violence. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in Brazil, Israel, and the United States, Brazilian newspapers in Portuguese and Yiddish, and oral history interviews with Brazilian Jewish political activists, this research situates Brazilian Jewish politics of belonging within the transnational contexts of the immediate of the Holocaust, Cold War superpower rivalries, Latin American revolutionary insurgencies, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A light reception, book sales, and signing will follow the program.
About the Speaker
Michael Rom is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles. He received a PhD in History from Yale University and held a graduate fellowship at Center for Jewish History in 2017-18. He has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Harvard University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Cape Town. His first book, Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America, is now available from Stanford University Press.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Photo: Scholem Aleichem School Bus, 1956, courtesy of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo, Brazil.
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book talk
lecture
The People’s Torah: Crowd-Sourcing Jewish Customs from An-ski to the Internet – Live on Zoom
Nathaniel Deutsch | Delivered in English.
A century ago, Sh. An-ski, the revolutionary and playwright most famous for The Dybbuk, described the countless customs that guided Jewish daily life as a kind of “Oral Torah.” To document the People's Torah, An-ski created a massive ethnographic questionnaire in Yiddish for use in the Russian Pale of Settlement and especially among its Hasidic residents. Now, a team of researchers led by Nathaniel Deutsch is launching The Digital Minhag Project, an interactive website built around a Yiddish-English version of An-ski’s ethnographic questionnaire that seeks to crowd-source contemporary Jewish customs or minhagim, beginning with those still practiced by Hasidic communities. What has changed since An-ski created his questionnaire? What has remained the same?
About the Speaker
Nathaniel Deutsch combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to explore phenomena from antiquity to the modern period. He is a professor of history and holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute for more than a decade and the Chair of the University of California Consortium of Humanities Centers. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and an Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. Deutsch is currently creating “The Digital Minhag Project: A Crowd-Sourced Archive of Jewish Customs.”
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture