conversation
At Lunch with Trish Hall
Author and journalist Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal and NY Times) sits down with influential cultural leaders in the Jewish American Community; we'll hear their thoughts about working in this present moment, current projects, and what they have to say about their Jewish identity. Grab your lunch and tune in for our conversation with Trish Hall, writer and former New York Times editor & journalist.
Our Guest This Month: Trish Hall- is a writer and journalist who worked for the New York Times for more than two decades. She initially joined the paper from The Wall Street Journal as a food reporter and eventually oversaw all the feature sections as a member of the masthead. For almost five years, she served as the Op Ed editor. She expanded the reach and the nature of digital offerings, winning an Emmy for an Op Doc produced by her team. She also created the Sunday Review, which since its inception has been one of the most popular sections at the Times. Her book for Norton, "Writing to Persuade," was published in June 2019. She lives in New York City.
Interviewed By: Julie Salamon- is an American author, critic and storyteller. She worked at The Wall Street Journal for five years first as a commodities and banking reporter before spending eleven years as the paper's film critic. Later she became a staff journalist at The New York Times where she was a TV critic and arts reporter. Later she gained fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and became a Kaiser Media Fellow. She has written both fiction and non-fiction books for adults and children-- and produced articles for magazines that include The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and The New Republic. Her books have received wide critical and popular attention, she has just completed "Unlikely Friends," a memoir for Audible Original, scheduled for release in 2021.
Ticket Info: Free; register at forms.office.com for a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Family History Today: Researching your Family History in Israel from Home
Rescheduled from January 21, 2021
Searching for records of your family in Israel can be daunting. Fortunately, much of your research can now be done online. In this lecture, Garri Regev, President of the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA), will provide an overview of the types of records available online and where to focus your efforts. In addition, you will learn about alternatives to vital records and how you can create a vivid picture of how your ancestors lived in Israel.
This program is funded, in part, by a Humanities New York CARES Grant, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/family-history-today-2021-04-15 to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
virtual tour
Global Nacao: Synagogue Tour - Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and St. Thomas
Join us as we explore three more Western Sephardi communities that have spread around the globe.
Indonesia:
Yaakov Baruch was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. His grandmother's family came from the Netherlands. In 2004 Mr. Baruch opened a synagogue for the Jews of the Netherlands who remain in Indonesia.
Dominican Republic:
Dr. Hakham Yehonatan Elazar-Demota was born in Miami. He comes from a long line of Sephardic families from Spain, Portugal, and North Africa who established themselves in the Caribbean. He is trained as a Hakham, shochet, and mohel. The Sephardic community in La Romana, Dominican Republic was established in 2013. Today there are over 50 families that gather there. The synagogue was established in 2017 in its current location. Members from the community built the hekhal, teba, and a wooden menorah for Hanukkah.
St. Thomas:
The Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas was founded by nine Sephardic Jewish families of Spanish and Portugese descent. Today, it is the oldest synagogue building in continuous use under the American flag and the second oldest in the western hemisphere. Rabbi Michael Feshbach has been leading the congregation since 2017.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
virtual tour
lecture
Global Nacao: Five London Hakhamim in the Early Enlightenment
The centers of Sephardic life in early modern Europe--Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Livorno, Venice--were at the very same time the fulcrum of Enlightenment culture. While we know about Sephardic figures like Spinoza and da Costa who were deeply engaged with Enlightenment ideas, most Sephardim were engrossed in commerce. What was on the minds of their Hakhamim, who, in the case of London, lived in close proximity to Locke, Newton and Boyle?
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Professor Matt Goldish, Dept. of History, Ohio State University is a specialist in Jewish and European History, with interests in Messianism, Jewish-Christian intellectual relations, and Sephardic studies. He holds the Samuel M. and Esther Melton Chair in Jewish History. He earned his B.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. His Ph.D. (1996) is from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Goldish has published "Judaism in the Theology of Sir Issac Newton" (Dordrecht: Kluwer-- International Archives of the History of Ideas, 1998), "The Sabbatean Prophets" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), "Jewish Questions: Responsa on Jewish Life in the Early Modern Period" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), and several edited collections, as well as articles and book reviews. Professor Goldish is active as an invited lecturer in various academic and community environments.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
The Light of Days: the Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
Judy Batalion's new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos—already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture—brings the largely unknown stories of Jewish women resistance fighters to light. Join us for a conversation with Batalion about this new book led by Andrew Silow-Carroll (New York Jewish Week).
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Women-Resistance-Fighters for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
A Conversation on Charlotte Salomon
Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds, UK) will be in conversation with Kerry Wallach (Gettysburg College, PA) about the work and life of the Berlin-born Jewish artist, Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943).
Murdered with her unborn child on arrival at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26, Charlotte Salomon left behind an artistic legacy that is as beguiling as it is perplexing. A single, composite artwork of images, text and music that she titled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? Or Theater?) comprises 784 paintings in a variety of modes produced in one year between 1941 and 1942 in the South of France. Salomon began the work after having spent several months in a French concentration camp at Gurs where many ‘German’ refugees in the France had been interned, including Hannah Arendt. In 1943, Salomon had been forced into hiding once Italy, hitherto controlling the Nice region where so many Jewish refugees had sought refuge, fell to German control after Hitler’s invasion of Italy. Pollock is the author of Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory (Yale U. Press, 2018. She has described Leben? oder Theater? as “an event in the history of modern art,” and has sought to present a searching analysis of Salomon’s paintings through the lenses of feminist art history and Jewish studies in order to draw out a more complex range of meanings in the work than are usually ascribed to it when it has treated as a visual autobiography.
Kerry Wallach, the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (U. of Mich. Press, 2017), brings to the conversation insights that she has gained from her research on German-Jewish culture as well as new ones related to the preparation of the first book-length study of East European-born Jewish artist and illustrator Rahel Szalit-Marcus (1888–1942).
Ticket Info: Free; register at eventbrite.com/e/a-conversation-on-artist-charlotte-salomon-tickets-132447779875 for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Global Nacao: How the Unique Confluence of Culture can Benefit Modern Jewry
Western Sephardim have lived in the West for over 400 years. Yet their unique background in Spain, rather than Germany and France, has given them a different lens on Western life and thought and we just may discover valuable lessons from them.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
panel discussion
Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski: New Scholarship on the History and Memory of the Holocaust in Poland
The new Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center—City University of New York launches its public programming with “In Honor of Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski: New Scholarship on the History and Memory of the Holocaust in Poland.” Chaired by Dr Joanna Sliwa (winner of the Fraenkel Prize, 2020), the program showcases a wave of outstanding young historians: Miranda Brethour, Alicja Podbielska, and Jonathan Zisook. Professors Engelking and Grabowski will offer remarks in response.
Panelists
Chair and moderator: Dr. Joanna Sliwa, author of Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust, awarded the 2020 Fraenkel Prize
Featuring a new wave of scholars:
, “Life and Death in the Shadow of Sobibór: Economic Dimensions of Jewish-Gentile Relations in the Town of Wlodawa, 1939-1944”
Alicja Podbielska, “The Righteous or Szmalcowniks?! Narrative of Rescue vs. Holocaust Scholarship”
Jonathan Zisook, “'Polityka Historyczna' and the Instrumentalization of the Holocaust in Contemporary Poland”
Responses by Profs Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski
Ticket Info: Free; register at gc-cuny.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Sephardi Thought and Modernity: In Praise of the Orient: Elia Benamozegh’s Sephardic Modernities
The intention of this series is to spark the interest in processes of Jewish modernization not exclusively mediated by Europeanization. The questions we will be dealing with are related to non-dichotomic identities, multiplicity and loss of language, colonization, social transformation, and intellectual responses to it. We will approach these questions by looking at Jewish-Arab influences, the Sephardi response to European modernization, the responses of the rabbinic leadership and the work of Sephardi intellectuals.
April 22nd: Clemence Boulouque (Columbia University): In praise of the Orient: Elia Benamozegh’s Sephardic Modernities
Ticket Info: Free; register at ucalgary.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Sutzkever Essential Prose
Sutzkever Essential Prose brings the largely unknown prose of seminal Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever to English readers in new translations by Zachary Sholem Berger. In these works, Sutzkever blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and poetry; between real and imagined; between memory and metaphor. He offers haunting scenes drawn from a vast imagination and from the unique life he lived—his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his trauma as a partisan fighter and a survivor of the Holocaust, and his post-war life as a Yiddish poet in Israel. Join us for a conversation celebrating this new book with translator Zachary Sholem Berger and scholars Miriam Trinh and Karolina Szymaniak, moderated by Justin Cammy.
About the Participants
Zackary Sholem Berger is a poet and translator working in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. His work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Yiddish Forward, and Asymptote and elsewhere. Themes of his verse range from the philosophical and medical to the immediate problems of his adopted city Baltimore. In the Yiddish world he might be best known as a regular contributor to the Forverts and the translator of Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat (as well as other Seuss creations) into Yiddish.
Dr. Miriam Trinh is a professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at Hebrew University. Co-founder of “Yo”-Yidish-Ort, a center for Yiddish language and culture in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, Trinh is a noted Yiddish educator including at many international summer courses around the world.
Justin Cammy is chair and associate professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College, and senior fellow of the Goldreich Institute for Yiddish at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of the introduction to The Full Pomegranate, a recent volume of Sutzkever poetry translated by Richard Fein. Cammy's own translation of Sutzkever's memoir Vilna Ghetto will appear with McGill-Queens University Press in 2021.
Karolina Szymaniak is assistant professor at the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wroclaw and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute. Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, and translation studies. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the POLIN Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in ?ódz. Her recent publications include Montages. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City and My wild goat. Anthology of women Yiddish poets (in Polish). She is also the editor of Rachel Auerbach's ghetto writings, which received the 2016 Polityka History Award.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Sutzkever-Essential-Prose for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
The Soul of Judaism - Jews of African Descent in America
Author Dr. Bruce D. Haynes speaks of his recent work The Soul of Judaism in conversation with Dr. Michael Alexander. The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent.
Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities.
Ticket Info: Free; register at forms.office.com for a Zoom link
About the Speakers:
Bruce D. Haynes was born in Harlem, New York. After receiving his B.A. in Sociology from Manhattanville College, he conducted applied research, under sociologist and jury expert Jay Schulman, selecting juries for trials throughout New York State. From there he went on to earn his doctorate in sociology from the City University of New York (1995) and was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Yale University in 1995. In 2001, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis, where he now serves as Professor of Sociology. In addition, he is now a Senior Fellow in the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University. In 2019 he was awarded the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.
Michael Scott Alexander is the Maimonides Chair of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at U.C. Riverside. He is the author of Jazz Age Jews, which won the National Jewish Book Award, and Making Peace with the Universe: Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing. Alexander earned a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University and a B.A. in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been faculty at the University of Oklahoma, as well as Temple University where he was director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. He has served on the board and as associate editor of American Jewish History, where he guest edited several volumes, including co-editing “The Color Issue” with Prof. Bruce Haynes (U.C. Davis). Alexander writes about Jewish history, psychology of religion, and medical humanities.
Presented by:
book talk
virtual tour
Global Nacao: Tour of the Venice Ghetto
Tour the Venice Ghetto with Moshe Bassali.
About the tour guide:
Moshe Bassali was born in Milan to Sephardic Jewish parents that came to Italy from Iran in the 1950's and married in Italy. His mother arrived at age 12 and went to school in Milan. Moshe has a degree in economics, works in diamonds, and is an official certified tour guide for Venice and Italy. He has been working in Venice since 1991 and after his marriage, Moshe and his wife, Tally, decided to move there. Currently they have three children. Moshe's father and brothers still live in Milan.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
virtual tour
lecture
Global Nacao: Dayan Dilemmas
In the past, when Jewish communities were largely insulated and autonomous, the functions and jurisdiction of a Beth Din were more clearly defined. In today's global world, where Jewish communities are less clearly defined, and the Beth Din is largely a private endeavor operating within the general legal framework of the local government, many dilemmas regarding authority and jurisdiction arise. Dayan Ofer Livnat will try to address some of the dilemmas dayanim are faced with, and in particular how they relate to issues of Jewish identity, conversions and monetary disputes.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Dayan Ofer Livnat serves as a Dayan on the Sephardi Beth of London. A graduate of the Eretz Hemdah Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, Dayan Livnat teaches in a number of programs for training rabbis and Dayanim, including the Semicha and Dayanut Programs run jointly by the Montefiore Endowment of London and Eretz Hemdah. A lecturer on Tanach at the Jerusalem College as well, Dayan Livnat has previously served in an artillery unit in the IDF and is currently studying for a PhD in Jewish studies at University College London.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (1906–1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-twentieth-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.
Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of the 1940s, Bugsy Siegel and his longtime partner in crime Meyer Lansky engaged in innumerable acts of violence. As World War II came to an end, Siegel saw the potential for a huge, elegant casino resort in the sands of Las Vegas. Jewish gangsters built nearly all of the Vegas casinos that followed. Then, one by one, they disappeared. Siegel’s story laces through a larger, generational story of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early- to mid-twentieth century.
Program registrants will receive a code for 30% off and free shipping on the book.
This program is funded, in part, by a Humanities New York CARES Grant, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/bugsy-siegel-2021-04-26 to receive a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
The Jewish Experience in Opera
The volume and richness of operatic repertoire drawn from specifically Jewish experience often comes as a revelation to seasoned opera buffs and otherwise knowledgeable devotees of Jewish high culture alike. Yet, dating to the 19th century and continuing on a steep upward incline during the 20th and 21st centuries thus far, very many composers have turned for their operas to themes and subjects of Jewish history, legends, and sacred as well as secular literature. These operas range across several languages, including modern Hebrew and Yiddish.
This panel discussion will include four prominent composers of such operas of Jewish experience: Ofer Ben-Amots, composer of one opera in Hebrew based on The Dybbuk and another in Yiddish on Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, "A Fool's Paradise"; David Schiff, whose opera, Gimpel the Fool is also to a Singer story; Bruce Adolphe, whose operas include Mikhoyels The Wise—about the legendary Soviet Yiddish actor—and Shabbtai Zvi, about the 17th-century so-called "false messiah" naively followed by many thousands of Jews; and Alex Weiser, who wrote an opera about Theodor Herzl, State of the Jews, with librettist Ben Kaplan who will also join the panel.
Introduced and moderated by YIVO's Anne E. Leibowitz Visiting Professor-in-Residence in Music Neil W. Levin, the discussion among the panelists will address questions and issues of topic selection; musical interpretations or reinterpretations of Jewish stories, events, or characters; Jewish aesthetics vis-a-vis the operatic medium; intertwining roles between composer and librettist and/or author; the variety of musical approaches to Jewish themes; and the universal resonance of otherwise specifically Jewish subjects, when viewed through an operatic prism; and what qualifies as a "Jewish opera."
Ticket Info: Free; register at https://www.yivo.org/Jewish-Opera for a Zoom link
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
New Works Wednesday and Global Nacao: Chocolate Around the World
Around the globe today, chocolate is embraced not only by enthusiastic consumers but also by truly passionate creators who pour their hearts into their confections.
Here in this convenient guidebook are nearly 300 of these chocolate masters. From Brussels to Boston, Paris to Tokyo, London to Los Angeles, these are some of the most dedicated artisans anywhere.
Special listings for gluten-free, vegan, organic, and other dietary needs are also included.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Joshua de Sola Mendes is the proprietor of www.sandpcentral.org and www.grahamesguides.com. He is a proud S&P community member and researcher who works to bring the international communities together through his website, and under a separate hat, make us all happy through insight into chocolate and chocolatiering. Joining his will be master chocolatiers who will share some of their background.
Presented by:
book talk
book club
LBI Book Club, Vol. X: Nathan the Wise
One of the most frequently performed and widely read comedies of the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779) combines rich characterization with an engaging plot. Set in Muslim-ruled Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, it deals with universal themes -- including the nature of God, antisemitism, wealth and poverty, and the conflict between love and duty. Today the play is as timely as ever. (Macmillan Learning).
Author
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781) was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and an outstanding representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. Lessing was not Jewish, but was famous for his friendship with Jewish-German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A biography of Mendelssohn's grandson, Felix, describes their friendship as one of the most "illuminating metaphors [for] the clarion call of the Enlightenment for religious tolerance". It was this relationship that sparked his interest in popular religious debates of the time. He began publishing heated pamphlets on his beliefs which were eventually banned. It was this banishment that inspired him to write Nathan the Wise.
Recommended Edition of the Play
Our guest for this book club recommends this particular version of the text, which comes with accompanying essays and historical notes. Of course, any edition is fine, but this will be the edition "officially used" by the book club for the meeting. The book can be purchased on Amazon here.
Our Guest
We are pleased to have Professor Peter Jelavich, who was with us twice last year to discuss Berlin Alexanderplatz, return for our discussion of Nathan the Wise.
Peter Jelavich specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany. His areas of interest include the interaction of elite and popular culture; the history of mass culture and the media; and the application of cultural and social theories to historical study.
He is the author of Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914 (1985), Berlin Cabaret (1993), and Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (2006).
He currently is writing a book on censorship of the arts in Germany from 1890 to the present.
Ticket Info: Free; register at eventbrite.com for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book club
panel discussion
Leftists on Left-Wing Antisemitism
There is a robust discussion inside the Left about antisemitism in its own ranks. This is not just related to Zionism, Israel, and Palestine, but also involves questions about conspiracy theories, notions of secret elites, and critiques of financial capital—as well as how to deal with openly antisemitic actors. This unique panel will bring together four scholars and activists on the Left, who have a range of different views to discuss this. What does antisemitism on the Left actually consist of? Where do different parts of the Left stand in relation to this issue? How is it addressed or ignored? And what are constructive ways the Left can better deal with antisemitism?
Moderated by Spencer Sunshine, this panel will feature Sina Arnold, Shane Burley, Keith Kahn-Harris, and Joshua Leifer.
Ticket Info: Free; register at https://www.yivo.org/Leftists for a Zoom link
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
New Works Wednesdays with José Alberto R. Silva Tavim
In this edition of New Works Wednesday, José Alberto R. Silva Tavimwill discuss his new book "The Diasporas of Jews and New Christians of Iberian Origin between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean."
This book consists of a set of contributions, with different themes and chronologies, on the general theme of Jews of Iberian origin after the late 15th century conversions, that is, with an official Christian identity; and also about welcoming others, of remote Portuguese origin or not, in contemporary Portugal, but also in other longitudes, such as Egypt and Brazil, in different and sometimes even adverse circumstances.
In the light of the dispersion between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, one can visit, as an example, the fortunes of some of these New Christians in Portugal, and their presence, assuming again a Jewish identity, in Diaspora lands, in Europe and in the New World. Modernity reveals the resistance in Portugal of an awareness of being Jewish; and also that, alongside this phenomenon, the arrival of other Jews, especially from the Maghreb, is more than just a return, it is actually another stage of permanence in completely different contexts with regard to people's origins, their activities, acceptance and respect for its identity.
Ticket Info: $8; register at us02web.zoom.us for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Editor José Alberto R. Silva Tavim will share insights into the book along with some of the contributors: Hugo Martins, who is in Potsdam with a German research grant, published an article in English about the Jews of Hamburg in the 17th century; Angela Benoliel Coutinho (Portuguese-Cape Verdean) wrote about the migration of Jews from Morocco to Portugal and Cape Verde in the 19th and 20th centuries; and Luís Filipe Meneses, from the University of Belo Horizonte (Brazil), wrote an article about a Brazilian Jewish writer of Moroccan origin - Leão Pacífico Esaguy.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Information Hunters
Information Hunters examines the unprecedented American effort to acquire foreign publications and information in World War II Europe. An unlikely band of librarians, scholars, soldiers, and spies went to Europe to collect books and documents to aid the Allies’ cause. They traveled to neutral cities to find enemy publications for intelligence analysis and followed advancing armies to capture records in a massive program of confiscation. After the war, they seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools and gathered countless looted Jewish books. Improvising library techniques in wartime conditions, they contributed to Allied intelligence, preserved endangered books, engaged in restitution, and participated in the denazification of book collections. Information Hunters explores what collecting meant to the men and women who embarked on these missions and how the challenges of a total war led to an intense focus on books and documents. Book and document acquisition became part of the apparatus of national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. These efforts also spurred the development of information science and boosted research libraries’ ambitions to be great national repositories for research and the dissemination of knowledge that would support American global leadership, politically and intellectually.
Ticket Info: Free; register at forms.office.com for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work explores modern American cultural history, gender and sexuality, consumer culture, and the history of books, libraries, and information. Other books include Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998), and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011). She has also served as a consultant to museums, archives, and public history projects, and appeared in the documentary films New York, Miss America, and The Powder and the Glory.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Due to their unique mediation between the score, the stage, and their audiences, singers are one of the most indispensable elements of opera’s performance and reception. Although opera singers have often inspired scholarship about their geographical, social, and ethnic backgrounds, few studies have designed methods for comparing the experiences of large numbers of singers at the same time. What is more, beyond biographies of individual performers, Jews are rarely understood as significant contributors to the American opera scene. Yet examination of their presence in the Center for Jewish History’s archives confirms that there is merit in undertaking devoted study of their vocal careers.
In this talk, Samantha M. Cooper (CJH Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Fellow in Jewish Culture 2020-2021, NYU Ph.D. Candidate in Historical Musicology) presents the first extended investigation into the patterns that shaped the trajectories of numerous men and women of Jewish descent who pursued careers as opera singers in New York between 1880 and 1940. Drawing on a wealth of archival resources, she unearths over 50 European- and American-born singers from Jewish families who sang in the citadel of America’s opera scene: New York City. Specifically, she attends to how the outsized frequency of name-changing, connections with the synagogue cantorate, performances for Jewish organizations, recordings in Jewish languages, networking with other Jewish musicians, impact of the Holocaust, and dedication to the State of Israel shaped these singers’ professional lives in particularly Jewish ways. Ultimately, Cooper finds that the statistically significant presence of extraordinarily talented Jewish performers in the American opera industry constituted a much more ordinary reality than scholars of American Jewish history have previously realized.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/tradition-of-talent-2021-05-05 to receive a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
After two years at the Center for Jewish History, the Scholars Working Group “Hear Their Cry:” Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience presents a talk with two group members about their new books.
Bernice Lerner is a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. She is the author of The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives and coeditor of Happiness and Virtue beyond East and West: Towards a New Global Responsibility. Dr. Lerner will present on her new book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (2020), in which she focuses on the life of her mother, Rachel Genuth. Michael Berenbaum writes, “All the Horrors of War is a powerful and poignant tale that traces both the arc of the war and the history of the Holocaust. In this meticulously researched and detailed account, Lerner never lets the reader forget the humanity of the victims or their liberators.”
Marlene Trestman is an attorney and author of Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin. With exhaustive research and engaging prose, Trestman’s Fair Labor Lawyer recounts Margolin’s inspirational journey from New Orleans Jewish Orphans Home through the New Deal to the nation’s highest courts, where she shepherded the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Prompted by her research on Margolin’s early life and by her own childhood in New Orleans as a Jewish orphan, Trestman’s latest work is Most Fortunate Unfortunates: New Orleans Jewish Orphans’ Home, 1855-1946, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press.
Followed by a Q&A with both authors.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/contextualizing-2021-05-10 to receive a link to the Zoom webinar
Presented by:
book talk
cooking show
A Taste of Rome's Historic Jewish Cuisine
Rome is home to one of Europe's oldest and most delicious Jewish cuisines. Shaped by centuries of hardship and tightly-bound community, la cucina Ebraica Romana (the Roman Jewish kitchen) is defined by its elegant approach to vegetables, saucy braised meats, love of small and briny fishes, and masterclass level of skill for frying foods in olive oil. Join celebrated cookbook author Leah Koenig for an online cooking demonstration highlighting some of Rome's best dishes. The recipe for concia, a bright and silky marinated zucchini dish, will be made available before the event, so students may pick up ingredients and cook along.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Rome-Jewish-Cuisine for a Zoom link
About the Speaker:
Leah Koenig's writing and recipes have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Food & Wine, Epicurious, Food52, and Tablet, among other publications. Leah is the author of six cookbooks including The Jewish Cookbook (Phaidon, 2019) and Modern Jewish Cooking (Chronicle Books). In addition to writing, Leah also leads cooking demonstrations and workshops around the country and world. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
Presented by:
cooking show
conversation
Modern ideals of scholarly detachment and objectivity have always existed in tension with political and public engagement. In 1895, for example, Theodore Reinach, the President of the Société des études juives in France, wrote: "The Society of Jewish Studies need not concern itself with the present trials of Judaism, however poignant the interest may be. It dwells in the quieter sphere of history, and it is only by dispelling the accumulated errors about ancient Judaism that it can indirectly contribute to rehabilitating or consoling Judaism today.” Magda Teter (Fordham University, NEH Scholar-in-Residence 2020-21), in conversation with Deborah Dash Moore (University of Michigan), will explore the role political concerns and specific events have played not only in the lives of Jewish studies scholars but also in their scholarship.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/on-jewish-studies-2021-05-13 to receive a link to the Zoom webinar
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Sephardi Thought and Modernity: Rabbi Yosef Knafo’s Struggle for Democratization of Knowledge in Fin de Siècle Essaouira
The intention of this series is to spark the interest in processes of Jewish modernization not exclusively mediated by Europeanization. The questions we will be dealing with are related to non-dichotomic identities, multiplicity and loss of language, colonization, social transformation, and intellectual responses to it. We will approach these questions by looking at Jewish-Arab influences, the Sephardi response to European modernization, the responses of the rabbinic leadership and the work of Sephardi intellectuals.
May 20th: Gabriel Abensour (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Rabbi Yosef Knafo’s Struggle for Democratization of Knowledge in Fin de Siècle Essaouira
Ticket Info: Free; register at ucalgary.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Muzzy Rosenblatt
Author and journalist Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal and NY Times) sits down with influential cultural leaders in the Jewish American Community; we'll hear their thoughts about working in this present moment, current projects, and what they have to say about their Jewish identity. Grab your lunch and tune in for our conversation with Muzzy Rosenblatt, CEO and President of the Bowery Residents’ Committee.
Our Guest This Month
Muzzy Rosenblatt is CEO and President of BRC (the Bowery Residents’ Committee, Inc.), one of the most successful and innovative nonprofits working in service to New Yorkers experiencing homelessness. BRC’s 30 programs with nearly 3,000 units of shelter and housing provide an integrated continuum of comprehensive services to 10,000 individuals it annually serves, offering a caring and effective path from homelessness to home. In 2017, Muzzy was honored by the Nonprofit Times as one of the country’s Top 50 influential nonprofit leaders. Prior to BRC, Muzzy held several positions in NYC government, including First Deputy Commissioner and Acting Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services. A native New Yorker he grew up in Manhattan, attending PS 158 and Hunter College High School, before earning and MPA from NYU Wagner and a BA from Wesleyan University. He now resides in “the hills of the forest” in the county of Queens.
Interviewed By
Julie Salamon is an American author, critic and storyteller. She worked at The Wall Street Journal for five years first as a commodities and banking reporter before spending eleven years as the paper's film critic. Later she became a staff journalist at The New York Times where she was a TV critic and arts reporter. Later she gained fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and became a Kaiser Media Fellow. She has written both fiction and non-fiction books for adults and children-- and produced articles for magazines that include The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and The New Republic. Her books have received wide critical and popular attention, she has just completed "Unlikely Friends," a memoir for Audible Original, scheduled for release in 2021.
Ticket Info: Free; register at forms.office.com for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper discuss their new book, which sheds light on the history of one of New York's Hasidic neighborhoods.
Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim avoided assimilation, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.
Ticket Info: Free; register at hforms.office.com for a Zoom link
About the Speakers:
Nathaniel Deutsch is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Michael Casper received his Ph.D. in history from UCLA and has contributed to American Jewish History and the New York Review of Books.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Salomea Perl & Women Yiddish Prose Writers
Warsaw based writer Salomea Perl was one of the rare women publishing literary Yiddish texts at the same time as the klasikers of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim and Y. L. Peretz. Ruth Murphy's new translation of Perl's work, The Canvas and other stories, is a cause for celebration and reflection. The last thirty years has seen many previously ignored or lost female authors, like Salomea Perl, finally brought into the Yiddish canon. Join us for a discussion of The Canvas, exploring the rediscovery and translation of her work and placing it into its literary context. Moderated by Rokhl Kafrissen (Tablet Magazine) the conversation will feature translator Ruth Murphy alongside Yiddish scholars Anna Fishman Gonshor and Justin Cammy.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Salomea-Perl for a Zoom link
About the Speakers:
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist and playwright in New York City. Her ‘Rokhl’s Golden City’ column began appearing in Tablet in 2017, the only regular feature in the world dedicated to new Yiddish culture in all its iterations. Her op-eds on feminism, sociology and Jewish life appear in newspapers all over the world. She was a 2019-2020 14th Street Y LABA fellow, for which she wrote Shtumer Shabes (Silent Sabbath), a black comedy about the dangers of ethnography and human experimentation.
Ruth Murphy is a published and peer-reviewed professional translator specializing in the research and translation of Yiddish literature, historical documents and yizkor (memorial) books. Murphy’s translations have been featured in the Jewish Review of Books, Metamorphoses, and Pakn Treger. Murphy has also served as a translator for the Ellis Island Discography Project where she transcribed and translated multiple early 20th-century Yiddish songs relating to the Jewish Yiddish-speaking immigrant experience.
Justin Cammy is chair and associate professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College, and senior fellow of the Goldreich Institute for Yiddish at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of the introduction to The Full Pomegranate, a recent volume of Sutzkever poetry translated by Richard Fein. Cammy's own translation of Sutzkever's memoir Vilna Ghetto will appear with McGill-Queens University Press in 2021.
Anna Fishman Gonshor is Faculty Lecturer of Yiddish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University (retired). She has been guest lecturer for several university Yiddish programs and various institutions across North America. As a translator her work includes film, articles for academic publications and archival materials. In addition, she is a longstanding faculty member of the YIVO Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
To conclude two years at the Center for Jewish History, the Scholars Working Group “Hear Their Cry:” Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience presents scholarship from four members on the following topics:
Natalia Aleksiun: Survival Strategies and Jewish Orphans during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe
Joshua C. Andy: Remembrance and Resistance: The Testimony and Memoir of Rachel Pinchsowitz Litwak
Emily Bengels: Vichy France Orphan Rescue
Ms. Bengels will be presenting on the interagency efforts to rescue unaccompanied children from Vichy, France, and bring them to the US from 1939-1942.
Katharina Menschick: The Kindertransports from Austria — Findings from Ten Oral Histories in the Leo Baeck Institute’s Austrian Heritage Collection
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/hear-their-cry-2021-05-25 to receive a link to the Zoom webinar
About the Speakers:
Natalia Aleksiun, Ph.D., is a Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She has published widely on Polish Jewish issues. She is the author of Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950, which appeared in 2002 in Polish, and the co-editor, with Antony Polonsky and Brian Horowitz, of Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe( 2016). She is currently working on a book about the so-called cadaver affair at European Universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.
Joshua C. Andy, Ph.D., is an Upper School History Teacher at Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he specializes in non-US history and teaches a class entitled “Genocide: A Global History on Crimes Against Humanity.” For the past eight years, he has traveled with and worked as a scholar and historian for Classrooms Without Borders; in that work he has guided students, teachers, and university educators in Holocaust education. Dr. Andy has been a partipant for the past two years in the Scholars Working Group ‘Hear their Cry: Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience’ at the Center for Jewish History. His latest publication, ‘When Ghosts Roam the Streets: Historical Memory in Starachowice,’ appeared in February 2020 in In Context and describes how one Polish town grapples with its own history and the larger historical narratives of the Holocaust. He earned his BA with honours from Washington & Jefferson College and an MA and Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham (UK).
Emily Bengels is a doctoral candidate at Gratz College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was a JDC Fellow in 2020 and was selected to be part of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Past is Present commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz and to attend the Yad Vashem Advanced Echoes and Reflections seminar. She leads music for the First Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Hunterdon County and for Congregation Kehilat Shalom, and teaches in Hunterdon County, NJ.
Katharina Menschick received an MA in history and literature from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2019. After working in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, she is now is a research associate at the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution.
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
In June of 1942, amid Third Reich victories everywhere, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top-secret unit becomes known as X Troop.
Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, author and historian Leah Garrett, Professor and Director of Jewish Studies at Hunter College, follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War IItells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.
This program is funded, in part, by a Humanities New York CARES Grant, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required at /tickets/x-troop-2021-05-27 to receive a link to the Zoom webinar
Presented by:
book talk
book club
Go behind the stories and peer inside the archives at the CJH book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of Plunder by Menachem Kaiser, the story of the author’s quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows. This debut from Kaiser has received rave reviews and was described by the New York Times as “a twisting and reverberant and consistently enthralling story…a weird story that gets weirder.” We will be joined by the author for a Q&A after the discussion.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion.
NOTE: This is a book discussion, not a lecture, so space is limited.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register at programs.cjh.org/tickets/people-book-club-2021-06-02 for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book club
lecture
Sephardi Thought and Modernity: Foreign in a Familiar Land - Language and Belonging in the Work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida
The intention of this series is to spark the interest in processes of Jewish modernization not exclusively mediated by Europeanization. The questions we will be dealing with are related to non-dichotomic identities, multiplicity and loss of language, colonization, social transformation, and intellectual responses to it. We will approach these questions by looking at Jewish-Arab influences, the Sephardi response to European modernization, the responses of the rabbinic leadership and the work of Sephardi intellectuals.
June 17th: Yuval Evri (King’s College London) and Angy Cohen (University of Calgary): Foreign in a familiar land: language and belonging in the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida
Ticket Info: Free; register at ucalgary.zoom.us for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
