family history today: genealogy programs at the center
SOLD OUT: Case Studies from Sherlock Cohn, The Photo Genealogist
In this fun and informative workshop, Sherlock Cohn, the internationally-known Jewish genealogy sleuth, will demonstrate how and why it is important to mine the clues our ancestors left for us in their photographs. The first part of the program will focus on understanding how immigration and assimilation, as well as religious customs and practices of our Jewish ancestors, help us learn more about the personalities and the stories hidden within our family photos. In the second portion of the program, Sherlock will use case studies, including one from Yeshiva University Museum’s current exhibition, Lost and Found – A Family Photo Album, to illustrate how photo dating, photo identification, knowledge of fashion and artifact history, and matching vital records can illuminate our relatives’ lives and help us solve some of our vexing genealogy mysteries. At the conclusion, she will help workshop attendees begin the process of analyzing their own family photos.
If you plan to attend this workshop and have a family photo you would like Sherlock Cohn to analyze, please read the photo submission guidelines here.
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: This event is sold out.
About the Speaker:
Ava (Sherlock) Cohn is an internationally-recognized professional genealogist who specializes in the dating and interpretation of Jewish family photographs. Ava is a graduate of Brandeis University and has completed coursework in decorative arts, art history and costume history at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. For the past ten years, she has worked professionally as Sherlock Cohn and was a volunteer photo analyst for many years before starting her own business.
Presented by:
family history today: genealogy programs at the center
lecture
Bad Rabbi: and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press
Eddy Portnoy, Ph.D., author of Bad Rabbi, Academic Advisor for the Max Weinreich Center and Exhibition Curator at YIVO, will discuss the Yiddish press in New York and Warsaw and the often strange stories about Jews that appear in it, as well as its use as a genealogical resource.
Ticket Info: $5 at the door; free for JGS members
Presented by:
lecture
conference
Jewish Africa Conference: Past, Present, and Future
Join us for a three-day cultural and scholarly conference bringing together emerging North & Sub-Saharan African scholars and leaders to analyze the history and contemporary situation of Jewish Africa, which is home to some of the oldest, most diverse and fascinating communities in the world.
Ticket Info: Available at www.jewishafricaconference.org or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
conference
conference
Jewish Africa Conference: Past, Present, and Future
Join us for a three-day cultural and scholarly conference bringing together emerging North & Sub-Saharan African scholars and leaders to analyze the history and contemporary situation of Jewish Africa, which is home to some of the oldest, most diverse and fascinating communities in the world.
Ticket Info: Available at www.jewishafricaconference.org or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
conference
curator's talk
Lost & Found – A Family Photo Album
Join curator Jacob Wisse on a tour of Lost & Found, exploring the remarkable story of a pre-war family photo album that was owned by a woman who was deported from the Kovno Ghetto in 1943. Prior to her deportation, she smuggled the album to a non-Jewish Lithuanian family for safekeeping. After the album’s fortuitous discovery in 2013, it was reunited with the original owner’s descendants.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 seniors, students; free for YUM members, YU students, faculty, staff at bpt.me/3918709 or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
curator's talk
conference
Jewish Africa Conference: Past, Present, and Future
Join us for a three-day cultural and scholarly conference bringing together emerging North & Sub-Saharan African scholars and leaders to analyze the history and contemporary situation of Jewish Africa, which is home to some of the oldest, most diverse and fascinating communities in the world.
Ticket Info: Available at www.jewishafricaconference.org or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
conference
conversation
The Changing Arab Military Threat to Israel
A special evening featuring former CIA analyst and renowned scholar Kenneth Pollack in conversation with Algemeiner editor-in-chief Dovid Efune. The talk will draw from Pollack’s new book, Armies of Sand, in which he argues that Arab forces have consistently punched below their weight since the Second World War. Mr. Pollack will explore these patterns while sharing a powerful and riveting historical account of the Middle East.
Ticket Info: $15 at events.theaj.com or 212-376-4988
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s
Join us for a panel to celebrate the publication of Marc Dollinger’s Black Power Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s with the author and special guests Including April Baskin (The Union for Reform Judaism), Cheryl Greenberg (Trinity College), Ilana Kaufman (The Jews of Color Field Building Initiative) and Rivka Press Schwartz (Associate Principal, SAR High School and Fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America).In this book, Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism. He shows how, in a period best known for the rise of black antisemitism and the breakdown of the black-Jewish alliance, black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda—including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the rise of Jewish day schools, the revitalization of worship services with gender-inclusive liturgy, and the birth of a new form of American Zionism.
AJHS is home to the records of the American Jewish Congress, where numerous photos trace the participation of Rabbis and other prominent Jewish leaders in the 1963 March on Washington, the 1965 March from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, and other events and causes of the Civil Rights movement era. AJHS is also home to the collection of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews, which helped Ethiopian Jews receive recognition, aid, and refuge as they were trying to flee Ethiopia since the 1970s.
The Shalom Hartman Institute is a leading center of Jewish thought and education, serving Israel and North America. Our mission is to strengthen Jewish peoplehood, identity and pluralism and ensure that Judaism is a compelling force for good in the 21st century.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 AJHS members, students, seniors at bpt.me/3913922 or 800-838-3006; $12 at the door
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Love and Strife: A Celebration of Saul Bellow Life and Storytelling
Join us for a celebration of the publication of the highly acclaimed Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, volumes 1 and 2, in discussion with Marc Cohen, the author of the newly published Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 AJHS members, students, seniors at bpt.me/3913925 or 800-838-3006; $12 at the door
Presented by:
book talk
book talk & live podcast recording
Michael Walzer Discussion with the Tel Aviv Review
Join us for an in-depth conversation between eminent author and scholar Michael Walzer and the Tel Aviv Review podcast’s Gilad Halpern, where they will be discussing Walzer’s new critically-acclaimed book A Foreign Policy for the Left. Originally adapted from a selection of Walzer’s writings previously published in the quarterly Dissent, A Foreign Policy for the Left requires leftists to reevaluate presumed ideologies regarding today's international affairs.
Ticket Info: $15 general; $10 YIVO members, students at yivo.org/Tel-Aviv-Review or 917-606-8290
Presented by:
book talk & live podcast recording
curator's tour
Kindertransport – Rescuing Children on the Brink of War
Join curator Ilona Moradof on a tour of Kindertransport – Rescuing Children on the Brink of War, illuminating the organized rescue efforts that brought thousands of children from Nazi Europe to Great Britain in the late 1930s. Explore the children’s difficult and often heartbreaking journeys through personal stories, artifacts and engaging media.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 seniors, students; free for YUM members, YU students, faculty, staff at kindertransport.bpt.me/3918592 or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
curator's tour
book talk
Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back
Marc Slobin discusses his recently published Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back (Oxford University Press, 2018). Motor City Music examines the melting pot of musical life throughout Detroit.
Ticket Info: Free; reservations required at yivo.org/motorcity
Presented by:
book talk
short talks on big subjects
The Treaty of Versailles with Michael Neiberg
Collection of the Australian War Memorial
The Treaty of Versailles ended more than the First World War. By putting a final end to the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires it also raised questions about the future of the Jews who lived in those empires. In our continuing series, Short Talks on Big Subjects, Michael S. Neiberg, author of The Treaty of Versailles: A Very Short Introduction, discusses the watershed events of 1916-1919 and their connection to the Jewish people today. Book included with admission and a book signing follows the program.
Ticket Info: $20 general; $18 seniors; $15 CJH/Partner members, students at versailles.bpt.me or 800-838-3006
About the Speaker:
Considered one of the “foremost thinkers about the First World War,” Michael Neiberg is a Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he teaches history, strategy, and international relations to American and international security professionals. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War in Europe, 1914-1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d'Or du Rayonnement Culturel from Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.
Presented by:
short talks on big subjects
book talk
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
Pauline Kael called him “the greatest American screenwriter.” Jean-Luc Godard said he was “a genius” who “invented 80% of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” With credits that include Scarface, Twentieth Century and Notorious, novelist, reporter, and playwright Ben Hecht also emerged during WWII as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe and later became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. Adina Hoffman speaks with Phillip Lopate about her new biography of this charismatic and contradictory figure, who came to embody much that defined America—especially Jewish America—in his time. Book sales and signing follow the program.
Ticket Info: $15 general; $12 seniors; $10 CJH/Partner members, students at hecht.bpt.me or 800-838-3006
About the Speakers:
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review, one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist, and won the UK’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association’s award for the Jewish Book of the Year. Formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, she is Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and was named one of the inaugural (2013) winners of the Windham Campbell prize for literature. She lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.
Phillip Lopate has written four personal essay collections, two novels, a pair of novellas, and three poetry collections, among many other published works. His latest book is the memoir, A Mother’s Tale, (OSU Press, 2017). Mr. Lopate has received numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. A Brooklyn native, he is a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches nonfiction writing.
Presented by:
book talk
family history today: genealogy programs at the center
Genealogy Lecture for Sephardi and Mizrahi Families
Curious about family history outside of the Pale of Settlement? J.D. Arden, Genealogy Librarian at the Center for Jewish History, will provide an overview of tools for researching Jewish community records and Jewish life in the Sephardi and Mizrahi Diaspora.
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; reservations required at bpt.me/3909846 or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
family history today: genealogy programs at the center
lecture
Lublin’s “Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre” and the 43 Thousand Project: Documenting an Entire Lost Jewish Community of Lublin, One Individual at a Time
Olivier Szlos will present the work of Lublin’s “Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre” Centre to reclaim Jewish memory in the Lublin region of Poland, with its 43 Thousand Project, by exploring archives, personal testimonies and private collections to retrieve names, photos, documents and stories, and provide a hands-on approach to the project’s public access database that might add to your family research.
Ticket Info: $5 at the door; free for JGS members
Presented by:
lecture
panel discussion
America Different? Anti-Semitism in the United States
In the wake of the murderous attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, anti-Semitism in America fosters debate. Join award-winning historians Lila Corwin Berman (Temple), Tony Michels (University of Wisconsin) and Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis) for a conversation covering recent events that are also rooted in history.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 AJHS members, students, seniors at bpt.me/3913927 or 800-838-3006; $12 at the door
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
First Person: Matti Friedman in Conversation with Lucette Lagnado
Matti Friedman’s new book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel tells the unknown story of four of Israel’s first spies. Recruited by a rag-tag outfit called the Arab Section before the 1948 War of Independence, they assumed Arab identities to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations. At the height of the war the spies posed as refugees fleeing the fighting, reached Beirut, and set up what became Israel’s first foreign intelligence station. Spies not only tells a breathtaking and true espionage story, it also explores a different story about how the state was founded and raises many questions that are relevant today.
In a wide-ranging First Person conversation, Matti Friedman speaks with author Lucette Lagnado (The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit) about his journalism career, researching and writing his new book, and what Spies of No Country reveals about Israel in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Ticket Info: $15 general; $12 seniors, $10 members and students at friedman.bpt.me or 800-838-3006
About the Speakers:
Credit: Mary AndersonMatti Friedman has reported from Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. A former Associated Press correspondent, he is a contributor to The New York Times Op-Ed Page, and his writing has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Tablet. Matti’s 2016 book Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War was chosen as a New York Times’ Notable Book and as one of Amazon’s 10 best books of the year. Pumpkinflowers was selected as one of the year’s best by Booklist, Mother Jones, Foreign Affairs, the National Post, and The Globe and Mail. It won the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish literature, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and was shortlisted for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize, the Writer’s Trust Prize, and the Yitzkak Sadeh Prize for military writing (Israel). Matti’s first book, The Aleppo Codex, an investigation into the strange fate of an ancient Bible manuscript, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. It was translated into seven languages. Matti was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem with his family.
Born in Cairo, Lucette Lagnado is a cultural and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she has received numerous prizes for her work. She and her family left Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, an experience that helped shape and inform her recent memoirs, The Arrogant Years and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (Ecco/HarperCollins). In 2008, she was the recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. She is also the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, which has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Lagnado resides with her husband, journalist Douglas Feiden, in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, New York.
Presented by:
book talk
film screening and discussion
RBG
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a lengthy legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But the unique personal journey of her rise to the nation's highest court has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans – until now. RBG explores Ginsburg's life and career. The film captures Ginsburg’s determination as she goes from being a brilliant legal scholar shunned by law firms because of her gender to a masterful appellate litigator who advanced women’s rights by arguing and winning several key cases before the nine men on the Supreme Court in the 1970s, and then finally to her role as a member of the Court.
Join MALA and the Center for Jewish History for a special screening and panel discussion of this critically acclaimed award-winning documentary. We will be joined by two of RBG’s filmmakers, Associate Producer Nadine Natour and Director/Producer Julie Cohen for an in- depth conversation on their journeys in chronicling the life and career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $7 senior; $5 CJH/MALA member at Eventbrite
Presented by:
film screening and discussion
