lecture
Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Food – Live on Zoom
For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin? Trace this delicious history from the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to today’s take-out lo mein with Andrew Coe, author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States.
About the Speaker:
Andrew Coe is a food writer and culinary historian who has written for Gastronomica, Saveur, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States and coauthor, with Jane Ziegelman, of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression.
Presented by:
lecture
book club
LBI Book Club, Vol. VI: The Ground Under My Feet – Live on Zoom
Born in Vienna in the 1920s, Eva Kollisch was sent as a teenager on a 1938 Kindertransport to England. She then was able to come to the United States, where the family was reunited. The author writes about these experiences, as well as growing up in the world of left-wing politics and culture in New York, finding her way as a writer, literary critic, teacher pacifist, and feminist. Unswervingly, she examines the traces that persecution and rejection have left on both her and those around her. Written as a series of essays, The Ground Under My Feet is a meditation on being a survivor. Grace Paley described the book as “…beautifully written. It has more history in it than most historians give us.”
About the Speaker:
Eva Kollisch is the daughter of writer Margaret Kollisch and the architect Otto Kollisch (1881-1952). She spent her school years in Baden bei Wien, Austria. In July 1939, she fled on a Kindertransport to the UK and in 1940 and she emigrated with her two brothers Peter and Stephen to the U.S., where her parents had found refuge in November 1939.
In New York, from 1941 to 1946, she was a member of the Trotskyist Workers Party, and married author Stanley Plastrik, one of the editors of the magazine “Dissent.” In 1950, she married her second husband, the painter Gert Berliner (born 1924) who, with others such as the painter David Gross, collectively ran the cafe Rienzi, 107 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. The cafe was a gathering spot for New York bohemians and patrons included James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, and Bob Dylan.
Eva Kollisch studied German literature and science at Brooklyn College and later at Columbia University. Then she led, together with Gerda Lerner and Joan Kelly, a course for women's studies at Sarah Lawrence College. At this college, she eventually became a professor and taught English, German, and Comparative Women’s Literature.
In 1986 Eva Kollisch met her current partner, the American poet Naomi Replansky. In 2016, both women won the Clara Lemlich Social Activist Award. Eva and Naomi continue to live in New York City today.
Presented by:
book club
cooking show
Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara Piñer – Live on Zoom
Episode Five: Fish Stew of the Conversos and Matza
Sephardi Culinary History is a new show that combines chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer’s fascination with food studies and flair for creating delicious cuisine. Join along as she cooks Sephardic history!
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Hélène Jawhara-Piñer earned her Ph.D in History, Medieval History, and the History of Food from the University of Tours, France.
Presented by:
cooking show
virtual tour
Writing Between Tongues: An Exploration of Hebrew and Arabic Calligraphy – Live on Zoom
In this interactive session and virtual gallery tour, we will dive into the rich visual worlds of Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy. Through historical, spiritual, linguistic and artistic lenses, we will discover the parallels between both languages. Educator, community organizer, and artist Ruben Shimonov will take us on an exploratory journey of his multilingual calligraphy and the ways he has used his art to enrich Muslim-Jewish interfaith communities.
We will end the session with a live calligraphy demonstration.
Presented by:
virtual tour
panel discussion
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: AJ Congress and The Civil Rights Era– Live on Zoom
One of our largest collections is from the American Jewish Congress; an organization that tackles questions of American national significance, and whose leaders, staff, and members work for "full equality in a free society for all Americans." Throughout the Civil Rights Movement representatives from AJ Congress frequently partnered with religious and social justice leaders to push for equality and advocate for positive change. Join us as AJHS Director of Collections & Engagement Melanie Meyers gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking work that goes into processing an archive of this size – from lifting the lid off the first box to creating the finding aid. Historian Dr. Lila Corwin Berman will highlight the historical significance of the collection and its importance to researchers, and Dr. Ilana Kaufman, Executive Director of the Jews of Color Initiative, will shed light on how to frame this collection in our contemporary moment for students.
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panel discussion
book talk
Loss & Legacy: The Half-Century Quest to Reclaim a Birthright Stolen by the Nazis – Live on Zoom
By 1929 Helene and Samuel Gronner reach economic success and social prominence in the German town of Ilmenau. But when Nazi ideology grips the community, neighbors begin to shun Jewish-owned businesses like theirs. After near daily antisemitic encounters in school, they resolve to send Jochen, their teen-aged younger son, to Palestine. It's not until the war ends that he discovers that his parents perished in the Holocaust.
In his new memoir, Loss & Legacy, Sam A. Gronner traces his father's life-long pursuit to reclaim the birthright stolen by the Nazis. Readers follow the Israel-born author's narrative as he reconstructs the long arc of his father's life, culminating in his 2010 death as the naturalized American citizen, John Gronner. The author belatedly recognizes his father as a survivor of the Holocaust, steadfast in his determination to recoup his inheritance and restore the reputation of the family that the Nazis sought to eradicate.
Sam A. Gronner will be discussing his book, its revelations, and its implications for contemporary readers with Joseph Berger, veteran New York Times journalist and author of Displaced Persons and The Pious Ones.
Event sponsored with a generous grant to LBI from Este and Sam Sylvetsky.
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book talk
conference
Shared History Project: 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-Speaking Lands
Attendance via video conference is free with advance registration. The conference languages will be German and English with simultaneous translation. Visit https://www.lbi.org/events/shared-history-conference/ for the conference schedule and details.
Presented by:
conference
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 – Live on Zoom
The ninth and final episode in our series exploring new research. Aviva Ben-Ur discusses her new book Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825.
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suri-name, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance.
Aviva Ben-Ur is Professor in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is author of Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History.
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book talk
digital show and tell
Sound Archive Show and Tell – Live on Facebook and YouTube
Join YIVO Sound Archivist, Lorin Sklamberg for a show and tell of YIVO’s Sound Archives, which houses over 15,000 recordings. See 78 rpm and LP discs, open-reel and cassette tapes, piano rolls, and compact discs, and more from the collections. Find out how the art of sound recording evolved and discover the breadth of YIVO’s holdings.
Presented by:
digital show and tell
conference
Shared History Project: 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-Speaking Lands
Attendance via video conference is free with advance registration. The conference languages will be German and English with simultaneous translation. Visit https://www.lbi.org/events/shared-history-conference/ for the conference schedule and details.
Presented by:
conference
virtual tour
A Virtual Tour of the Bukharian Jewish Heritage Museum – Live on Zoom
We will look at fascinating artifacts and traditional clothing from the Bukharian Jewish Heritage Museum. We will discuss their importance and the differences that they contain from the local community in Uzbekistan.
Presented by:
virtual tour
conference
Shared History Project: 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-Speaking Lands
Attendance via video conference is free with advance registration. The conference languages will be German and English with simultaneous translation. Visit https://www.lbi.org/events/shared-history-conference/ for the conference schedule and details.
Presented by:
conference
lecture
Over 4.8 million of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices are commemorated in Yad Vashem's online Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names. In this lecture, Serafima Velkovich, an archival researcher in the Reference and Information Department of the Yad Vashem’s Reference and Information Department of the Yad Vashem Archives, will highlight the Central Database’s new features and sources and offer her expert tips on how to utilize it to its fullest potential. In addition, she will provide guidance on the use of other Yad Vashem online resources that are relevant for genealogists.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute in cooperation with Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. It is supported, in part, by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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lecture
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – Life Without a Childhood in the Yemenite Jewish Community 1882-1948 – Live on Zoom
The eighth in our series exploring new research. Danny Bar Maoz discusses his new book "Life without a Childhood in the Yemenite Jewish Community 1882-1948."
The book is in Hebrew, but the lecture will be given in English.
Danny Bar-Ma’oz holds a PhD from the Bar-Ilan University in the history of the people of Israel, and has published books on Yemenite Jewish research, as well as on early Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine and British Mandate Palestine.
Presented by:
book talk
virtual tour
A Virtual Tour of the Bukharian Community Center/Synagogue in Queens, NY – Live on Zoom
Discover how the largest Bukharian Jewish Community outside of Israel ended up in Queens. What is the community like today? What are the impact and footprints they are leaving in US society?
Presented by:
virtual tour
book talk
In response to a precipitous rise in the price of kosher meat, thousands of Jewish women took to the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side on May 15, 1902. Their stated intention was to shut down every kosher butcher shop until prices came down. What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. In The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), writer and historian Scott D. Seligman tells the twin stories of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices, and the mostly uneducated female immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power. With few resources and little experience but a great deal of steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force, and in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.
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book talk
cooking show
Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara-Piñer – Live on Zoom
Episode Four: Hanukkah Special; Challah Candles and Bimuelos
Sephardi Culinary History is a new show that combines chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer’s fascination with food studies and flair for creating delicious cuisine. Join along as she cooks Sephardic history!
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Hélène Jawhara-Piñer earned her Ph.D in History, Medieval History, and the History of Food from the University of Tours, France.
Presented by:
cooking show
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography – Live on Zoom
The seventh in our series exploring new research. Cedric Cohen-Skalli discusses his new book "Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography."
Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier, a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings, a preacher and exegete, a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities, Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. This book, the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years, depicts his life in three cultural milieus—Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy—and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. Yet, it is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity.
Cedric Cohen-Skalli teaches early modern and modern Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa and is the director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society.
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book talk
panel discussion
Avrom Sutzkever: Ten Poems - Live on Zoom.
Celebrate the publication of Tsen Lider. Ten poems. Desimt eilerasciu with a discussion panel on Avrom Sutzkever's work with Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertiene, and Justin Cammy, moderated by Jonathan Brent and with welcoming remarks by Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas.
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panel discussion
conference
Psalmody through the Ages: Music and the Book of Psalms - A Four-Part Digital Conference on Zoom
The book of Psalms echoes from the ancient Jerusalem Temple to the modern concert hall, and its role as an inspiration for musical works is unquestionable. In this digital conference, we bring together scholars from across disciplines to begin to answer the following question: How are we to understand the relationship between the book of Psalms and the music it inspires?
Presented by The Jewish Music Forum, with the support of The UCLA Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music.
Presented by:
conference
lecture
At the Crossroads of Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-Speaking Worlds: The History of Bukharian Jews (Part 2 of 2) – Live on Zoom
The culture and history of Bukharian Jews is situated at the unique, intersection of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Russian-speaking Jewish identities. Through this 2-part learning series, we will explore the multilayered, rich story of this millennia-old community—discovering the ways in which they have developed their mosaic culture through a dynamic interaction with the dominant and changing societies surrounding them. Our discussion will also shed light on how their experiences fit into the broader historical saga of the Jewish people. Presented by Ruben Shimonov.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History – Live on Zoom
The sixth in our series exploring new research. Jane Gerber discusses her new book "Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History."
Sephardi identity has meant different things at different times, but has always entailed a connection with Spain, from which the Jews were expelled in 1492. While Sephardi Jews have lived in numerous cities and towns throughout history, certain cities had a greater impact in the shaping of their culture. This book focuses on those that may be considered most important, from Cordoba in the tenth century to Toledo, Venice, Safed, Istanbul, Salonica, and Amsterdam at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Each served as a venue in which a particular dimension of Sephardi Jewry either took shape or was expressed in especially intense form. Significantly, these cities were mostly heterogeneous in their population and culture - half of them under Christian rule and half under Muslim rule - and this too shaped the Sephardi world-view and attitude. While Sephardim cultivated a distinctive identity, they felt at home in the cultures of their adopted lands. Drawing upon a variety of both primary and secondary sources, Jane Gerber demonstrates that Sephardi history and culture have always been multifaceted.
Jane S. Gerber is Professor Emerita of History and director of the Institute for Sephardic Studies at the Graduate Center of the CUNY. She is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Hebrew University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and has lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere. She headed the Advisory Board of the American Sephardi Federation and served on the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History and the Academic Board of the Rothberg School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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book talk
panel discussion
Fermenting and Foraging: Resourcefulness in the Historical and Contemporary Kitchen – Live on Zoom
Today, techniques such as fermenting and foraging are increasingly appealing to those seeking to create economical, nourishing, waste-free meals. This panel, moderated by Jane Ziegelman, will explore today’s innovative tactics and the historical precedents for these strategies in the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant kitchen at the turn of the 20th century.
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panel discussion
panel discussion
Two Great Families and Their Temple: The Strauses, the Lehmans and Temple Emanu-El – Live on Zoom
Join us for a virtual presentation about the Straus Family, their relationship with the Lehman family, and their commitment to their synagogues, Temples Emanu-El and Beth-El.
From these two prominent families arose leaders in government, commerce and philanthropy, shaping the history of America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Strauses and Lehmans were linked by marriage as well as through the close-knit New York Jewish community and their congregations. Temple Emanu-El was founded in 1845 as the first Reform Jewish congregation in New York City merging with Temple Beth-El in 1927.
This unique event will feature speakers Warren Klein, Joan Adler, and Karen Franklin who will each provide a comprehensive and complementary history of the families and the congregations.
About the Speakers:
Joan Adler, executive director of the Straus Historical Society, has spent the past thirty years researching, documenting and disseminating information about the Straus family from Rheinpfalz area of Germany. She is an historian, genealogist, researcher, author, archivist, event planner, public speaker, and much more. She is the author of For the Sake of the Children: The Letters Between Otto Frank and Nathan Straus, Jr. and compiler/editor of several other books about the German Jewish families she researches.
Warren Klein is the curator of the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum of Judaica at Temple Emanu-El where he manages their collection of over 1,200 objects and curates rotating exhibitions. Previously, he worked at the JTS Library, Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, Magnes Museum in Berkeley and several private collections in New York. He has an MA in Jewish Art from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a BA in the History of Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Karen S. Franklin is Director of Family Research at the Leo Baeck Institute and a consultant for the Museum of Jewish Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Mrs. Franklin has served as Chair of the Council of Jewish Museums, Chair of the Memorial Museums Committee of the International Council of Museums, President of the International Jewish Genealogical Societies, and Co-Chair of the Board of Governors of JewishGen.org. She currently serves on the board of the National Association of Retired Reform Rabbis. She has worked for many years with the Lehman family, documenting their efforts to assist refugees in the 1930s and 1940s.
Presented by:
panel discussion
conversation
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: A Pinch of Tradition and a Dash of Imagination- Stories from the AJHS Cookbook Archives - Live on Zoom
On this episode we explore how Ashkenazi and Sephardi immigrants adapted a New World food and quintessential Thanksgiving dish: pumpkin. Inspired by the AJHS cookbook collection, specifically an award-winning Sabra Liqueur pumpkin pie dreamed up in a kitchen in Milwaukee and sweet pumpkin burekas perfected by a kosher food columnist right here in New York City, culinary historian Sarah Lohman demonstrates how Ashkenazi and Sephardi adaptations alike generate new ideas for your Thanksgiving table. Director of Collections Melanie Meyers and Executive Director Annie Polland are joined by Dr. Hasia Diner for a conversation about adaptation, invention, and the making of the diverse and delicious American Jewish culinary tradition.
Presented by:
conversation
conference
Psalmody through the Ages: Music and the Book of Psalms - A Four-Part Digital Conference on Zoom
The book of Psalms echoes from the ancient Jerusalem Temple to the modern concert hall, and its role as an inspiration for musical works is unquestionable. In this digital conference, we bring together scholars from across disciplines to begin to answer the following question: How are we to understand the relationship between the book of Psalms and the music it inspires?
Presented by The Jewish Music Forum, with the support of The UCLA Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music.
Presented by:
conference
lecture
At the Crossroads of Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-Speaking Worlds: The History of Bukharian Jews (Part 1 of 2) – Live on Zoom
The culture and history of Bukharian Jews is situated at the unique, intersection of Sephardic, Mizrahi and Russian-speaking Jewish identities. Through this 2-part learning series, we will explore the multilayered, rich story of this millennia-old community—discovering the ways in which they have developed their mosaic culture through a dynamic interaction with the dominant and changing societies surrounding them. Our discussion will also shed light on how their experiences fit into the broader historical saga of the Jewish people. Presented by Ruben Shimonov.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – The Jews of 18th-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition – Live on Zoom
The fifth in our series exploring new research. Stanley Mirvis discusses his new book "The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition."
An in-depth look at the Portuguese Jews of Jamaica and their connections to broader European and Atlantic trade networks.
Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Stanley Mirvis examines how Jamaica’s Jews put down roots as traders, planters, pen keepers, physicians, fishermen, and metalworkers, and reveals how their presence shaped the colony as much as settlement in the tropical West Indies transformed the lives of the island’s Jews.
Stanley Mirvis is an assistant professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and the Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies, at Arizona State University.
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book talk
discussion
In a series of discussions with leading scholars of modern Jewish history and the Holocaust, our new "Family Affairs" series explores researching and writing about Jewish experience from a distinctively personal perspective.
We will also discuss projects in the making, with scholars who are currently working on their books that either trace their family history or take this connection as a point of departure for their research. Despite their different disciplinary approaches and geographic scope, what these scholars share is the challenge of life-writing about close relatives. How does this experience change their thinking about Jewish history and their experience of writing it? What do these family affairs reveal to them in different ways?
Meri-Jane Rochelson and Devin E. Naar will discuss their projects and personal histories in Ashkenazi and Sephardi contexts, in conversation with Natalia Aleksiun.
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discussion
sidney krum young artists concert series
Joel Engel's "Jewish Folksongs" Volumes I & II – Live on Facebook & YouTube
Join us for a performance of Joel Engel's Jewish Folksongs (Volume I, 1909/ Volume II, 1912). These 20 arrangements, which frame the folksongs with classical piano accompaniments, proved to be very influential. They inspired the Society for Jewish Folk Music and the composers affiliated with it to create a vast oeuvre of similar work. Engel's work also provided a source for a variety of other composers who used Yiddish folksongs in their music including, famously, Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes whose second theme is taken from the second song of this cycle. These 20 songs will be performed by singer Lucy Fitz Gibbon with pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, with a special guest appearance by Yurie Mitsuhashi.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
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sidney krum young artists concert series
commemoration
Kristallnacht and Its Aftermath - Remembering Terezin: A Tribute to the Artists who Perished in the Holocaust - Livestream
Join us in commemoration of Kristallnacht for a tribute to artists who perished in the Holocaust. The evening will include performances by young artists from Mannes School of Music, poetry readings and an excerpt from the highly acclaimed film, “The Last Flight of Petr Ginz,” with a message from Peter Ginz's sister Chava Pressburger, a Holocaust survivor.
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commemoration
conference
Psalmody through the Ages: Music and the Book of Psalms - A Four-Part Digital Conference on Zoom
The book of Psalms echoes from the ancient Jerusalem Temple to the modern concert hall, and its role as an inspiration for musical works is unquestionable. In this digital conference, we bring together scholars from across disciplines to begin to answer the following question: How are we to understand the relationship between the book of Psalms and the music it inspires?
Presented by The Jewish Music Forum, with the support of The UCLA Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music.
Presented by:
conference
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity – Live on Zoom
The fourth in our series exploring new research. Shalva Weil discusses her new book "The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity."
This book explores the extraordinary differentiation of the Baghdadi Jewish community over time during their sojourn in India from the end of the eighteenth century until their dispersion to Indian diasporas in Israel and English-speaking countries throughout the world after India gained independence in 1947.
Chapters on schools, institutions and culture present how Baghdadis in India managed to maintain their communities by negotiating multiple identities in a stratified and complex society. Several disciplinary perspectives are utilized to explore the super-diversity of the Baghdadis and the ways in which they successfully adapted to new situations during the Raj, while retaining particular traditions and modifying and incorporating others. Providing a comprehensive overview of this community, the contributions to the book show that the legacy of the Baghdadi Jews lives on for Indians today through landmarks and monuments in Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata, and for Jews, through memories woven by members of the community residing in diverse diasporas.
Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical Studies and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa.
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book talk
lecture
In contrast to vital records, family photos do not impart clear, standardized information and have always posed a genealogical challenge. In 2019, amateur genealogist and data scientist Scott Genzer developed a technique for using free online facial recognition tools to identify people in photographs, and has successfully applied it to historical photos of the Jewish community of his ancestral town, Mielec, Poland, among others. In this presentation, he will offer a detailed demonstration of this technique and explain how it may help you break through some of your genealogical brick walls.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute. It is supported, in part, by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Her Role Models and the Hadassah Archive – Live on Zoom
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was growing up, she found inspiration in the trail-blazing accomplishments of Henrietta Szold and Emma Lazarus. In this segment, we pay homage to RBG by drawing on our own archives to lend more dimension to her heroes. We'll also uncover an unexpected archive that provided one of the late Justice's first gleanings of feminism and look at a speech RBG sent us to preserve. Join AJHS archivists and historians, as well as guest scholar Dr. Judith Rosenbaum of the Jewish Women's Archive, as we honor the resilience and innovation of past leaders and find inspiration for the future.
Presented by:
lecture
conference
Psalmody through the Ages: Music and the Book of Psalms - A Four-Part Digital Conference on Zoom
The book of Psalms echoes from the ancient Jerusalem Temple to the modern concert hall, and its role as an inspiration for musical works is unquestionable. In this digital conference, we bring together scholars from across disciplines to begin to answer the following question: How are we to understand the relationship between the book of Psalms and the music it inspires?
Presented by The Jewish Music Forum, with the support of The UCLA Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music.
Presented by:
conference
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging – Live on Zoom
The third in our series exploring new research. Alma Rachel Heckman discusses her new book "The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging."
The Sultan's Communists uncovers the history of Jewish radical involvement in Morocco's national liberation project and examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly-independent Morocco. Closely following the lives of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Assidon), Alma Rachel Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and '60s, and how they survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy to ultimately become heroic emblems of state-sponsored Muslim-Jewish tolerance.
The figures at the center of Heckman's narrative stood at the intersection of colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Zionism. Their stories unfolded in a country that, upon independence from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, Israel) during the Cold War, while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. The Sultan's Communists contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East and provides a new history of twentieth-century Jewish Morocco.
Alma Rachel Heckman is Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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book talk
book club
LBI Book Club, Vol V, Part 2: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin – Live on Zoom
The Jewish author Bruno Alfred Döblin is best-known as the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). The book became a best seller in the Weimar Republic, selling over 50,000 copies in just two years. The meandering story of Franz Biberkopf, ex-con, pimp, small-time criminal, and ordinary Joe trying to stay on the straight and narrow, captured life in 1920s Berlin like no other document. It was banned and burned under the Nazi regime, but recovered in the postwar era and canonized as a modernist masterpiece.
Bruno Alfred Döblin (1878 – 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for this novel. A prolific writer whose work spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters—his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Fischer Verlag, span more than thirty volumes. Döblin fled to Paris and then the United States in the Nazi period, but returned to Europe after the war, living in Paris and dying in West Germany.
About the Speaker:
Peter Jelavich, our guest expert for this month, is a Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Previously, Jelavich was professor of history and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1979-1981) and he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1982. Jelavich specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany. 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).
Presented by:
book club
cooking show
Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara-Piñer: Episode Three: Special Maimonides Session – Live on Zoom
Sephardi Culinary History is a new show that combines chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer’s fascination with food studies and flair for creating delicious cuisine. Join along as she cooks Sephardic history! In this special Maimonides session, she creates Maimón Cake and Quince, Pear, Apple and Pomegranate Juices.
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Hélène Jawhara-Piñer earned her Ph.D in History, Medieval History, and the History of Food from the University of Tours, France.
Presented by:
cooking show
lecture
Facing an escalating demand for entry into the United States by German-speaking Jews in Shanghai in early 1941, the United States Consulate called the JDC for help. No one forewarned Laura Margolis, a translator for immigration interviews, about the living conditions of 16,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, all desperate for food and housing. She set up a new JDC Shanghai office, which stood as a rock for Jewish refugees under four directorships, four different regimes, and two wars.
Drawing from the JDC Archives, testimonies, and memoirs, this lecture by Sara Halpern, PhD candidate at Ohio State University, offers a tale of how the JDC Shanghai office — both a transnational American and an international Jewish relief organization — and its ingenious directors navigated the regimes of the treaty port controlled by multiple powers, the Japanese puppet government, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Mao Zedong. In contrast to Europe during the same period, the small, isolated JDC office in Shanghai had to rely on the goodwill of the various consulates and local authorities to assist with the Jewish refugees’ survival and emigration to other destinations. Hailed by the senior administration in New York, the “Shanghai job” was one of the most difficult in the world.
Closed captioning will be available during this program.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
New Works Wednesdays – The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of WW II – Live on Zoom
The second in our series exploring new research. Reeva Spector Simon discusses her new book "The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II."
Incorporating published and archival material, this volume fills an important gap in the history of the Jewish experience during World War II, describing how the war affected Jews living along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and the Levant, from Morocco to Iran.
Surviving the Nazi slaughter did not mean that Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa were unaffected by the war: there was constant anti-Semitic propaganda and general economic deprivation; communities were bombed; and Jews suffered because of the anti-Semitic Vichy regulations that left them unemployed, homeless, and subject to forced labor and deportation to labor camps. Nevertheless, they fought for the Allies and assisted the Americans and the British in the invasion of North Africa. These men and women were community leaders and average people who, despite their dire economic circumstances, worked with the refugees attempting to escape the Nazis via North Africa, Turkey, or Iran and connected with international aid agencies during and after the war. By 1945, no Jewish community had been left untouched, and many were financially decimated, a situation that would have serious repercussions on the future of Jews in the region.
Reeva Spector Simon served as Associate Director of the Middle East Institute, Columbia University, and Professor of History at Yeshiva University. She is the author of Iraq Between the Two World Wars and co-editor of The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
A Brief History of the Paper Brigade - Live on Facebook and YouTube.
Join us for a brief, fast-paced history of the Paper Brigade, a group of poets and scholars who risked their lives to smuggle Jewish books and materials from YIVO’s collections during World War II. Using a variety of photos and books from YIVO's collections, Eddy Portnoy (YIVO’s Academic Advisor & Exhibitions Curator) delves into the harrowing story of how these materials escaped destruction at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviet Union.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Live From the Archives: The Gangster, The Undercover Investigator, and The Historian: Jewish Crime in Progressive-Era New York
More than just pushcarts and stickball, the Lower East Side was a complex immigrant neighborhood embedded in a complex, rapidly urbanizing and industrializing city. In the 1910s, uptown and downtown Jews joined together to form community--the Kehillah of New York-- and deemed crime-fighting to be essential. The Kehillah engaged Abraham Shoenfeld to go undercover to research and investigate the Jewish crime scene. Decades later, a historian named Arthur Aryeh Goren researched the Kehillah, and found his way to Shoenfeld's meticulous notes, and eventually Shoenfeld himself, who regaled him with stories of gangsters, prostitutes and unscrupulous police and politicians. Join AJHS historians and archivists as we share some of the amazing material from this collection. Professor Jennifer Fronc, author of New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era, helps place this undercover work in its broader context.
Presented by:
lecture
panel discussion
Leftists on Left-Wing Antisemitism – Live on Zoom
There is a robust discussion inside the Left about antisemitism in its own ranks. This includes not just discussions about Zionism, Israel, and Palestine, but also involve the presence in the left of conspiracy theories, notions of secret elites, critiques of financial capital, as well as openly antisemitic actors. This unique panel will bring together four scholars and activists on the Left who have a range of views to discuss conflicting notions of what Left antisemitism consists of, where different parts of the Left stand in relation to this issue, how the Left addresses or ignores the issue, and constructive ways this issue can be dealt with.
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
New Works Wednesdays - Ideas: Bereshit – Live on Zoom
Sina Kahen will discuss his new book “Ideas: Bereshit,” ideas on the weekly Torah portion through a Western Sephardi lens.
The Torah is Judaism's crown. The ideas gleaned from it have improved and advanced human civilization. Sina Kahen weaves together ideas from ancient to modern times, in an effort to provide an intellectually honest and spiritually fulfilling representation of the Torah's weekly portions. Drawing from science, philosophy, psychology, and history, this series offers the reader a vision of Torah based on intellect and integration, rather than superstition and isolation.
Sina Kahen is a Sephardi consultant, speaker, and author on Medical Tech, AI, and Jewish Philosophy.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Derek Penslar will discuss his book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader with Daniel Schwartz (George Washington University).
The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader?
Drawing on a vast body of Herzl’s personal, literary, and political writings, historian Derek Penslar shows in his new book that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader—possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings.
Presented by:
book talk
discussion
Yiddish Children’s Literature Today
The Jewish children’s literature field is booming and the call to provide representation of Jewish children, for Jewish children, has played a large part in that. The publication of Miriam Udel’s new book of translated Yiddish children’s literature, Honey on the Page, is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the history of Yiddish children’s literature, and to examine the roles it can play for children today.
What is the potential for Yiddish literature to educate not just Jewish readers, but non-Jewish readers? How is Yiddish literature different from other texts aimed at young Jewish readers? What can it bring to the field of Jewish children's literature that other texts might not? Join us for a conversation exploring these questions moderated by Rokhl Kafrissen (Tablet Magazine) with Miriam Udel, Naomi Seidman, and Jennifer Young.
Presented by:
discussion
lecture
Family History Today: Donating Your Family Papers – How, When, Where and Why?
Karen Franklin, Director of Family Research at the Leo Baeck Institute, is donating her voluminous family papers to LBI, providing her a unique dual perspective on the donation process as both a donor and a recipient. This session will address what you can do to organize and prepare your collection for donation to ensure that the material will be accessible and meaningful to future researchers. Karen will cover topics including the types of collections that are accepted, what to do with difficult and personal information, and requesting access restrictions. She will also share a few of the many family secrets she uncovered in the process of preparing her donation!.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and Leo Baeck Institute. It is supported, in part, by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor, as well as by funding from The New York Community Trust's NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Preparing for the High Holidays – Simhat Torah
Understanding our Sephardic Laws and Traditions with Hakham Rabbi Elie Abadie, MD
Rabbi Elie Abadie, M.D., comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he grew-up in Mexico City before settling in the United States. Following in the footsteps of the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), he is both a rabbi and a physician. Rabbi Dr. Abadie maintains a practice in Gastroenterology and is fluent in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, French, as well as conversant in Italian and Portuguese. He serves on the Boards of the American Sephardi Federation and Beit Hatfutsot, as the Director of the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University, Head of School of the Sephardic Academy of Manhattan, and Founder and Leader of the Manhattan East Synagogue – Congregation Shaare Mizrah.
Presented by:
lecture
cooking show
Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara-Piñer
Episode 2: Special Sukkot Edition "Beans and Chicken" and "Brown Nougat"
Sephardi Culinary History is a new show that combines chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer’s fascination with food studies and flair for creating delicious cuisine. Join along as she cooks Sephardic history!
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Hélène Jawhara-Piñer earned her Ph.D in History, Medieval History, and the History of Food from the University of Tours, France.
Presented by:
cooking show
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol V, Part 1: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The Jewish author Bruno Alfred Döblin is best-known as the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). The book became a best seller in the Weimar Republic, selling over 50,000 copies in just two years. The meandering story of Franz Biberkopf, ex-con, pimp, small-time criminal, and ordinary Joe trying to stay on the straight and narrow, captured life in 1920s Berlin like no other document. It was banned and burned under the Nazi regime, but recovered in the postwar era and canonized as a modernist masterpiece.
Bruno Alfred Döblin (1878 – 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for this novel. A prolific writer whose work spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters—his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Fischer Verlag, span more than thirty volumes. Döblin fled to Paris and then the United States in the Nazi period, but returned to Europe after the war, living in Paris and dying in West Germany.
About the Speaker:
Peter Jelavich, our guest expert for this month, is a Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Previously, Jelavich was professor of history and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1979-1981) and he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1982. Jelavich specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany. 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).
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Preparing for the High Holidays – Sukkot
Understanding our Sephardic Laws and Traditions with Hakham Rabbi Elie Abadie, MD
Rabbi Elie Abadie, M.D., comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he grew-up in Mexico City before settling in the United States. Following in the footsteps of the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), he is both a rabbi and a physician. Rabbi Dr. Abadie maintains a practice in Gastroenterology and is fluent in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, French, as well as conversant in Italian and Portuguese. He serves on the Boards of the American Sephardi Federation and Beit Hatfutsot, as the Director of the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University, Head of School of the Sephardic Academy of Manhattan, and Founder and Leader of the Manhattan East Synagogue – Congregation Shaare Mizrah.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Preparing for the High Holidays – Yom Kippur
Understanding our Sephardic Laws and Traditions with Hakham Rabbi Elie Abadie, MD
Rabbi Elie Abadie, M.D., comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he grew-up in Mexico City before settling in the United States. Following in the footsteps of the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), he is both a rabbi and a physician. Rabbi Dr. Abadie maintains a practice in Gastroenterology and is fluent in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, French, as well as conversant in Italian and Portuguese. He serves on the Boards of the American Sephardi Federation and Beit Hatfutsot, as the Director of the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University, Head of School of the Sephardic Academy of Manhattan, and Founder and Leader of the Manhattan East Synagogue – Congregation Shaare Mizrah.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: Hank Greenberg and Yom Kippur – Live on Zoom
About the Series:
A new National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant enables AJHS to bring curated objects and documents straight to you through new digital storytelling methods. In these live interactive Zoom sessions, you’ll see documents close up and pose questions to archivists and historians about what you are examining.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
May God Avenge their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych
May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). The triptych takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey from Hasidic life before the Holocaust to the chaos of the early days of war and then to the horrors of Nazi captivity in Auschwitz. A new translation by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub brings these extraordinary memoirs to the English-language readers for the first time. Join us for a presentation by and discussion with translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub and Bryks' daughter, cultural activist Bella Bryks-Klein, exploring Bryks' life and work, the genesis of this project, and the related holdings in YIVO's collections.
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
Natalia Aleksiun in conversation with Samuel Kassow
Natalia Aleksiun and Samuel Kassow discuss the legacies of Jewish historians before the Holocaust who wrote both academic and popular history for their community and engaged in creating a sense of Polish-Jewish belonging, while also fighting for their rights as an ethnic minority. What shaped their sense of both scholarly and communal mission? How relevant is their work to writing Jewish history today and to our understanding of the modern Jewish experience in East Central Europe?
Presented by:
conversation
panel discussion
Our new "Family Affairs" series explores researching and writing about Jewish experience from a distinctively personal perspective in discussions with leading scholars of modern Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Daniel Mendelsohn a scholar of the classics will discuss the experience of writing his critically acclaimed book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, published in English in 2006, a memoir in which he uncovered the fate of his family members in a Galician town (today in Western Ukraine), offering a compelling new perspective on Holocaust remembrance. Omer Bartov has shifted from the study of the German perpetrators to the study of memory and loss in eastern Galicia in his 2007 book Erased, a turn which culminated in his award winning book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), which explores the impact of the Holocaust in one community closely linked with his family history, exploring the perspectives of all groups involved. Atina Grossmann's research trajectory has taken her from the study of German Jews to the experience of Jewish refugees, following the path of her family's plight during World War II, through her co-edited volume Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017), to her current project, which follows her German Jewish refugee parents on their journey from Europe to the Middle East and Asia, exploring sites of refuge during World War II. She will reflect on her book in progress, Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure in Transit: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India. All three authors will delve into questions about the pull of family history in the context of the Holocaust, the challenge of shifting geographic boundaries, the limits of microhistorical studies and how personal journeys into one's past can inform and enliven historical writing.
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
People of the Book Club: The World That We Knew – Live on Zoom
Go behind the stories and peer inside the archives at our book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman, a work of historical fiction and magical realism set in 1941, that follows three young women as they flee from Berlin into France to escape the Nazi regime. The discussion will be followed by a show and tell with archivist Michael Simonson, sharing documents and artworks from LBI’s collections that are connected to the setting and themes of the book.
“[A] hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance, and enduring love in dark times…gravely beautiful…Hoffman the storyteller continues to dazzle.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Preparing for the High Holidays – Rosh Hashana
Understanding our Sephardic Laws and Traditions with Hakham Rabbi Elie Abadie, MD
Rabbi Elie Abadie, M.D., comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he grew-up in Mexico City before settling in the United States. Following in the footsteps of the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides (the Rambam), he is both a rabbi and a physician. Rabbi Dr. Abadie maintains a practice in Gastroenterology and is fluent in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, French, as well as conversant in Italian and Portuguese. He serves on the Boards of the American Sephardi Federation and Beit Hatfutsot, as the Director of the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University, Head of School of the Sephardic Academy of Manhattan, and Founder and Leader of the Manhattan East Synagogue – Congregation Shaare Mizrah.
Presented by:
lecture
film screening
Saving the Iraqi Jewish Archives: A Journey of Identity
Documentary Feature | USA | 2020 | 45 min
In English
Followed by the Q&A with the Filmmakers 30 min
Summary
The Iraqi government, under color of law, stripped the Iraqi Jews of their property, including religious and cultural artifacts, starting in 1952. Rescued by US soldiers in 2003 from a flooded basement of the Iraqi secret police, the Iraqi Jewish Archives consist of over 4800 books and artifacts. Among those are the records of the last Jewish education center in Iraq – The Frank Iny School. Presently, the US and Iraqi governments are planning to return those same archives to a politically unstable Iraq. One day there will be little hard evidence for the community to prove they ever existed in Iraq. Moreover, this same plight is being inflicted upon other minorities in the middle east. NYSJFF is please to present the world premiere of this eye-opening feature documentary that include personal stories of escape, how the archives were discovered, and what the archives mean to future generations to come.
Presented by:
film screening
commemoration
Nusakh Vilne Memorial
Join us for our annual event commemorating the Jewish community of Vilna through poetry and music. This year's commemoration, the first ever to take place digitally via Zoom, will feature a conversation reflecting on the history and format of Nusakh Vilna, and the role that music, poetry, and ritual play in holocaust commemoration. Chaired by Elye Palevsky, the conversation will be moderated by YIVO's Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, and will feature Rivka Augenfeld and Edna Friedberg (Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
Presented by:
commemoration
film screening
Saving the Iraqi Jewish Archives: A Journey of Identity
Documentary Feature | USA | 2020 | 45 min
In English
Followed by the Q&A with the Filmmakers 30 min
Summary
The Iraqi government, under color of law, stripped the Iraqi Jews of their property, including religious and cultural artifacts, starting in 1952. Rescued by US soldiers in 2003 from a flooded basement of the Iraqi secret police, the Iraqi Jewish Archives consist of over 4800 books and artifacts. Among those are the records of the last Jewish education center in Iraq – The Frank Iny School. Presently, the US and Iraqi governments are planning to return those same archives to a politically unstable Iraq. One day there will be little hard evidence for the community to prove they ever existed in Iraq. Moreover, this same plight is being inflicted upon other minorities in the middle east. NYSJFF is please to present the world premiere of this eye-opening feature documentary that include personal stories of escape, how the archives were discovered, and what the archives mean to future generations to come.
Presented by:
film screening
panel discussion
Join Elisheva Carlebach, Deborah Dash Moore, Dara Horn, and Itamar Borochov in a discussion about Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880, Vol. 6 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, edited by Elisheva Carlebach.
Hear voices rarely included in Jewish culture, such as that of Roza, a multilingual Jewish midwife and that of a Jewish soldier during the American Civil War. Learn about the powerful religious music inspiring artists of today. Explore passionate Jewish debates on all sides of religious and political issues, including such fundamental matters as private property and the institution of slavery.
What happens to our understanding of Jewish civilization when those who are often marginalized move to the center of the story? Discover the unexpected breadth of Jewish culture.
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Family History Today: Portuguese Citizenship - Reconnecting with your Sephardic Iberian Ancestors
While Spain has ended its Law of Return for descendants of Sephardic Jews, Portugal continues to be an option for those wishing to reclaim their ancestors' citizenship. Rita Mayer Jardim, a Lisbon-based lawyer specializing in this path to Portuguese citizenship, will address the most common questions she receives from prospective applicants. Learn what is required to prove your Sephardic heritage, how long it takes, and other practical details that will help you navigate the process.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute. It is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: Rosh Hashanah Recipes – Live on Zoom
About the Series:
A new National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant enables AJHS to bring curated objects and documents straight to you through new digital storytelling methods. In these live interactive Zoom sessions, you’ll see documents close up and pose questions to archivists and historians about what you are examining.
Presented by:
lecture
cooking show
Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara-Piñer – Live on Zoom
Episode One: "Eggplant Almodrote" and "Moroccan flatbreads"
Sephardi Culinary History is a new show that combines chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer’s fascination with food studies and flair for creating delicious cuisine. Join along as she cooks Sephardic history!
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Hélène Jawhara-Piñer earned her Ph.D in History, Medieval History, and the History of Food from the University of Tours, France.
Presented by:
cooking show
lecture
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: Miniatures & Colonial America – Live on Zoom
When we surveyed you to discover what topics interested you most, you expressed great interest in both "Early American Jewish Families" and "Jews of Color." Our archives offer an intersection of these identities in the story of the Moses family of New York City. One of the most prominent New York Jewish merchant families of the late 18th and 19th century, the Moses family has a fascinating story behind their multiracial identity.
Join us on August 25 as we take a close look at two ivory miniatures, engage in conversation with Professor Laura Leibman, and learn about life in early 19th-century Barbados, London and New York City. Then Director of Collections and Engagement, Melanie Meyers, shares how AJHS acquired the objects - its own story that sheds light on turn-of-the- twentieth century New York Jews and the Society's early days.
About the series:
A new National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant enables AJHS to bring curated objects and documents straight to you through new digital storytelling methods. In these live interactive Zoom sessions, you’ll see documents close up and pose questions to archivists and historians about what you are examining.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Jennifer Mendelsohn is the founder of #resistancegenealogy, a social media movement that’s garnered international attention by using genealogical and historical records to fight disinformation and honor America’s immigrant past. In this session she’ll talk about her path to becoming an “accidental activist.” She’ll also detail how her genealogical adventures have helped reunite long lost family members, debunked decades-old family fairy tales (Did you know no names were changed at Ellis Island?) and led to shocking, poignant and sometimes hilarious revelations.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
LBI Book Club, Volume IV: The German Bride by Joanna Hershon – Live on Zoom
The German Bride, by Joanna Hershon, begins in Berlin in 1861. Eva Frank, a 16-year-old Jewess, has her portrait painted, which leads to an indiscretion that has devastating consequences. Desperate to escape a painful situation, Eva marries Abraham Shein, an ambitious merchant who has returned home to Germany for the first time in a decade since establishing himself in the American West. The young bride leaves Berlin and its ghosts for an unfamiliar life halfway across the world, traversing the icy waters of the Atlantic and the rugged, sweeping terrain of the Santa Fe Trail.
Though Eva’s existence in the rough and burgeoning community of Sante Fe, New Mexico, is a far cry from her life as a daughter of privilege, she soon begins to settle into the mystifying town. But this new setting cannot keep at bay the overwhelming memories of her former life, nor can it protect her from an increasing threat to her own safety that will force Eva to make a fateful decision.
Join LBI and author Joanna Hershon on August 18th at 2:00 PM EDT in discussing this fascinating novel, which was also shaped in part by Hershon's research at the Leo Baeck Institute. The Zoom information will be sent via email before the event.
Author
Joanna Hershon is the author of five novels: St. Ivo (Farrar, Straus & Giroux April 2020), Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride and A Dual Inheritance (Ballantine Books). Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the literary anthologies Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories. Her two most recent novels are A Dual Inheritance and St. Ivo, a contemporary suspense novel set in New York City. She teaches in the Creative Writing department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, painter Derek Buckner, their twin sons and daughter. Learn more about Hershon and her work on her website.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Sue Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth and a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to appreciate the rural South while understanding the need to interrogate its complexities. In Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South, she travels to nine states, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with the region’s complex, conflicted present. Learning how southern Jews benefited from slavery and escaped some discrimination by not being on the lowest rung of society’s ladder, she finds herself on an African-American history journey as well, investigating the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine.
If you would like more information about the National Museum of American Jewish History please visit nmajh.org
Presented by:
book talk
talk
A story from the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute
With a keen photographic eye and sharp sense of humor, Emil Carl Grossmann documented his life as he encountered the quotidian joys and historic upheavals characterizing a life that spanned the 20th century. Diverse materials including autographed playbills, photographs of zoo animals, and personal ads, along with reminders of his family’s tragic history, come together to give a fuller picture of Grossmann and his time. By exploring his archival collection, Sarah Glover, Archivist at the Center for Jewish History, shows how much we can learn from just one box. With Michael Simonson, head of the Reference Department and Director of Public Outreach for the Leo Baeck Institute.
About the Series
At the Center for Jewish History, there are tens of thousands of boxes in our partners’ archival collections. Boxes filled with photographs, journals, letters, and documents. We take these treasures Out of the Box in our new series. Join us!
About the Speakers:
Sarah Glover is an Archivist and Digitization Projects Liaison at the Center for Jewish History, where she has worked since 2015. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied English, History, and Jewish Studies and her Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan. Sarah uses her knowledge of German, Hebrew, and Yiddish in her archival work.
Michael Simonson serves as the head of the Ira S. Lewy Reference Department and as the Director of Public Outreach for the Leo Baeck Institute. Originally from Minnesota, Michael studied German history and German language before attending Pratt Institute for archival studies. A former President of the Archivist Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, Michael has worked as an archivist at LBI for the last 17 years.
Presented by:
talk
concert
Cantata Profana Performs Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde – on Facebook Live and YouTube
YIVO joins forces with the young, “intrepid” (New Yorker) instrumental and vocal chamber ensemble Cantata Profana to present Gustav Mahler’s epic song symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in Arnold Schoenberg and Rainer Riehn’s chamber orchestra arrangement.
Presented by:
concert
concert
BEYLE100: Celebrating a Century of the Yiddish Songs, Poetry & Artistic Vision of Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman – Live on Zoom
Join us for a special online concert celebrating the 100th Birthday of Yiddish songwriter/poet/singer Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920-2013). The program, conceived by Binyumen Schaechter, and organized by Schaechter with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, will feature a number of the Yiddish world’s leading contemporary performers including Michael Alpert, Sharon Bernstein, Dovid Braun, Patrick Farrell, Itzik Gottesman, Svetlana Kundish, Janet Leuchter, Sasha Lurje, Sarah Myerson, Binyumen Schaechter, Reyna Schaechter, Temma Schaechter, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Asya Vaisman Schulman, Alicia Svigals, Perl Teitelbaum, Theresa Tova, Lucette van den Berg, Josh Waletzky, and Hy Wolfe. Yiddish actor Shane Baker will serve as emcee.
Born in Vienna and raised in Chernovitz (then Romania, now Ukraine), Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman came to New York in 1951, and created an oeuvre of vivid songs and poetry covering a wide range of subjects from subway musicians, to personal reminiscences, to descriptions of street life near her home in the Bronx. Writing in Yiddish, Schaechter-Gottesman’s work uniquely captures universal themes from intimate snapshots, while humanizing the bustle of modern life. Schaechter-Gottesman was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005, and her songs continue to be performed and enjoyed across the globe.
Planning Committee:
Shane Baker, Dovid Braun, Itzik Gottesman, Ethel Raim, Pete Rushefsky, Binyumen Schaechter, Josh Waletzky, Alex Weiser
Presented by:
concert
talk
LIVE FROM THE ARCHIVES: Emma Lazarus' Red Manuscript - A New Interactive Zoom Series from AJHS!
Emma Lazarus handwrote her work here in the mid-1880s, and while we typically turn to page 1 to study “The New Colossus,” this time we’ll turn to page 2 to study “Progress & Poverty.” Initially published in the New York Times, Lazarus wrote the poem after reading labor activist and journalist Henry George’s 526-page economic analysis, Progress & Poverty. Join Executive Director, Dr. Annie Polland, and AJHS Director of Collections and Engagement, Melanie Meyers, for a live show that draws on the perspectives of Professor Schor, historian Ed O’Donnell, author of Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age, and others, as you discover more facets to Lazarus’s work.
About the Series:
A new National Endowment for the Humanities CARES grant enables AJHS to bring curated objects and documents straight to you through new digital storytelling methods. In these live interactive Zoom sessions, you’ll see documents close up and pose questions to archivists and historians about what you are examining.
Presented by:
talk
lecture
Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt. A geshikhte fun 'bund.'
Jack Jacobs | Delivered in Yiddish
The Jewish Workers’ Bund, founded in Vilna in 1897, was the most important Jewish socialist party in Europe, and the most powerful Jewish political party in a number of Poland’s major cities in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. This talk will explore the history of the Bund, and its ideological development, and will attempt to explain both the reasons for the Bund’s success, and the party’s limitations. Why was a party rooted in Marxism, led by secularists, and advocating anti-Zionist ideas, so attractive to a significant proportion of Polish Jewry in the 1930s?
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Accidental Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater
Alyssa Quint | Delivered in English
The Accidental Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater explores the particular social, commercial, cultural, linguistic, and historical circumstances that gave rise to the first public performances of Yiddish operetta in Romania and Russia from 1876 to 1883, a period considered the first chapter of the modern Yiddish theater. These performances kickstarted the global cultural phenomenon that became the modern Yiddish theater. Under what circumstances was this complex institution allowed to grow? And what accident of history—without which there may have been no Yiddish theater—lies at the intersection of all of these circumstances?
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Family History Today: Reading between the Lines in your Family’s Papers – Live on Zoom
Family papers can tell us a lot about our family histories, but without proper historical context, much of what these documents might tell us is lost. In this presentation, Michael Simonson will provide crucial context to historical documents you might find in your own family history research, allowing you to understand your discoveries on a deeper level. While he will focus on examples from German and Austrian family papers, his presentation’s themes will be applicable to genealogical researchers of all backgrounds.
About the Speaker:
Michael Simonson comes to us with a knowledge of genealogical resources for German and Austrian Jewish families gained over 17 years as an archivist at the Leo Baeck Institute. In addition, Mr. Simonson now serves as the head of the Ira S. Lewy Reference Department and as the Director of Public Outreach for the Leo Baeck Institute.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
From the Inquisition to The Mishiguene Restaurant: The Latin American Jewish Food Story – Live on Zoom
Take a culinary tour of Jewish Latin America with esteemed food and culture writer and cookbook author Jayne Cohen. We will begin our journey during the Inquisition and travel all the way to today’s Mishiguene (a Spanish take on meshuggeneh), the Jewish restaurant in Buenos Aires rated number 18 on Latin America’s 50 Best list. Along the way we’ll explore diverse Jewish foodways south of the border, from tamales con schmaltz, posole with matzoh balls and guava-filled sufganiyot, to Cuba's kosher butcher and the most traditional kitchens. And then we’ll take a look at how Latin American Jewish immigrants are changing the landscape of Jewish cuisine in the U.S.
About the Speaker:
Jayne Cohen writes and lectures extensively about Jewish cuisine and culture and created and moderated an annual program on Jewish cuisine around the world at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage for seven years. Her most recent book, Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover's Treasury of Classics and Improvisations, was named a James Beard award finalist in International Cooking. She has appeared on numerous radio and TV programs and has written for publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Gourmet, and Bon Appetit, among others.
Presented by:
lecture
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon for Emma Lazarus' Birthday! – Live on Zoom
Come celebrate Emma Lazarus' birthday! Born on July 22, 1849, in the middle of a Cholera Epidemic, she would be 171 this year. We invite previous participants to come and share the poems they have written during or after previous workshops. We offer this as an opportunity to discuss our work and celebrate!
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, these virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
Stutchkoff and Yiddish Radio
Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel | Delivered in Yiddish
Nahum Stutchkoff was a prominent Yiddish lexicographer (Der oyster fun der yidisher shprakh; Der yidisher gramen-leksikon), but did you know that he was also a prolific playwright, actor, director, lyricist, translator and producer of Yiddish radio programs? Stutchkoff spent years at WEVD radio in New York, creating Yiddish radio dramas that enthralled listeners with family sagas, melodramatic sob stories and comic scenes of intergenerational conflict, all produced on a shoestring budget and seasoned with homemade special effects – not to mention his delightful commercials for food products. This lecture will explore Stutchkoff’s legacy within the “golden age” of Yiddish radio, drawing on his rich archive in the Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Chaim Zhitlovsky and His Philosophy of Yiddishism
Tony Michels | Delivered in English
Although barely remembered today, Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865-1943) was a towering figure in modern Jewish politics and culture during his own lifetime. He was highly influential yet often controversial. A revolutionary socialist and Jewish nationalist, Zhitlovsky promoted the idea of a Yiddish cultural renaissance in the United States, eastern Europe, and wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews lived. At various times, he supported Zionism and Communism; at other times he was a fierce critic of both. Who was Chaim Zhitlovsky and what was his philosophy of Yiddishism? This lecture explores the life and thought of one of the most intriguing Jewish thinkers of the modern era.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Being Heumann with Judy Heumann—LIVE ON ZOOM
Judy Heumann is an internationally recognized leader in the disability community and a lifelong civil rights advocate. From fighting to attend grade school to winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license, her actions throughout her life set a precedent that have fundamentally improved rights for people with disabilities, sparking a national movement that led to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She has worked with a wide range of activist organizations, NGOs, and governments since the 1970s, serving in the Clinton and Obama administrations and as the World Bank’s first adviser on disability and development. In Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, she recounts her lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.
An ASL interpreter will be present at this event.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol. III: Her First American by Lore Segal – Live on Zoom
Lore Segal’s Her First American (1985) follows a young Austrian refugee named Ilka who falls in love with a powerfully charming and prominent Black intellectual in 1950s America. Ilka is as wide-eyed as most 22-year-olds, but she has an uncommon sort of fearlessness—the kind that seems to have never known fear. Carter Bayoux, her wiser and older inamorata, gives Ilka an introduction to the way that race, class, religion, and prejudice function in America. The novel, hailed by many as a classic, took her 18 years to write and has a modernist touch, especially in the crackling bits of dialogue and an almost deadpan sense of humor—yes, humor. Despite the heavy subject matter, her sentences always have a way of working toward some wry, dark truth. But the heart of Her First American is in the powerfully drawn humanity of each of the main characters. One is estranged from her country; the other is estranged within his country. Their love comes partly from the friction between that shared sense of half-displacement.*
The first chapter of Her First American is based on the Lore Segal’s short story The First American, published in The New Yorker in 1983. Click here to listen to Alice Mattison reading and discussing the story with Deborah Treisman.
Author
Lore Segal is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, children's book author, translator and teacher, living in New York City.
When Segal was ten years old in 1938, she escaped her native Vienna and went to England on a Kindertransport, where she lived with a number of foster families–an experience she would later write about in her novel Other People’s Houses. After receiving her B.A. English Honors from the University of London in 1948, she went to live in the Dominican Republic until American quotas allowed her to come to New York in May 1951.
Between 1968 and 1996 Lore Segal taught writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Princeton, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Ohio State University, from which she retired in 1996. Among many other awards, she has received the Clifton Fadiman Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Many of her stories were published in the The New Yorker, and her book Shakespeare's Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Her latest book, The Journal I Did Not Keep, a collection of new and selected writings, was published in 2019.
See a short introduction to Lore Segal by The New Yorker here.
*The preceding description of the novel is adapted from Catherine Lacey’s introduction of Lore Segal’s The Journal I Did Not Keep.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Rabbi Dr. Bentzion Barami: The Yemenite Torah – Live on Zoom
Yemenite Jews are known to be conservative in their keeping of tradition. However, when the Yemenites brought their Torah scrolls to the Western World, they were rebuffed. There are slight differences in the Yemenite Torah as compared with Jews around the world. Rabbi Barami will discuss these unique details and how it is actually the true continuation of the Torah that was in the Temple.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Ab. Cahan's Early Experiments in Yiddish Journalism: di "Sedre" and the Novella "How Rafol Naaritsokh Became a Socialist"
Ellie Kellman | Delivered in Yiddish
Abraham Cahan is known for writing what he called pleyne (plain) Yiddish. As editor of the socialist daily Forverts during the first half of the twentieth century, he famously expunged from the newspaper vocabulary he considered esoteric or unfamiliar to immigrant readers. During the 1890s, Cahan experimented with writing in a variety of genres for an audience of newly literate immigrants. As a co-founder of the socialist weekly Arbeter tsaytung, he tested his supposition that immigrants would buy a socialist paper if it were to supply sophisticated content in a simplified, partly entertaining form. In connection with this effort, Cahan created several popular genres for the paper. Among them was the well-known "Sedre." Each week, Cahan chose a theme from the weekly Torah portion and interpreted it along the lines of his socialist world view.
Among Cahan's less well known experiments with popularizing socialist ideas was his novella "How Rafol Naaritsokh Became a Socialist," which appeared in installments in Arbeter tsaytung in 1894. The protagonist, Rafol, a talented cabinet maker from Lithuania, immigrates to America and finds work in a furniture factory in New York. Suffering under the routinized and alienating labor that is required of him, he becomes active in a socialist circle, where he comes to understand that capitalism both exploits his body and dulls his spirit. Gradually, he embraces socialism in order to revive his sense of pride in productive work.
The novella was reprinted in pamphlet form in 1896. In 1907, Cahan revised and expanded the work into a full-length novel entitled Rafol Naaritsokh – the Story of a Carpenter Who Saw the Light.
The speaker will analyze the language and content of "Di Sedre" and the original version of Rafol Naaritsokh for the purpose of broadening the scope of scholarly evaluation of Cahan's early contribution to the Yiddish press.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Barton Brothers, Mickey Katz, and Others: Yiddish-English Bilingual Parody Songs
Ronald Robboy | Delivered in English
In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (that is, bilingual) parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons’ unexpected success—their send-up of Yiddish radio, “Joe & Paul,” was a bona fide hit, however improbable—inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-rate studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Capitol Records issued (possibly to their own amazement) a steady stream of these Yinglish albums by Katz all through the 1950s and into the ‘60s. These in turn inspired Allan Sherman, a TV gameshow writer/producer, to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs. Though hardly any of Sherman’s lyrics had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded—phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically—to Yiddish beginnings.
Close readings of selected tracks by the Bartons, by Katz, and by Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Dr. Motti Kedar: What makes the Middle East so problematic? – Live on Zoom
Dr. Kedar will help you connect the dots between the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, the tension in Israel, and other incidence across the region. Sponsored in conjunction with E'eleh BeTamar.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Where Is the Capital of Yiddishland?
Kalman Weiser | Delivered in Yiddish
Yiddishists understood Yiddish as a global language and its secular culture as a global culture whose centre lay in eastern Europe. But where was the capital the "Yiddishland"? Following the First World War, litvish Vilna—home of YIVO—and poylish Warsaw—the metropolis of the modern Yiddish press, literature, and theatre—emerged as the leading candidates in the competition. Each city had its admirers and detractors who praised its virtues or condemned its vices in dozens of articles in the international Yiddish press. Their evaluations reflect local patriotism, personal frictions and ideological conflicts. But what does the competition teach us about the state of Yiddish in general and about Yiddishist hopes and fears for the future of the language?
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish Children's Literature and Jewish Modernity
Miriam Udel | Delivered in English
Scholars are only beginning to consider the corpus of nearly one thousand extant books, as well as several periodicals, that constitute the Yiddish children’s literature of the 20th century. However, this body of work was important in both shaping and respecting key aspects of the modern Jewish experience. We will explore what it means to limn the contours of a canon of Yiddish kidlit and discuss the unique vantage point that studying children’s literature and culture affords with respect to the rest of modern Jewish civilization.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture & performance
The Music of North Africa: Modern and Contemporary Judeo-Arabic Song and Performance – Live on Zoom
By Broom & Allen Fellow, researcher, writer and performer Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz & ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Samuel Thomas Torjman
Presented by:
lecture & performance
lecture
Rescue and Resettlement: Researching Refugees from Nazi Europe
Researchers may face challenges in documenting relatives who were refugees from Europe during World War II. Not all those who fled followed well-worn routes, so identifying and tracking them involves the kind of creative sleuthing important for all historical research. Exit routes and countries of refuge covered in this presentation include British Guiana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Morocco and Egypt among others. This session is organized around case studies in which unusual as well as tried and true sources will be discussed.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Jews and the Right: Heimat and Hatred – Live on Zoom, Facebook and YouTube
PLEASE NOTE: This program will be held over Zoom, but it will also be live-streamed on LBI's YouTube and Facebook pages.
In his new study of Jewish participation in conservative political movements in the Wilhelmenian and Weimar periods, historian Philipp Nielsen (Sarah Lawrence) opens with correspondence between Gershom Scholem and his older brother Reinhold in the 1970s. After reading one of his famous younger brother's books, Reinhold objects in one letter to Gershom's portrayal of German history and affirms his identity as a "right-liberal." While Gershom had been drawn to Zionism, Reinhold still identified strongly with his WWI service and German nationalism and placed his political sympathies on the right.
The diverging political paths chosen by these two members of the same bourgeois Berlin family—thrown into even sharper relief by the career of their Communist brother, Werner—highlights how German-speaking Jews navigated the complex currents of class, religion, national identity, and ideology to arrive at a broad spectrum of political affiliations.
Nielsen will discuss his book, Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871–1935 with historian Jay Geller (Case Western), author of the 2019 study The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Based on Nielsen's study of German-Jewish involvement with nationalist and conservative political parties, societies that promoted Jewish agricultural settlement, and the military, and using the Scholems as a case study, they will examine the forces that shaped Jewish political identity and action in this period. As many right-wing political projects moved from a more inclusive state-centric ideology to a "Völkisch" one that explicitly excluded Jews from the German nation, Jews on the right faced a new dilemma: when did the need for self-defense start to outweigh motivations of nation and class?
About the Speakers:
Jay Geller is the Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he teaches a wide range of courses on Jewish history and culture, the history of modern Europe, and urban history. He is the author of The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction, which examines the experiences of one German-Jewish family over five generations, from the time they came to Berlin in the early 1800s through their dispersion around the world during the Holocaust. The Scholems was long-listed for the 2019 Cundill History Prize and will be published in German later this year. Geller’s other books are Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, and Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, published earlier this year.
Philipp Nielsen is an Assistant Professor for Modern European History at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and an Associated Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2012. His publications include Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling after 1945, edited with Till Großmann (Routledge, 2019), and Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity, edited with Benno Gammerl and Magrit Pernau (Berghahn, 2019). Since 2019, Nielsen has been the historical advisor in the planning and planting of the “Jewish Garden” in Berlin, Germany, which forms a part of the city owned “Gardens of the World”.
Presented by:
book talk
sidney krum young artists concert series
Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong in Classical Music – Live on YouTube and Facebook
Join us for a digital premiere performance of 5 new compositions engaging with Yiddish folksongs. The new works by composers Martin Bresnick, Marti Epstein, Aaron Kernis, Judith Shatin, and Alex Weiser, were commissioned by YIVO and will be presented alongside archival recordings of the folksongs that they are reimagining which range from lullabies to protest songs. Performances will be by ensemble Cantata Profana featuring singers Annie Rosen and Emily Donato, violinist Jacob Ashworth, and pianist Daniel Schlosberg.
YIVO was planning a concert which would survey the history of Yiddish folksongs in classical music repertoire. The concert was to feature selections from Joel Engel’s 1909 cycle—the first example of a classical composition employing Yiddish folksongs—works by composers affiliated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, works by composers Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Stefan Wolpe, and more. The chronological span of the repertoire was to culminate with these five new works engaging with Yiddish folksongs today, continuing this story into the present moment. YIVO plans to present this concert in person when it is safe to do so. In the meantime, YIVO is presenting this event as a digital preview of the concert.
Presented by:
sidney krum young artists concert series
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
Eating Right and Left: Food and Political Alignment in the Yiddish Press
Eve Jochnowitz | Delivered in Yiddish
An editorial published in Der Tog May 17, 1916 titled “Vegetarians have to be liberal too” spelled out the intense and contentious connection drawn by many Yiddish writers between Jewish eating and Jewish politics in the early years of the 20th century. All parties, those arguing for and against vegetarianism, claimed for themselves the moral high ground associated with liberalism, with greatness of soul and generosity of spirit, and attributed conservatism to the other side.
This lecture will use intriguing texts and images to examine what values Yiddish writers in Europe, the Americas, and Palestine considered “liberal,” and how they saw food practices including both embracing or rejecting vegetarianism, as advancing those values. The question of whether any kind of prescriptivism could be put to use for a progressive agenda was complicated (in the United States) by the arguments for and against prohibition. Editors of Yiddish papers differed as well on whether women’s emancipation was relevant to a radical agenda and what role cooking and eating might play in advancing women’s rights. Women wrote or contributed to all three known Yiddish vegetarian cookbooks in the first half of the 20th century, indicating that women were among the most energetic, productive advocates for vegetarianism. Yiddish journalists, nevertheless, saw women not as pioneers and agitators for vegetarianism, but as passive companions, active resistors, or simply indifferent, hapless victims in need of defense. This position was partly justified by the tone-deaf sexism of many vegetarian writers.
The discomfort with and nostalgia for Jewish religious practice and custom regarding vegetarianism as an admirable khumre or a dangerous heresy informed the discourse as well. The original Jewish Encyclopedia, completed in 1906, has a brief article on vegetarianism which is entirely positive (citing rabbinic sources uncomfortable with meat, mostly because it is an extravagance, and touching on modern Jewish vegetarian thinkers, but making no mention of any anti-vegetarian sentiment.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Family History Today: Jewish Refugees & the U.S.-Mexico Border – Live on Zoom
Between the world wars, more than 200,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Europe and the Middle East found a safe haven in Latin America, where immigration restrictions were less stringent and more easily circumvented than in the U.S. and British-controlled Palestine. While some of these refugees permanently settled in Latin America, many more emigrated again, primarily to the U.S. and Israel. In this presentation, Moriah Amit, the Center for Jewish History’s senior genealogy librarian, will explore the lesser-known history of Jewish refugee immigration to the U.S. via Latin America. Additionally, for those whose ancestors came to America through this route, Moriah will explain how to locate records that will shed light on their journey.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute; it is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
lecture
The Music of North Africa: Sephardi Judeo-Espagnole - Threads Across the Strait – Live on Zoom
By Broom & Allen Fellow, esearcher, writer and performer Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
The Lost Family with Libby Copeland – Live on Zoom
In her acclaimed new book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are (Abrams, 2020), award-winning journalist Libby Copeland investigates the rapidly evolving phenomenon of home DNA testing, uncovering the story of Alice Collins Plebuch, whose supposed Irish ancestry is overturned by a DNA test that indicates Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. On the 20th anniversary of home DNA testing for ancestry purposes, and with over 30 million Americans tested, the author will explore how this technology illuminates how we think about family, heritage, and ourselves. She will also discuss the implications of home DNA testing for Jewish genealogy, as well as the unique challenges of genetic genealogy for Ashkenazim.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture and concert
Sephardic Art Song – A Musical Legacy of the Sephardi Diaspora – Live on Zoom
The history and culture of Sephardic Jewry can be found in the rich repertoire of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) folksongs. These folksongs reflect on Jewish traditions and stories as well as universal human themes such as love, death, and despair. In the 20th and 21st century Western classical composers such as Alberto Hemsi, Yehezkel Braun, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Joaquin Rodrigo, Wolf Simoni (Louis Saguer), Lazare Saminsky, Paul Ben-Haim, and others used these melodies to create a repertoire of Ladino Art Songs. These art songs provided the composers a way to preserve the folksongs and, in many cases, an avenue through which they could reflect on their own heritage. The musical styles of these songs draw on diverse traditions ranging from Spanish, Greek, Balkan, and Turkish/Ottoman folk and classical traditions as well as Western classical music more broadly.
Join us for a lecture recital about this fascinating and little- known repertoire led by mezzo-soprano and music scholar Lori Sen. Sen will discuss the history, language, and culture of the Sephardim, with a special focus on the elements and stylistic features of Sephardic music. The lecture will be followed by a recital of Sephardic songs for voice, piano, and guitar for which Sen will be joined by guitarist Jeremy Lyons and pianist Alexei Ulitin.
Registration required at link below for 3 pm lecture.
Registration not required for 4 pm concert. Click one of these links to watch:
Presented by:
lecture and concert
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Presented by:
family program
lecture
The Music of North Africa: Musical Life in Devotional Texts – Live on Zoom
By Broom & Allen Fellow, ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Samuel Thomas Torjman
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
Identity in the Throes of Crisis – Live on Zoom
Join us for a fascinating conversation featuring Irina Nevzlin, Chair of the Board of Directors of The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, President of the NADAV Foundation and author of The Impact of Identity: The Power of Knowing Who You Are. She will be in conversation with Ethan Bronner, Senior Editor at Bloomberg News, Former Deputy National Editor, and former Jerusalem Bureau Chief, New York Times. The program will be hosted by Ambassador Dani Dayan, Consul General of Israel in New York.
Presented by:
conversation
lecture & performance
Circus Jews Under National Socialism – Live on Zoom
The stories of Jewish circus artists between the world wars are told with sensitivity and humor by Stav Meishar, circus artist and academic. The lecture is based on over seven years of extensive research and combines photos from personal albums, recorded testimonies, and personal stories. Additionally, Meishar will present excerpts from her show "The Escape Act", a show based on one of the stories she uncovered–that of a Jewish acrobat who survived the Holocaust hiding in a German circus.
This event will explore the lives of Jewish circus artists in Germany from 1880-1945 and the process of transforming historical research into performance. Join us for a glimpse into a little-known colorful and fascinating world!
Stav Meishar is a theatre maker, multidisciplinary performer, academic researcher and educator, working across circus, theatre and contemporary performance. Born and raised in Israel and now based out of both Bristol UK and New York City, Stav has spent the past two decades performing on professional theater and circus stages; on the ground and in the air; in Hebrew, English and Yiddish; in works devised by herself and by others; all over Israel, America and Europe.
Stav is committed to pursuing the gestalt of circus, history, education, and social change. Her most recent project, The Escape Act: A Holocaust Memoir, is a one-woman show mixing puppetry, theatre and circus steeped in seven years of historical research. It is based on the true story of a Jewish acrobat who survived the Holocaust hiding at a German circus and examines questions of antisemitism and multigenerational-trauma. When Stav isn't performing she directs Dreamcoat Experience, the award-winning organization she founded, which uses Performing Arts as tools for teaching progressive Judaism. She also founded Petite Mort Productions, a performance company committed to developing original multidisciplinary works. A proud queer Jew, she answers to both she/her and they/them.
Presented by:
lecture & performance
lecture
The East-Side Jew Who Conquered Europe: Leon Trotsky Through the Eyes of Jews
Leon Trotsky ranks among the 20th century’s most important political leaders. A theorist of revolution and commander of the Red Army, Trotsky profoundly shaped the course of modern Russia. He has come to represent a certain type of modern Jew, the proverbial “non-Jewish Jew,” indifferent to the Jewish people and its fate. Yet many Jews, during Trotsky’s lifetime, saw him differently. Jewish admirers viewed Trotsky as an intellectual genius and a fearless revolutionary; a Russian by cultural attainment but still a Jew in some essential sense; a Jewish hero and a hero to the Jews. This lecture will explore Jewish perceptions of Trotsky, as they appeared in Yiddish and English.
About the Speaker:
Tony Michels teaches American Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Jewish Socialists in New York, editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History, and co-editor of The Cambridge History of Judaism. Volume Eight: The Modern World, 1815-2000.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
People of the Book Club: Inheritance - Live on Zoom
Go behind the stories at our bi-monthly book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of Inheritance, a memoir by Dani Shapiro, in which she recounts her experience of discovering (via DNA testing) the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. The book discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the author.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion.
Presented by:
book talk
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
lecture
Imagining the Jew in Early Modern England - A Presentation on Two Sephardim: Rodrigo Lopez & Menasseh Ben Israel – Live on Zoom
Speaker: Leonard Stein, ASF Broome & Allen Fellow and Connaught International Doctoral Scholar at the University of Toronto
For centuries after their expulsion in 1290, Jews were largely imagined as stereotypes in England. However, two famous Sephardim, one a crypto-Jewish doctor, the other a Portuguese-Dutch rabbi, profoundly influenced the way England thought, wrote, and debated about the readmission of Jews. This presentation will discuss the tragic history of Rodrigo Lopez during the Elizabethan era and the auspicious history of Menasseh Ben Israel during the English Protectorate, in order to understand how crypto-Jews, conversos, and Sephardim inspired a wide range of literary, theological, and political work on the status of the Jew.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol II, Part 2: The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, featuring George Prochnik – Live on Zoom
Join us for a discussion of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, featuring George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
Please note that the discussion for The World of Yesterday will be broken into 2 parts, Chapters 1-8 and Chapters 9-16. The first 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 2nd meeting. The second 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 9th meeting. IF YOU WISH TO ATTEND BOTH SECTIONS, PLEASE REGISTER FOR BOTH. This is the webpage for the second session. The page for the first session is here. Thank you!
Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. The World of Yesterday is often described as Zweig’s memoir to a lost world.
Presented by:
book talk
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Presented by:
family program
lecture and musical program
Yemenite Men and Women and their Music – Live on Zoom
The Yemenites were a fixed community in the southern Arabian peninsula for 3,000 years. Barak Oded is a musicologist who specializes in Yemenite songs of all types, as well as the language and tunes involved in the context of other Jewish communities. In these sessions, Barak will show the uniqueness of Yemenite song and prayers as they were distinct from other communities. Prayers were chanted, there wasn't and still isn't music and song in liturgical services. Men would sing songs based on Jewish texts, and in Hebrew, while women would sing in Arabic about daily life.
Samples of each of these categories will be presented throughout these presentations.
Presented by:
lecture and musical program
book talk
The Art of the Jewish Family – Live on Zoom
A virtual program exploring the history of women in early New York through five objects.
In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850. These objects, many of which are drawn from the AJHS Archives, offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Join us for a conversation with Laura Arnold Leibman about her new book, and the important role objects and material culture play in preserving the stories of women.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Dybbuks, Golems, S. An-ski, and Jewish Legends in Times of Fear – Live on Zoom
S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern Jewish drama. This talk by scholar Gabriella Safran explores its roots: in Jewish folklore, the scandalous blood libel trial in Kiev in 1913, and the political passions of Russian-Jewish revolutionaries. In composing the play, An-ski was torn between two Jewish myths, each still modern: the tragic ambivalence of the dybbuk, a lost, wandering soul, and the technological triumphalism of the golem, a robot set in motion by practical kabbalah and capable of defending the Jews from every harm.
About the Speaker:
Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author and editor of prize-winning books on how Russian novels describe Jewish assimilation and on the relation between Jewish literature and anthropology; her biography of a pioneering Russian-Jewish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky, came out with Harvard University Press in 2010. Safran is now finishing a book on listening, transcription, and verbal imitation across class lines in the mid-19th-century Russian Empire, and beginning another book about the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Muslim World’s Reaction to the Six Day War – Live on Zoom
Bar-Ilan University Lecturer Dr. Mordechai Kedar discusses the Muslim world's reaction to the Six Day War.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol II, Part 1: The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, featuring George Prochnik – Live on Zoom
Join us for a discussion of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, featuring George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
Please note that the discussion for The World of Yesterday will be broken into 2 parts, Chapters 1-8 and Chapters 9-16. The first 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 2nd meeting. The second 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 9th meeting. IF YOU WISH TO ATTEND BOTH SECTIONS, PLEASE REGISTER FOR BOTH. This is the webpage for the first session. The page for the second session is here. Thank you!
Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. The World of Yesterday is often described as Zweig’s memoir to a lost world.
Presented by:
book talk
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
Values and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective - Live on Zoom
Professor Zvi Zohar on the Sephardi perspective of values and consequences in the halakhic process.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
lecture and musical program
Musical Source of the Yemenite Tefillah and its Distinction from Other Groups – Live on Zoom
The Yemenites were a fixed community in the southern Arabian peninsula for 3,000 years. Barak Oded is a musicologist who specializes in Yemenite songs of all types, as well as the language and tunes involved in the context of other Jewish communities. In these sessions, Barak will show the uniqueness of Yemenite song and prayers as they were distinct from other communities. Prayers were chanted, there wasn't and still isn't music and song in liturgical services. Men would sing songs based on Jewish texts, and in Hebrew, while women would sing in Arabic about daily life.
Samples of each of these categories will be presented throughout these presentations.
Presented by:
lecture and musical program
panel discussion
Refuge in the Heights: Migration, Memory, and Authoritarianism in the 20th Century – Live on Zoom
From "Frankfurt on the Hudson" to the "Little Dominican Republic", Washington Heights has often been defined by the immigrant groups who started new lives there. Since the 1930s, many of those immigrants have been fleeing authoritarian regimes. European Jews escaped Hitler, Dominicans brought the memory of Trujillo and his brutal successors, and Jews from the Soviet Union also settled in Washington Heights beginning in the 1970s. Although the Heights was no different than other immigrant destinations, where immigrants lived in enclaves and mixed only uneasily, many of these groups found support from the same network of urban institutions, such as the YM & YWHA of Washington Heights and Inwood, that serve new immigrant groups today.
Our panelists will discuss different groups of immigrants and institutions have experienced their own refuge in Washington Heights, especially focusing on shared experiences of trauma in the old country and exclusion in an unequal New York City, but also solidarity and resilience.
This discussion will be held over Zoom. After registering on Eventbrite, you will receive the Zoom information before the event. If the event is sold out, don't worry! We will be live-streaming the panel discussion on our Facebook and YouTube pages.
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Global Nacão - Five part Zoom Series
Western Sephardi cantorial practices
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Yiddish in Israel – A History – Live on Zoom
The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Following the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture, author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Join us for a discussion of this book with Rachel Rojanski in conversation with Rachel Brenner, Shachar Pinsker, and Sunny Yudkoff.
Presented by:
book talk
virtual tour
Global Nacão - Five part Zoom Series
A Tour of Western Sephardi Synagogues from Jamaica, Bayonne, Philadelphia, Montreal, and New York with S&P Central’s Joshua Mendes
Presented by:
virtual tour
book talk
Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century – Live on Zoom
What are the long-lasting consequences of refugee crises? How can one attempt to fully grasp the transnational fate of those displaced in the chaos of wars? What can we do to alleviate the suffering?
Join Adam Teller (Brown University), in conversation with Jonathan Karp (SUNY Binghamton), about the untold story of the 17th-century Jewish refugee crisis which spread from war-torn Poland-Lithuania through the Middle East, North Africa, and Western Europe— its social-cultural, economic, and cultural consequences, and the ways Jewish society responded to it. Whether by raising money to ransom those Jews put up for sale on the slave markets or adopting new social and religious forms to help relieve the suffering of those who had undergone traumatic experiences, 17th-century Jewish society exerted itself mightily to help the refugees and presents us with new ways to think about refugee issues.
The conversation celebrates Adam Teller’s new book, Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, recently published by Princeton University Press. You can purchase the book at a 30% discount with free shipping by using this link and the discount code CJH30-FG: press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161747/rescue-the-surviving-souls
Offer valid through July 17, 2020.
Presented by:
book talk
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
Values and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective - Live on Zoom
Professor Zvi Zohar on the Sephardi perspective of values and consequences in the halakhic process.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Global Nacão - Five part Zoom Series
Just before Shavuot, we gather for a reading of the Azharot, as is customary in Sephardi communities.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Presented by:
family program
concert
A Musical Journey to Jerusalem - Live on Zoom
In honor of Yom Yerushalayim / Jerusalem Day, join Elad Kabilio and Avigail Malachi of MusicTalks for a musical journey through the City of Gold, featuring selections from Yeshiva University Museum's collection.
Presented by:
concert
discussion
Photographs of the Depression: a Jewish Angle – Live on Zoom
In this online virtual session, historians Beth Wenger and Deborah Dash Moore show how photographs shed light on history. Special emphasis will be placed on photographs in AJHS's collection, particularly those of JB Lightman, a social worker who set out to document a disappearing Jewish Lower East Side.
Presented by:
discussion
lecture
Global Nacão - Five part Zoom Series
Global Nacão conference may have been postponed, but we're still giving you a glimpse into the world of Western Sephardim through an academic perspective.
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
Bad Rabbi – Live Podcast Recording
Join us for a live recording of Charlie Buckholtz’s Bad Rabbi Podcast in which Buckholtz will be joined by YIVO’s Eddy Portnoy for a discussion of Portnoy’s book, Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Portnoy’s Bad Rabbi mines the Yiddish press to expose the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Living in Liminal Spaces: Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1951 – Live on Zoom
Since the end of WWII in 1945, many Jews from Eastern and Central Europe viewed Italy as the byway to Israel, and although blockades and quotas had significantly prolonged their tenure in Italian Displaced Persons (DP) camps, by 1949 many had made their way to the Israel; in 1948 Jewish refugees from North Africa were now hoping to follow the same trajectory. This lecture will compare the daily experiences of European and North African Jewish refugees and their ability to turn the DP camps into new "home" spaces. Through a series of case studies, it will examine what options single adults, unaccompanied children, and families felt they had in order to build a future for themselves, and whether their sense of agency differed based on age, gender, and/or national origin. In examining the daily lives of those in Italian DP camps, it will argue that many established homes in these temporary spaces that attempted to both re-create elements of their former lives and at the same time to project what they hoped their future lives might look like.
About the Speaker:
Danielle Willard-Kyle is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at Rutgers University and an Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Fellow. She received her M.St. in Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford, an M.A. in History and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. in History and English from Westmont College. Her dissertation, "Living in Liminal Spaces: Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945-1951," recovers the stories of long-silenced European and North African Jewish displaced persons after World War II. She has given presentations on her research at multiple national and international academic conferences and has received numerous grants and fellowships, including the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Fellowship, the Steven Spielberg Endowment for Jewish Studies and the Memory of the Shoah Special Doctoral Fellowship, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research Graduate Research Fellowship, the JDC Archives Regional Fellowship, the Ben and Zelda Cohen Visiting Fellowship at the United States Memorial Museum and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies Fellowship.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Values and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective - Live on Zoom
Professor Zvi Zohar on the Sephardi perspective of values and consequences in the halakhic process.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
virtual tour
Global Nacão - Five part Zoom Series
Virtually tour the Chatham Street Cemetery with Congregation Shearith Israel ’s Sexton Zachary Edinger
Presented by:
virtual tour
lecture
The Syrian-Jewish Community of NY: Similarities & Differences to other Jewish Communities
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Dr. Murray Mizrahi on the Jewish Syrian community.
Presented by:
lecture
virtual tour
Virtual Lag Ba’Omer – Live on Zoom
A hilula like no other, as Diarna Geo-Museum Tours digitally transports pilgrims to shrines in multiple countries, including Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco. No Passport, Airfare, or Quarantines!
Presented by:
virtual tour
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol I: My Blue Piano by Else Lasker-Schüler
Join LBI's staff online for our first book club to discuss Else Lasker-Schüler's anthology of poems, My Blue Piano.
Else Lasker-Schüler wrote her 1943 collection, My Blue Piano (Mein Blaues Klavier) while living in exile in Jerusalem after fleeing Nazi Germany. The poems collected in this bilingual volume represent the full range of Lasker-Schüler’s work, from her earliest poems until her death. Brooks Haxton’s translation embraces the poems’ lyrical imagery, remaining faithful to the poet’s vision while also capturing the cadence and rhythms of the poetry.
Purchase a digital copy of the book online here or a print copy here. Additionally, the book may be available digitally at your local library. It is available through the New York Public Library here.
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
Jewish Thought and Messianism in the Colonial Puritan Imagination: The Case of Judah Monis – Live on Zoom
Jews made up less than one tenth of a percent of the population of late colonial America, but due to a Puritan obsession with the Hebrew Bible and an early idea of America as the new Promised Land, Jewish thought played a key role in American identity formation. At the same time, many Puritans hoped for the conversion of the Jews as an integral part of the end of times. In this conversation, we will explore the role of Judah Monis, a seminal figure who both brought Jewish thought to the American Protestant public and who acted as an ‘exemplar’ by converting to Christianity. Monis was the first Jew to receive an advanced degree in North America and the first full-time Hebrew instructor at Harvard.
CJH-NEH Senior Scholar Brian Ogren (Rice University) and Michael Hoberman (Fitchburg State University) will discuss the figure of Judah Monis as an unwitting focal point for Puritan messianic projections. They will look at his career, and the kabbalistically tinged discourses given at his public baptism, as sources for better understanding the often slippery early American notions of religious identity formation.
Presented by:
conversation
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
book talk
Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons – Live on Zoom
In 1978, Jakub Slucki passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-seven. A Holocaust survivor whose first wife and two sons had been murdered at the Nazi death camp in Chelmno, Poland, Jakub had lived a turbulent life. Just over 37 years later, his son Charles died of a heart attack. David Slucki’s Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons tells the story of his father and his grandfather, and the grave legacy that they each passed on to him. This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men. It is a story of a family’s century-long attachment to the Jewish Labor Bund. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, Slucki’s unique memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the 20th century.
Join us for a discussion of this new book with author and historian David Slucki in conversation with Eddy Portnoy (YIVO Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions).
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Values and Consequences in the Halakhic Process: A Sephardi Perspective - Live on Zoom
Professor Zvi Zohar on the Sephardi perspective of values and consequences in the halakhic process.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Presented by:
family program
book launch
He created Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four. The son of Jewish immigrants, Stanley Martin Lieber changed his name and transformed American pop culture. But Stan Lee's Jewish roots ran deep. Was Spider-Man just a reincarnation of Cain? Is the Incredible Hulk simply Adam by another name? How were Lee's celebrated comic book heroes inspired by the ancient tales of the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish mysticism? Author Liel Leibovitz speaks with Unorthodox Podcast co-host Stephanie Butnick about his new book, Stan Lee: A Life in Comics, and the surprisingly spiritual roots of Marvel Comics.
Special Book Offer! Purchase here with discount code STANLEE for 25% off and free shipping.
Jewish Lives is Yale’s prize winning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity.
Please note that if you already registered for the original April 23 date and received the new May 7 Zoom link, you do not need to re-register.
Presented by:
book launch
conversation
Historians of the Jews and the Making of Plague Memory – Live on Zoom
Following our program on April 22, this is the second conversation between Joshua Teplitsky and Magda Teter on disease and plagues in Jewish history and memory. During this installment, Professors Teplitsky and Teter will discuss the role historians have played in shaping public memory of the plagues. They will examine the role premodern chroniclers played in defining “facts” and the way modern historians have approached the topic from the earliest days of modern historiography in the nineteenth century to more recent works.
About the Speakers:
Joshua Teplitsky (Ph.D. NYU) teaches Jewish history at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale University Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is also the author of dozens of articles in academic journals and popular venues. Joshua Teplitsky received many prestigious fellowships. He is currently a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard University, working on a book about Jews and plagues in premodern Europe.
Magda Teter (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard, 2011), and Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006). She has published numerous articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundations,the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation, Harvard University, and the NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among others.
Presented by:
conversation
workshop
Virtual Workshop: Poetry Salon
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem.
Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed. During each salon, participants will have the chance to share the work they have created with their peers. Some take-home revision and new poem prompt ideas will be provided as well.
Salon participants have the opportunity to submit their work to AJHS' national poetry contest. Poems are being accepted on a rolling basis, and winner will be announced September of 2020.
About the Speaker:
Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Refusenik, Landscape with Sex and Violence, and If I Should Say I Have Hope, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space. Her essays have appeared in LA Review of Books, ESPN, and the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, a book about Dolly Parton that is also a bit of a memoir, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press in 2022. A former fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and previously on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, she currently teaches poetry at Columbia University and the 92Y.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
War Orphans Find Home: Child Holocaust Survivors and US Adoptions – Live on Zoom
This program is sponsored by the “Hear Their Cry: Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience” Scholars Working Group, which has been meeting at the Center for Jewish History since September 2019.
Soon after the conclusion of WWII, American Jewish families began to express interest in adopting young Jewish war orphans. Prompted by the fundraising images of child survivors that peppered the postwar press, letters of inquiry quickly reached the offices of Jewish communal workers. Their interest belied the reality; there were few surviving orphans to be had. Nevertheless, estimates suggest more than a thousand arrived to families in the war's immediate aftermath. Using images from the postwar US press, this lecture will highlight the fraught experience of those destined for the United States who were both children and survivors of the Holocaust.
About the Speaker:
Beth B. Cohen received her PhD in Holocaust history from Clark University and her Master's Degree in Developmental Psychology from Harvard University. Her first book, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America, analyzes the reception of adult survivors by the American Jewish community. Her second book, Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience, focuses on child survivors and their complex identity as survivors, children, and Americans. Her work can also be found in: Fogelman, Kangisser Cohen, and Ofer, eds. Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath; Patt and Berkowitz, eds., We Are Here: New Approaches to Displaced Persons in Germany; Cesarani and Sundquist, eds, After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, and others. She has also served as a consultant to numerous Holocaust education projects including the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, March of the Living, and PBS -TV's Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State. Cohen is currently a lecturer at California State University, Northridge, CA.
Presented by:
lecture
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
conversation
CANCELLED: Kabbalah and the Founding of America: Christian Uses of Jewish Thought in the Nascent Republic
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Please note: This is a Live Streamed Event via Zoom
How did Jewish designers, architects, patrons, and merchants contribute to the history of modern architecture and design? What do their stories tell us about Jewish assimilation into American society? And in the aftermath of World War II, how did creative communities like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and Pond Farm in Guerneville, California welcome Jewish emigre architects and designers? Join the Art Deco Society of New York and author and curator Donald Albrecht for an illustrated talk about Jewish contributions to America’s 20th-century domestic landscape.
About the Speaker:
Donald Albrecht is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions for the Getty Center, Library of Congress, Museum of the City of New York, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others. He served as curator of the exhibition Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2014.
Presented by:
lecture
poetry workshop
Poetry Salon - Live on Zoom
Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus,” written in 1883, is perhaps America’s most enduring poem and has been inspiring people — and poets — for generations. Lazarus immersed herself in the debates, adding her own voice to the mix with her poetry and other writing. AJHS invites you to craft a poem that addresses the nation's debates: if you could write a poem for the Statue of Liberty, what would it say?
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These 90-minute interactive virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem. Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed and share the work they have created.
Presented by:
poetry workshop
book talk
People of the Book Club: The Flight Portfolio – Live on Zoom
Go behind the stories and peer inside the archives at our bi-monthly book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer, a work of historical fiction about American journalist Varian Fry’s attempts to rescue artists and intellectuals during the Nazi occupation of France, followed by a show and tell of documents and artworks from the Center’s collections that are connected to the historical figures in the book.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion.
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
CANCELLED: Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time
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Presented by:
conversation
concert
Where is Our Homeland? Songs from Testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive - Live on Zoom & Facebook Live
In 2018, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, along with musician-in-residence D. Zisl Slepovitch, began production of an album of songs transcribed from testimonies in the Archive titled Where is Our Homeland? The widely diverse compositions presented on the album form a multidimensional image of the lives of Holocaust survivors and the multiple identities they carried as Jews by faith and roots, and as European citizens.The songs bring to life insights into their experiences both during World War II and in the period preceding the war, all of which are documented in their testimonies. Join us for a live digital discussion with the musicians behind this project including the premiere of new, never-before-heard renditions of songs from the album.
Presented by:
concert
walking tour
CANCELLED: Walking Tour: The Unexpected Story of Jewish Williamsburg (2.5 hours)
Presented by:
walking tour
walking tour
CANCELLED: Soapbox Walks: History’s Intersection
Presented by:
walking tour
workshop
Soapbox Yoga - Live on Zoom
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square. Recommended for children age 4 – 8, but family of all ages are welcome. (This program is made possible through the generous support of PJ Library.)
Presented by:
workshop
conversation
Strange New World: Time in David Bergelson’s Literary Work – Live on Zoom
Delays, inaction, repetition, the failure to take advantage of opportunities, missing the right moment—all sound bad. We are constantly told to move on. Yet sometimes, not doing, daydreaming, and standing still can be positive, even, creative. David Bergelson lived in a time of enormous upheaval and violent change. His characters, in contrast, do nothing. What can we learn from Bergelson in the Strange New World we live in?
Harriet Murav (University of Illinois) and Justin Cammy (Smith College) will discuss the texture of time, futurity, and activating the unrealized potentialities of the discarded past in Bergelson’s literary work, drawing on Murav’s recently published book, Strange New World: Untimeliness, Futurity. The conversation will begin with a general discussion about time and timing, using examples from The End of Everything, Bergelson’s 1913 masterpiece. We then turn to one of his most controversial novels, Judgment (1926) which, regardless of its sympathies for the Bolshevik cause, is not so interested in the new socialist future as much as the expansion of time and the exit from ongoing time found in holidays. The holiday, yontev, and the importance of holiday time (yontevdikayt) are key to Bergelson’s notion of creativity. To create literary work is to experience holiday time.
About the Speakers:
Harriet Murav is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to studies of Dostoevsky, and Russian law and literature, her books include Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford University Press, 2003), and Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford University Press, 2011). Her most recent book is David Bergelson’s Strange New World. Untimeliness and Futurity, published in 2019.
Justin Cammy is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and of World Literatures at Smith College. He is a literary and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish history, and Zionism and contemporary Israel. Justin Cammy's publications range from essays on Yiddish literary history to scholarly translations of Yiddish literature to introductions to new editions of works by Yiddish writers and memoirists. He is currently working on two projects: English translation and scholarly edition of the Abraham Sutzkever’ s memoir of the Vilna ghetto and testimony at Nuremberg, and a book,Young Vilna: Yiddish Culture of the Last Generation, to be published by Indiana University Press.
Presented by:
conversation
conversation
Epidemics, Disease, and Plagues in Jewish History & Memory - Live on Zoom
Epidemic diseases usually strike humans indiscriminately. Yet the social and cultural responses to them can often exacerbate the differences that set people apart. The plague first broke out in Europe in 1348, but it recurred every generation, and was a feature of daily, social, and cultural life. For Jews, outbreaks of disease carried a double threat: one biological, the other social. In this conversation we explore examples of disease in the Jewish past to examine the ways in which moments of epidemic challenged Jewish life and ritual, and to explore how governments, Jewish leaders, and Jewish and Christian neighbors responded to the pressures of plague. Joshua Teplitsky (SUNY Stony Brook) and Magda Teter (Fordham University) will discuss the role of memory and the constructions of myths and narratives about health, hygiene, immunity, and responsibility as they revolved around public health and the fear of contagion.
About the Speakers:
Joshua Teplitsky (Ph.D. NYU) teaches Jewish history at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale University Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is also the author of dozens of articles in academic journals and popular venues. Joshua Teplitsky received many prestigious fellowships. He is currently a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard University, working on a book about Jews and plagues in premodern Europe.
Magda Teter (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard, 2011), and Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006). She has published numerous articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundations,the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation, Harvard University, and the NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among others.
Presented by:
conversation
exhibit opening
CANCELLED: An Unlikely Photojournalist: Emile Bocian in Chinatown
Presented by:
exhibit opening
concert
Beethoven in the Yiddish Imagination - Facebook Live
Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure emblematic of the peaks of Western culture, loomed large in the Yiddish imagination. From Yiddish translations of Ode to Joy by poets such as Y. L. Peretz and M. Rivesman, to biographies, novellas, poems, and stories written for children, there are ample testaments to Yiddish speaking Jewry's love for Beethoven.
Join us for two Facebook livestreams celebrating Beethoven in the Yiddish imagination. A 3pm performance by baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco and pianist Spencer Myer will feature Ode to Joy in Yiddish translation alongside An die ferne Geliebte, a song cycle Beethoven wrote setting to music poetry by German Jewish poet Alois Isidor Jeitteles. A 4pm livestream with actors Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson showcases a bilingual dramatic reading of Bethovens levone sonate - a Yiddish children’s story by Shloyme Bastomski retelling an apocryphal story of the origins of the Moonlight Sonata.
Note: Facebook Live Streams remain available after the live performance ends
Presented by:
concert
conversation
Overcoming the Present - a Virtual Salon with Max Czollek
Author Max Czollek’s essay collection Desintegriert Euch transformed the debate about the integration of minorities in Germany when it appeared in 2018. His perspective on the roles of contemporary Jews in German society and its “theater of memory” struck a nerve not just among Jews, but other minority groups as well. “The threat from the right has created a new kind of solidarity,” he recently told the New York Times, speaking about the potential for alliances among various minority groups in Germany.
As a poet and theater-maker, Czollek has also found creative and provocative ways to to express his ideas through art, including several volumes of poetry and projects such as the "Radical Jewish Culture Days" in 2017 at the Maxim Gorki Theater which resulted in the satirical newscast, Jews News Today.
Join LBI live online for an exclusive discussion with the author, who will discuss his view of contemporary Jewish life in Germany today and how Jewish experience has informed his poetry and theater work. The first 50 registrants will have the opportunity to participate in a Zoom call, which will also be live-streamed to the public on YouTube and Facebook.
About the Speaker:
Max Czollek lives in Berlin, where he was born in 1987. After studies of political science at the Technical University (TU) of Berlin, he earned a doctorate at the TU's Center for Research on Antisemitism. Since 2009 he is member of the poetry collective G13, which published books and organized lectures. 2013–2018 he was curator of the international project “Babelsprech.International” for the connection of the young German-speaking and European poetry scene. Together with Sasha Marianna Salzmann he was initiator of “Desintegration. Ein Kongress zeitgenössischer jüdischer Positionen” (2016) and “Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage” (2017) at Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Studio. His lyric books Druckkammern (2012), Jubeljahre (2015) and Grenzwerte (2019) were published at Verlagshaus Berlin. 2018 his non-fiction book Desintegriert Euch! was published at Carl Hanser.
Presented by:
conversation
concert
Beethoven in the Yiddish Imagination - Facebook Live
Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure emblematic of the peaks of Western culture, loomed large in the Yiddish imagination. From Yiddish translations of Ode to Joy by poets such as Y. L. Peretz and M. Rivesman, to biographies, novellas, poems, and stories written for children, there are ample testaments to Yiddish speaking Jewry's love for Beethoven.
Join us for two Facebook livestreams celebrating Beethoven in the Yiddish imagination. A 3pm performance by baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco and pianist Spencer Myer will feature Ode to Joy in Yiddish translation alongside An die ferne Geliebte, a song cycle Beethoven wrote setting to music poetry by German Jewish poet Alois Isidor Jeitteles. A 4pm livestream with actors Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson showcases a bilingual dramatic reading of Bethovens levone sonate - a Yiddish children’s story by Shloyme Bastomski retelling an apocryphal story of the origins of the Moonlight Sonata.
Note: Facebook Live Streams remain available after the live performance ends
Presented by:
concert
comedy show
Laughter is the Best Medicine: Virtual Comedy Show with K-von - Live on Zoom
Join nationally acclaimed writer, actor, and comedian K-von for a virtual comedy show.
K-von has garnered millions of views online with sketches, stand-up comedy clips, and a viral ‘TED Talk’. He also produced an award-winning documentary about Noruz (the Persian New Year), and is currently working on a book which details his unique upbringing and journey into comedy.
During this time of Social Distancing, laughter can sometimes be the best medicine.
Presented by:
comedy show
family program
Meet Emma Lazarus - Live on Zoom
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Presented by:
family program
workshop
Tracing your Roots: A Two-Part Workshop With Genie Milgrom - Live on Zoom
Tracing her family back 15 generations to the early 1500s in Spain, Genie Milgrom was able to unravel the web of lies and deceit that her family had spun around themselves in order to survive the Spanish Inquisition. This fascinating story brought her on a journey she could have never imagined. For those of you looking to trace your own roots, or begin a genealogical expedition, Genie will share what she learned and how she has helped others trace their own roots. At the end of the first session there will be time for questions. For more intricate inquiries, please email drora@americansephardi.org before the second session.
It is recommended that you read her first book, My 15 Grandmothers, before the workshop. There Genie takes the reader through her journey – from growing up Catholic to finding her Crypto-Jewish lineage and embracing the religion of her ancestors.
Genie Milgrom was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba and today lives in Miami, Florida where her family emigrated during the Cuban Revolution. Genie is currently the President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami, President of Tarbut Sefarad-Fermoselle, and President of the Society of Crypto-Judaic Studies at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Presented by:
workshop
lecture
CANCELLED: Scandals, Shandehs, and Lies: The Stories Families Don't Tell
Presented by:
lecture
poetry workshop
Poetry Salon - Live on Zoom
Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus,” written in 1883, is perhaps America’s most enduring poem and has been inspiring people — and poets — for generations. Lazarus immersed herself in the debates, adding her own voice to the mix with her poetry and other writing. AJHS invites you to craft a poem that addresses the nation's debates: if you could write a poem for the Statue of Liberty, what would it say?
Led by celebrated teaching poets and contributors to the 92nd Street Y's #ANewColossus poetry festival, These 90-minute interactive virtual poetry workshops will delve into the construction and techniques used in writing “The New Colossus,” and place Lazarus' poem side by side with work by contemporary poets that is “descended” from, or inspired by, the original poem. Using what they have discovered as a springboard, salon participants will have two writing sessions per class based on prompts inspired by the poems they have discussed and share the work they have created.
Presented by:
poetry workshop
lecture and discussion
German-Jewish Judaica for Passover - Live on Zoom
Join us for a brief online talk about a unique collection of Passover-themed Judaica live on Zoom. After the talk, discuss your own antique Judaica for an “Antique Judaica Roadshow”–style appraisal from the curator, Tsadik Kaplan. Snap and share a photo of your unique Judaica to share its story, learn more, and perhaps even discover its value.
Tsadik Kaplan is a collector and appraiser who writes the “Antique Judaica Roadshow” column in The Jewish Press and the author of Jewish Antiques: From Menorahs to Seltzer Bottles.
Invitations to the videoconference are limited to the first 30 participants, but anyone can watch live (or later!) online.
Presented by:
lecture and discussion
lecture
Please note: This is a Live Streamed Event via Zoom
Passover is often described as the quintessential domestic Jewish holiday, celebrated by more American Jews than other religious ritual. Since the mid-20th century, however, Seders have also been reinterpreted as auspicious sites for Jewish-Christian engagement. While early modern European Christian writing about Jews often depicted the Seder as a mysterious, secretive Jewish domestic ritual with sinister associations with murder and blood libel, contemporary American engagements with Passover have radically altered this depiction, reconceiving it as an opportunity for connection between Jews and Christians through the celebration of a ritual that an increasing number of Christians have come to regard as an important part of their own heritage.
In this talk, Jessica Cooperman examines some of the ways American Jews and Christians have reimagined their engagement with the Passover seder, both together and separately, and to consider the ways that the Passover seder has been redefined and reinterpreted as a Christian ritual. An exploration of these new approaches to the seder can perhaps offer us a window onto the multiple and shifting dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in the post-World War II United States.
About the Speaker:
Jessica Cooperman is an Associate Professor of Religion Studies and Director of Jewish Studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. Her research focuses on 20th century American Judaism and on connections between American religion and state policy. Her book, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism, was published by NYU Press in 2018 and received an honorable mention for the Saul Viener Prize in American Jewish History. Her current research explores projects for promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue and understanding after World War II.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Joy & Halvah: A Family’s Story - Live on Zoom
Grab your Joyva jelly rings and join us for this virtual program just in time for Passover! When Nathan Radutzky immigrated from Kiev, he brought with him a recipe for halvah, a confection made from crushed sesame. In 1907 Nathan set up shop in Brooklyn New York selling his confections. Over the years Joyva Halvah expanded its sweet offerings and became ubiquitous in Jewish Americana and touched the lives of millions. Four generations later the manufacturer is still family-owned and Brooklyn based. Join us as we explore the history of this New York institution with award winning documentary filmmakers Sam Radtuzky and Josh Freund. They will be sharing footage from their upcoming documentary about the candy company and sharing how immigration, gentrification, and a drive to preserve cultural heritage have shaped the candy company’s past, present, and future.
Presented by:
lecture
walking tour
CANCELLED: Soapbox Walks: Arts & Politics
Presented by:
walking tour
workshop
Tracing your Roots: A Two-Part Workshop With Genie Milgrom - Live on Zoom
Tracing her family back 15 generations to the early 1500s in Spain, Genie Milgrom was able to unravel the web of lies and deceit that her family had spun around themselves in order to survive the Spanish Inquisition. This fascinating story brought her on a journey she could have never imagined. For those of you looking to trace your own roots, or begin a genealogical expedition, Genie will share what she learned and how she has helped others trace their own roots. At the end of the first session there will be time for questions. For more intricate inquiries, please email drora@americansephardi.org before the second session.
It is recommended that you read her first book, My 15 Grandmothers, before the workshop. There Genie takes the reader through her journey – from growing up Catholic to finding her Crypto-Jewish lineage and embracing the religion of her ancestors.
Genie Milgrom was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba and today lives in Miami, Florida where her family emigrated during the Cuban Revolution. Genie is currently the President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami, President of Tarbut Sefarad-Fermoselle, and President of the Society of Crypto-Judaic Studies at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Presented by:
workshop
book launch
Please note: This is a Live Streamed Event via Zoom
In these uncertain times, with widespread myths pervading the media, government policy, and our homes, there is a deeper urge to not only discover what is true, but to be able to recognize falsehoods. This year our Passover will be different from all other Passovers – with more questions to share at real and virtual Seder tables.
That's why we're pleased to announce that the discussion between Magda Teter (Fordham University) and Sara Lipton (SUNY Stony Brook) about Dr. Teter’s new book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of Antisemitic Myth, will happen online via Zoom, right before Passover on April 7 at 4 pm EST.
The book explores the medieval myth that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood— and its surprising persistence over centuries, cultures, and continents. The invention and development of printed media contributed to widespread dissemination of the myth, turning it into a “persistent template of hate”: from mid-12th-century monastic manuscripts to the Facebook group “Jewish Ritual Murder,” shut down in 2014, and beyond.
About the Speakers:
Magda Teter is Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of History at Fordham University. Her work focuses on early modern religious and cultural history, with emphasis on Jewish-Christian relations, the politics of religion, and transmission of culture among Jews and Christians across Europe in the early modern period. She published numerous articles and books in English, Polish, Italian, and Hebrew. Magda Teter was recently appointed the 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, and she will be working on her current research project, The Dissemination and Uses of the Jewish Past: The Role of The Present in The Production and Politics of History.
Sara Lipton is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her work focuses on religious identity and experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and art and culture in the high and later Middle Ages (11th–15th centuries). Her book, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Iconography (Metropolitan Books, 2014) examines how changes in Christian devotion and politics affected the visual representation of the Jew. It explains the emergence of the iconographically identifiable Jew around the year 1080 and brings theoretical coherence to the dizzying proliferation of images of Jews in subsequent centuries. Sara Lipton’s current project, The Vulgate of Experience: Art and Preaching in the High Middle Ages (1180–1300), explores why and to what effect Christendom invested so much in worshiping the ineffable Word through the material thing.
Presented by:
book launch
concert
Israeli Art & Song – from A to Z – Live on Zoom
Join Elad Kabilio of MusicTalks for a program of music and art. This livestream performance will pair works from Yeshiva University Museum’s exhibition, From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from Yeshiva University Museum’s Collection with music ranging from Klezmer to classical, from piyyut and poetry to Israeli pop. Elad, on cello, will be joined by clarinetist and singer, Avigail Malachi, and singer, Inbar Goldman.
Presented by:
concert
conversation
CANCELLED: Dis-Integration? Perspectives on a German Debate with Max Czollek & Rebecca Guber
Presented by:
conversation
concert
CANCELLED: Stern College for Women Ensemble in Residence
Presented by:
concert
conference
CANCELLED: Psalmody through the Ages: Music and the Book of Psalms
Presented by:
conference
art workshop for adults
CANCELLED: Transforming Haggadah Text into Textile
Presented by:
art workshop for adults
concert
CANCELLED: EXILE: Music of the Early-Modern Jewish Diaspora
Presented by:
concert
sidney krum young artists concert series
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Sephardic Art Song: A Musical Legacy of the Sephardic Diaspora
Presented by:
sidney krum young artists concert series
talk
CANCELLED: Out of the Box" />CANCELLED: Out of the Box
:
Presented by:
talk
lecture and theatrical reading
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Lew Nussimbaum aka Essad Bey aka Kurban Said – Wanderer Between Worlds
Presented by:
lecture and theatrical reading
memorial
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Remembering Yiddish Actress Mina Bern
Presented by:
memorial
book talk
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): A Forgotten Land: Growing up in the Jewish Pale
Presented by:
book talk
book launch
CANCELLED: An Actor’s Director: The Life and Work of Sidney Lumet
Please note: This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled at a later date.
Presented by:
book launch
curator's tour
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Highlights of Israeli Art from YU Museum’s Collection
Presented by:
curator's tour
film screening
CANCELLED: From A(gam) to Z(aritsky): Saving the Iraqi Jewish Archives: A Journey of Identity
Presented by:
film screening
film and discussion
POSTPONED: Stories of New York: City CollegeCinema and Sanctuary" />
POSTPONED: Stories of New York: City College
Cinema and Sanctuary
Please note: This event is postponed. A new date and time will be announced as soon as possible.
Presented by:
film and discussion
children's workshop
CANCELLED: Kids in the ‘Hood: Discover the History of Your Community - For Children 7-12 and Their Families" />CANCELLED: Kids in the ‘Hood: Discover the History of Your Community - For Children 7-12 and Their Families
Please note: This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled at a later date.
Presented by:
children's workshop
book launch
CANCELLED: Midwives, Musicians, Soldiers, Rabbis: Whose Stories Will Become Jewish History?
Presented by:
book launch
exhibit opening
Refuge in the Heights: The German Jews of Washington Heights with Robert Snyder
Rob Snyder, author of the book Crossing Broadway, Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City and Professor of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, will help LBI celebrate its new exhibition on the German-Jewish refugees of Washington Heights with a talk on the northern Manhattan neighborhood once known as “Frankfurt on the Hudson” for its large population of German-Jewish refugees. Eight decades later, the neighborhood is still a vibrant home for new immigrant communities.
Presented by:
exhibit opening
book talk
CANCELLED: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust
Please note: This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled at a later date.
:
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
Why the Far Right Kills
The October 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, committed by a Far Right activist, was the most lethal assault on Jews on U.S. soil in history. It was followed by attacks on synagogues in Poway, California and Halle, Germany. The Far Right has also massacred immigrants in El Paso, Texas and Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. In fact, the postwar Far Right has killed thousands of people. Why is this political faction, compared to others, so violent—and what drives them to kill again and again?
Researcher Chip Berlet, who has investigated the Far Right for forty years, will explain how the movement’s internal dynamic drives its participants into homicidal outbursts. Berlet will discuss the Far Right’s themes of demonization, scapegoating, conspiracism and apocalypticism with journalist Talia Lavin, and they will offer their perspectives on how to deal with this toxic social current.
Presented by:
conversation
conversation
From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History
In honor of International Women’s Day, the AJHS and YIVO are delighted to host a panel discussion of Nancy Sinkoff’s new book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, the first comprehensive biography of a pioneer historian in the field of Holocaust Studies. Dawidowicz emerged from an interwar immigrant Yiddishist background to become a major Jewish public intellectual in postwar American life. Nancy Sinkoff is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University and additional panelists include Adam Kirsch, author of Why Trilling Matters, of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, Francine Klagsbrun, author of more than a dozen books including Lioness, Golda Meir and The Nation of Israel, and Annie Polland, co-author, with Daniel Soyer of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Era of Immigration.
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Field Report: Stories from a Diarna Researcher
Presented by:
lecture
concert
The Israeli Songbook – A Tribute to Women Poets
Acclaimed Israeli American singer-songwriter Shira Averbuch and an all-female MusicTalks ensemble pay tribute to Israel's female poets, including Rachel Bluwstein, Leah Goldberg, Tirza Atar and others.
Presented by:
concert
book talk
The Odyssey of an Apple Thief
In his autobiography The Odyssey of An Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas takes us through his fascinating life, starting with his boyhood in pre-war Lithuania, with a focus on the most impoverished part of the Jewish population, rarely accounted for in the books written by survivors after the war. Join us for an event celebrating the release of a new English translation of this book translated by Jonathan Layton and edited by Isabelle Rozenbaumas. Scholars Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Sam Kassow will join Rozenbaumas in a conversation about this new publication. The evening will also feature readings from the book by Yuri Venedyapin and musical performances by violinist and singer Eléonore Biezunski, Yuri Venedyapin (guitar, vocals), and Ilan Moss (accordion) including songs in Yiddish, Russian, and French.
Presented by:
book talk
curator's tour
Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy – Closing Event
On its final day, join curator Audra Lambert on a tour of this exhibition featuring dynamic, lyrical sculptures and paintings echoing Jews’ traditions and ancient history in Babylonia.
Presented by:
curator's tour
celebration
League for Yiddish Celebration
Devoted Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of Afn Shvel, Dr. Sheva Zucker, after 15 years of inspired and groundbreaking work, is passing the baton to new Editor-in-Chief Dr. Miriam Trinh and new Executive Director Noah Barrera. The event will feature guest speaker Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz, greetings from Dr. David E. Fishman, and musical program by Mira Kessler. The chair is Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath.
Presented by:
celebration
performance & discussion
About a 17th-Century Purim Opera
In advance of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts’ performance of Ester, Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo (Esther, Liberator of the Jewish People) the Purim Story by Alessando Stradella (1639 -1682), ensemble members perform excerpts and discuss the opera.
Presented by:
performance & discussion
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
lecture
The Rest of the Story: Finding Your Family in Online Newspapers
Janeen Bjork will share her search methodology using several case studies to illustrate the techniques of finding and preserving family items from online newspapers. She will discuss OCR (optical character recognition, the technology that allows newspapers to be searched online), and how to work around its significant failure rate. Other topics will include best practices for searching in popular newspaper resources, and websites to explore.
Janeen Bjork is a TV researcher and genealogy teacher. She has been obsessed with the information historical newspapers contain ever since she found a story about the 1894 murder of her great-great grandfather in a Syracuse, NY newspaper.
Presented by:
lecture
film screening
23rd NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival
Lights, Camera, Action! The NYSJFF showcases contemporary voices steeped in the history, traditions, and rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities. This year’s festival includes premiere film screenings, intriguing stories, evocative documentaries, powerful narratives, Q&As with filmmakers, as well as special honorees, dignitaries, and diplomats. The Pomegranate Awards Ceremony celebrates Sephardi excellence in the arts.
In partnership with YUM, ASF presents a special extension of "Hey, Wow! The Art of Oded Halahmy."
Presented by:
film screening
book talk
Lives in Limbo: Jewish Refugees in Portugal, 1940–1945
Historian Marion Kaplan explores the experience of refugees from Nazi Germany in Portugal, the port of last resort once Hitler invaded France.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
People of the Book Club
Go behind the stories and peer inside the archives at this new bi-monthly book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. The first session will feature a discussion of The Promised Land by Mary Antin, a celebrated 1912 memoir by a Russian-Jewish immigrant to Boston, followed by a show and tell from the Mary Antin papers as well as other archival materials related to the immigrant Jewish experience held by the American Jewish Historical Society.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion. The book is available as a free download via Amazon.com, Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.com) or NYPL. Inexpensive used copies are available for purchase via Amazon.com or abebooks.com.
Light refreshments will be served.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Jewish Brick and Mortar in the Russian Capital: The Architectural Dialogue between the St. Petersburg Jewish Community and the Tsarist Metropolis
The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship
In this lecture, Dr. Vladimir Levin will consider the uneasy relationship between the architectural oeuvre of the Jewish community and the capital city of the Russian Empire. Although concentrating on St. Petersburg, the talk will address questions and problems that many Jewish communities in European and American cities had to wrangle with. Every Jewish community that settled in a large or small city had to decide how to represent itself vis-à-vis that city, how prominent and visible should their representation should be; what are the ways to express Jewishness in the general cityscape and which means should be employed toward achieving this goal. The lecture will discuss how the Jews of St. Petersburg and their non-Jewish allies looked for a style that was best suited for marking their presence in the city, and how a unique convergence of architecture and manuscript illuminations was created to that end.
Presented by:
lecture
book launch
Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays by Chava Rosenfarb
Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) was one of the most prominent Yiddish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1923, she survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, immigrating to Canada in 1950 and settling in Montreal. The new book, Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays by Chava Rosenfarb, compiled and edited by Goldie Morgentaler, comprises thirteen personal and literary essays by Rosenfarb, ranging from autobiographical accounts of her childhood and experiences before and during the Holocaust to literary criticism that discusses the work of other Jewish writers, as well as two travelogues describing trips to Australia and Prague. This book marks the first time that Rosenfarb's non-fiction writings have been presented together in English, deepening the reader's understanding of an incredible Yiddish woman and her experiences as a survivor in the post-Holocaust world. Join us to celebrate the launch of this book with a talk by Goldie Morgentaler.
Confessions of a Yiddish Writer is the winner of a 2019 Canadian Jewish Literary Award.
Presented by:
book launch
concert
Beethoven Turns 250: Phoenix Chamber Ensemble and Tesla Quartet Celebrate Beethoven's 250th Birthday
Phoenix Chamber Ensemble and Tesla Quartet performing Beethoven’s Piano Quartet in E flat Major, Op. 36, No. 1; Beethoven’s String Quartet in C Major, Op.59, No. 3, Finale; and Dvorák’s Piano Quintet No.2, in A Major, Op.81
Presented by:
concert
book talk
Prince of the Press: David Oppenheim and His Library
Historian Joshua Teplitsky will introduce his new book about one of the world's largest collections of Jewish books, and the man who used his collection to cultivate power, prestige, and political influence.
David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky’s book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.
About the Speaker:
Joshua Teplitsky is assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the history of the Jews in Europe in the early modern period and in the study of books and media. He lives in New York City.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Stories of New York: City College
The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team
This February and March, join historians, writers, filmmakers, and alumni at the Center for Jewish History for a series of discussions and films about City College, its rich Jewish history, and its transformative role in the lives of so many.
Part II: The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team
At a school better known for intellectual achievement than athletic prowess, the 1949-1950 City College Beavers were the unlikeliest of champions. An unheralded group of Jewish and African-American city kids, the Beavers stunned the basketball world by becoming the only team in history to win both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same season. But the next year, the starting five were arrested, charged with point shaving, and engulfed in a scandal that would affect the rest of their lives. Bestselling author Matthew Goodman discusses his critically acclaimed new book, The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team, with Clyde Haberman, CCNY 1966. They are joined by former City College basketball co-captain, Ron Nadell, CCNY ’51 and former sports editor of The Campus, Mort Sheinman CCNY ’54.
About the Speakers:
Matthew Goodman is a New York Times bestselling author of four books of nonfiction: The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team (2019); Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World; The Sun and the Moon: Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York; and Jewish Food: The World at Table. Matthew’s books have been Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Indie Next “Great Reads,” and Borders Original Voices selections, and have been translated into eight languages. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The American Scholar, the Harvard Review, Salon, the Forward, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
Ron Nadell CCNY ‘51, was born in Brooklyn. He was a star player for the Erasmus Hall High School basketball team and named co-captain of the CCNY Beavers for the 1950-51 season. After graduating, Ron moved to Long Island where he worked in real estate. Married for 63 years, Ron and his wife Rhoda have 3 children, 5 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.
Mort Sheinman CCNY ’54, is Bronx born and raised. After attending Bronx public schools, he entered CCNY in 1950. Mort joined the student newspaper, The Campus, and during his undergraduate years he was a sportswriter, sports editor and managing editor. When he was a freshman, the CCNY basketball team made history by winning the NIT and NCAA championships and he was a sophomore when the “point-shaving” scandal broke. Mort spent his career in journalism writing for a variety of publications including the New York Daily News and Women’s Wear Daily, where he was the long-time managing editor. Mort was also the founding managing editor of W magazine. He is a long-time board member and former president of the Society of the Silurians (now called the Silurians Press Club), and he was inducted into the CCNY Communications Alumni Group Hall of Fame in 2003.
Clyde Haberman (moderator) CCNY '66, first worked at The New York Times while a student at CCNY. Having been editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Campus, he became CCNY correspondent for the Times. In 1966, he began reporting for The New York Post, ultimately returning to The New York Times in 1977. From 1982 to 1995, Clyde was a foreign correspondent based successively in Tokyo, Rome and Jerusalem. Returning home, he wrote the twice-a-week NYC column from 1995 to 2011 and in 2009, he was part of a Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, for coverage of the prostitution scandal that led to Governor Eliot Spitzer's resignation. Since 2014 he has written a regular Times column accompanying Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring major news stories of the past and their continuing resonance.
Clyde is also the writer and editor of The Times of the Seventies: The Culture, Politics, and Personalities That Shaped the Decade (2013 by Black Dog & Leventhal). Among other journalistic honors, he was inducted in 2015 into the New York Press Club's Hall of Fame.
Presented by:
book talk
book launch
CANCELLED: Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets
Please note: This event has been cancelled.
Presented by:
book launch
lecture
Family History Today: Jewish Students, Medical Globetrotters, and Persevering Women
At first, aspiring Jewish men from Galicia, Lithuania, and elsewhere ventured to Padua University to study medicine when other schools across Europe refused their admission. Then, from the end of the eighteenth century onward, Jews from Galicia attended Habsburg universities—from Lemberg/Lwów and Kraków, to Vienna, Pest and Prague. Many nineteenth-century Jewish medics influenced Galician life beyond their profession, advocating educational, religious and civic reforms. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish women were at the forefront of newly won access to university education, changing societal and family norms.
This presentation will take us across the countries and continents, with genealogical information illustrated by unique archival records, newspaper accounts, and maps. You don’t have to have medical practitioners among your ancestors to find this topic interesting and helpful in your family history research.
About the Speaker: Andrew Zalewski is a former professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He is the vice president of Gesher Galicia, a non-profit organization devoted to genealogical and historical research on Galicia. Andrew Zalewski has also authored two books on Austrian Galicia: Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family and Galician Portraits: In Search of Jewish Roots.
An ASL interpreter may be made available if requested in advance.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
tour
From A[gam] to Z[aritsky]: Highlights of Israeli Art from YU Museum’s Collection
Join YUM Collections Curator Bonni-Dara Michaels for a tour of From A[gam] to Z[aritsky], exploring the character of Israeli art and the personal relationships between artists and collectors.
Presented by:
tour
lecture and concert
What is the Cantorial “Golden Age”?
Among aficionados and practitioners, the term cantorial "Golden Age" draws to mind a discrete body of work recorded by a well-known cadre of Eastern European cantors working in Europe and America in the 1900s-30s. This narrative of a Golden Age was shaped by cantors working in tandem with commercial distribution networks, advertisements in print media, and the efforts of intellectuals and impresarios who worked to establish a canon of stars and hit records through journalism, liner notes and show-business style promotion. Remarkably, recordings of cantors singing through-composed recitative settings on liturgical prayer texts achieved the status of mass media entertainment among Jewish listeners in the early 20th century.
However, the “Golden Age” of recorded cantorial music did not come about without pushback and controversy. Critics of recorded cantorial music saw new technology as a contamination of tradition that vulgarized sacred sound through commerce and the displacement of the liturgy from its temporal-spatial location in ritual contexts. While communal leaders accused cantorial recording stars of degrading sacred art, the cantorial recording stars positioned themselves as defenders of an older strand of Jewish folk prayer music that had been displaced by the Sulzerian Romantic choral music which had become normative in elite urban synagogues. Recorded cantorial music offers a populist, hyper-emotional memory work that interpolates Jewish listeners into a sense of self-recognition by performing a theatrical imagined ethnography of Jewish sacred folklore.
In this presentation, scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood will offer insights from the YIVO archival holdings that illuminate the impassioned debates among cantors and their critics in the early 20th century. He will be joined by Cantor Yoel Kohn, one of the leading young voices reviving Golden Age cantorial music, who will sing representative works from classic records.
Presented by:
lecture and concert
keynote, panel discussion & film/discussion
Stories of New York: City College
The "Jewish Harvard" and a World of Ideas
This February and March, join historians, writers, filmmakers, and alumni at the Center for Jewish History for a series of discussions and films about City College, its rich Jewish history, and its transformative role in the lives of so many.
Part I: The “Jewish Harvard” and a World of Ideas
“From first day to last I felt privileged to be a student at City. I experienced City first with awe, then with pleasure, and finally with love.” Vivian Gornick, CCNY 1957
Its dazzling list of alumni includes playwrights and poets, politicians and journalists, engineers, scientists, teachers, and Nobel Prize winners. The City College of New York was established to provide children of working class and immigrant families access to a tuition-free, merit-based higher education. For many years, its student body was largely Jewish and for most it was “City College or nothing” at a time when quotas and cost kept Jews out of more prestigious institutions. Join us for Part I: The "Jewish Harvard" and a World of Ideas. Enjoy all-star line-up of speakers and great stories in the morning, and an award-winning film in the afternoon. Program schedule below.
| 10:00am | Coffee in the Great Hall at the Center for Jewish History |
| 10:30am | Welcome The Rank and File of Sturdy Sons and Eventually Daughters Jeffrey S. Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, CCNY 1971 |
| 11:15am | An Engine of Transformation CCNY alumni panel discussion with: Joseph Berger, CCNY 1966 Ralph Blumenthal, CCNY 1963 Sid Davidoff, CCNY 1960 Vivian Gornick, CCNY 1957 Irena Klepfisz, CCNY 1962 |
| 12:30pm | Stories from Our Past, Dreams of Our Future Dr. Vincent Boudreau President, The City College of New York Assistant Professor Chemistry; Director, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College |
| 1:00pm | Light Lunch Galleries Open |
| 2:00pm | Arguing the World Film screening and talkback with filmmaker Joseph Dorman, Princeton Professor David Bell, University of Oklahoma Assistant Professor, Ronnie Grinberg. Moderated by Barry Gewen. |
About the Speakers:
Keynote Speaker Jeffrey S. Gurock, CCNY '71 was a history major and a four year letterman on the college's lacrosse team where he was the recipient of the Abraham Kalman Scholar-Athlete award. In 2015,he was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal from CCNY in recognition of his post-graduate work. Presently the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and former chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, Professor Gurock is the author or editor of 22 books including Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City 1920-2010 (NYU Press, 2012) which received the “Book of the Year Award” from the National Jewish Book Council; The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline and Revival of a Jewish Community (NYU Press, 2016), and Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity (NYU Press, 2019).
David A. Bell received an AB from Harvard in History and Literature, and an MA and PhD from Princeton in History. The son of Daniel Bell (profiled in Arguing the World) David is a specialist in the history of early modern Europe. He has taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins (where he also served as Dean of Faculty), and since 2010 has held the Lapidus chair in the History Department at Princeton. Among his awards and fellowships are a Guggenheim, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He is the author of six books, including The Cult of the Nation in France and The First Total War. In 2020, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his latest book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. He is a regular contributor to The Nation and The New York Review of Books.
Joseph Berger, CCNY '66, a former reporter for The Campus, was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for over 30 years, writing about education, religion, New York City, Israel and the Middle East. For the previous 14 years he had been a reporter for the New York Post and Newsday. In 2011, Joe was honored with the Peter Kihss Award for a distinguished career given by the Society of Silurians, the city’s oldest press club. Retired from the Times since 2014, Joe is now a contributing writer and teaches two urban affairs courses at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College. Joe is the author of four books, including his memoir, Displaced Persons: Growing Up American after the Holocaust. Called an "extraordinary memoir" by New York Times, it was named a Times notable book of the year in 2001. His next book, a biography of Elie Wiesel will be published by Yale University Press in 2020.
Ralph Blumenthal, CCNY '63 was Editor-in-Chief of The Campus and a stringer for The New York Times at City College where he majored in English. After graduation, he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism ('64) and went on to the Times where he worked for the next 45 years. Over the course of his career, Ralph was a metro reporter, foreign correspondent, investigative reporter, crime writer, culture reporter and Southwest Bureau Chief based in Houston. He was also on the metro team that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting of the 1992 terrorist truck bombing of the World Trade Center. After retiring from The New York Times in 2009, Ralph was named a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College where he taught journalism and currently supervises historic collections in the Library Archives. He is the author of five non-fiction books, and a sixth, about a Harvard professor who studied encounters with UFOs and aliens, is scheduled for publication in 2021.
Vincent Boudreau was appointed president of The City College of New York in December 2017. Prior to becoming president, he has served in many positions at City College including as founding dean and director of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at CCNY; director of the M.A. Program in International Relations; chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the International Studies Program, and the deputy dean of the Division of Social Science. Boudreau is also a professor of political science at City College and member of the City University of New York graduate faculty. A specialist in the politics of social movements, particularly in Southeast Asia, his latest book is Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press).
Sid Davidoff, CCNY ’60, grew up in Queens and attended Baruch College, also known as CCNY “downtown.” A member of the City College wrestling team, he was active in student government and graduated with a degree in public administration. Sid earned his J.D. from New York University in 1963 and was administrative assistant to New York Mayor John V. Lindsay for seven years. Recognized as one of New York’s best known attorneys in special City and State agency work, Sid is currently Chair of the Administrative Law and Government Relations groups at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP. Among his many accomplishments, Sid was a Chubb Fellow at Yale University, a lecturer to the special Root-Tilden students at New York University School of Law, and also played a divorce lawyer on an episode of The Sopranos.
Joseph Dorman is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and the founder of Riverside Films. He wrote and directed the critically acclaimed documentary, Arguing the World about the controversial sixty-year political journey of the eminent political writers and thinkers, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer. Described by The New York Times as “enthralling… one of the deepest portraits of… of ideas ever filmed,” the film won a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence and was short-listed for the Academy Awards. Joseph also directed Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (2011), Colliding Dreams (2016) about the controversial history of Zionism, and co-directed Moynihan, a documentary about the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s lifelong fight against poverty in America. A writer for The New York Times Book Review and other publications, Joseph is also the author of Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in their Own Words (2001) and co-editor of the forthcoming When Ideas Mattered, The Nathan Glazer Reader.
Barry Gewen, who has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Harvard, has been an editor at The New York Times Book Review for over 30 years. He has written for a variety of publications, including The Times, The New Republic, Dissent, The National Interest and The American Conservative. His first book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, will be published by Norton this spring.
Vivian Gornick, CCNY '57 is a renowned memoirist, essayist, and biographer. Born in the Bronx, she received her BA from City College and her MA from NYU in 1960. After teaching English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1966–1967 and at Hunter College in 1967–1968, Vivian worked as a reporter for The Village Voice from 1969 to 1977 where she wrote prolifically about feminism and the women's movement. She is the author of twelve books including Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (2013), Fierce Attachments (1987), The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2005), The Men in My Life (2008), and The Odd Woman in the City (2015). The New York Times recently selected Fierce Attachments as the "#1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years. Vivian lives in New York City.
Ronnie Grinberg is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, and a core faculty member of OU’s Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the New York intellectuals tentatively titled, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, under contract with Princeton University Press. Dr. Grinberg is a member of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society and contributes to the Society of U.S. Intellectual History, among other professional organizations. She received her doctorate in American history from Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Credit: Linda EberIrena Klepfisz, CCNY ’62, was born in the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the war in a Polish orphanage. She came to New York with her mother in 1949 and they settled in the Bronx. At City College Irena studied English and Yiddish and after graduating, she entered the University of Chicago where she received her PhD. A poet, author, Yiddish translator, teacher and feminist/lesbian activist, Irena co-founded the feminist magazine, Conditions, served as Yiddish editor for the feminist Bridges magazine, and co-edited The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Woman's Anthology and A Jewish Woman's Call for Peace.She is the author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue (poetry) and Dreams of an Insomniac (essays). For ten years, Irena taught in the college program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women and for twenty-two years taught Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College. Among her many honors, Irena is a recipient of an NEA fellowship and NYFA grant in poetry, was a finalist for the poetry Lambda Award, and recently received the Dreaming in Yiddish Prize from the Adrienne Cooper Fund.
Lev Sviridov, CCNY ’05 immigrated to the United States as a child from the former Soviet Union. He studied chemistry, mathematics, physics, and pottery at The City College of New York and also served in student government where he was elected President. Following his graduation, Lev attended the University of Oxford and completed his D.Phil. in Inorganic Chemistry as a Rhodes' Scholar. He serves on the boards of The Foundation for City College, Concord Consortium, and Human Rights First. Currently, he is the Director of the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College of CUNY.
Presented by:
keynote, panel discussion & film/discussion
lecture
Eugen Bárkány: A Pioneer of Jewish Heritage Preservation in Slovakia
Eugen Bárkány (1885–1967) was a civil engineer and successful entrepreneur during the interwar period – and passionate collector in Eastern Slovakia. In 1928, he became a director of the Slovakia´s first Jewish museum in Prešov, which was a private initiative of the Jewish museum association, which Bárkány chaired. The museum assembled a remarkable collection, which survived the war and from 1952–1993 was stored at the State Jewish Museum in Prague, before it was returned to the Jewish Community of Prešov.
Bárkány hid in Budapest in 1942–1945 and returned to Prešov in 1945, where he was subsequently persecuted by the Communist regime, which expelled him from his city. In 1955, Bárkány settled down in Bratislava, where he lived in humble conditions. He continued his survey of Jewish heritage and travelled extensively around Slovakia. In Bratislava, Bárkány assembled another Judaica collection in the Neolog synagogue, and in 1966 a new Jewish museum was planned. This project was not fulfilled, the synagogue was demolished in 1969 and the collection deposited at the Slovak National Museum, from where it returned only in 2002. In 2012, the Jewish Community Museum was established in Bratislava´s only synagogue, which remains in use as an Orthodox house of worship. Since 2016, the Eugen Bárkány Prize has been awarded annually for achievements in Jewish heritage preservation by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Slovakia.
The Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava dedicated in 2018 and 2019 two exhibition projects to Eugen Bárkány and Slovakia´s first Jewish museum in Prešov. The precious collection has remained in the research and exhibition focus of the Museum.
The Museum’s director Maroš Borský will give an overview of Bárkány’s remarkable life, the collection he built, and its future. He will also discuss current synagogue restoration projects in Slovakia and major achievements of the past decade.
This event is co-sponsored by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, the Consulate General of Slovakia in New York, and the Jewish Cultural Institute, Bratislava
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
Ten Years Without Avrom Sutzkever
Remembered as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust,” a Partisan fighter, and a book smuggler, Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s legacy as a poet for poetry’s sake deserves more attention.
Sutzkever was a member of Eastern Europe’s last literary circle Yung yidish, and also a kindred spirit of New York’s in zikh movement of introspective Yiddish poets. Rejecting politics in poetry, Sutzkever transcended the stylistic boundaries of his peers and drew inspiration from outside of the Yiddish world including from Russian and Polish Romantic and symbolist poets. Sutzkever’s poetry is known for its Neo-romantic interest in nature and wonder, and for his virtuosic, inventive use of the Yiddish language. Having left behind an oeuvre which includes more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, and a memoir on his experience in the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever is also remembered for his work for almost 50 years as founder and editor of Tel Aviv’s premiere Yiddish Magazine, Di goldene keyt.
Join YIVO for an evening critically engaging with Sutzkever’s poetic legacy including recitations of his poetry, and discussion with literary scholar Ruth Wisse, translator Barbara Harshav, and poet Irena Klepfisz.
Presented by:
conversation
concert
MusicTalks presents "Ashes and Dust"
A Holocaust Remembrance Day performance of Yehuda Poliker’s celebrated 1988 album “Ashes and Dust,” a tribute to children of survivors, by Israeli singer Gilad Paz.
Presented by:
concert
jewish genealogical society programs at cjh
The Sugihara Refugee Story: Survivors and Those Without Whom This Story Would Not Be Told
Most Jewish genealogists know the story of Chiune Sugihara, the "Japanese Schindler", who issued over 2,000 Japanese transit visas that enabled many Jews to escape war torn Europe in the summer of 1940. But there is more to the story. There were many people-Europeans, Americans, Japanese- who helped to save these people. We will identify some of them and talk about their exploits. We will trace one women's journey around the world, documenting her journey using genealogical methods and records.
Mark Halpern was a businessman who lived in Japan. While on business in Poland, he became interested in his roots. Now retired, Mark works with JRI-Poland, JewishGen, IAJGS, and Jewish Genealogical and Archival Society of Philadelphia. He chaired the program committee for the 2009 and 2013 IAJGS conferences. He received the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Presented by:
jewish genealogical society programs at cjh
conversation
Rembrandt’s Legacy: A Personal Conversation
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik moderates a discussion on Rembrandt’s legacy between Thomas Kaplan, philanthropist and private collector, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of Northern Baroque paintings at the National Gallery of Art.
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
In 1940, Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated American journalist, traveled to occupied France carrying a little money and a short list of imperiled artists and writers, many of whom were Jewish. Determined to save prominent refugees and their work, Fry spent 13 months procuring false documents, amassing emergency funds, and setting up escape routes for luminaries like Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall. Inspired by Fry’s extraordinary story, bestselling author Julie Orringer (The Invisible Bridge) weaves together fact and fiction in her suspenseful new novel, The Flight Portfolio, and poses a difficult and enduring question: how do we weigh human lives? Orringer speaks with Jewish Week’s Sandee Brawarsky and Jonathan Wiesner of the International Rescue Committee.
About the Speakers:
Julie Orringer is the author of the novel The Invisible Bridge and the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.
Sandee Brawarsky, an award-winning journalist and editor, is the culture editor of The Jewish Week and writes primarily about books, theatre, art and museums, television, special events, and personalities from all walks of life. She also curates and moderates literary events around New York City. The author of several books, most recently 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York’s Jewel from Every Angle (with photographer Mick Hales), her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Lancet, Hadassah, the Jerusalem Post, and other publications. She is the co-editor of Two Jews, Three Opinions: A Collection of Twentieth Century American Jewish Quotations (with Deborah Mark). For The New York Times, she has written about the neighborhoods of New York City, ethnic festivals and events, historic sites and walking in the city at all hours, and about weddings in the “Vows” column. She lives in Teaneck, New Jersey with her husband, Barry Lichtenberg and their three children.
Jonathan Weisner has served in a leadership capacity on several environmental and humanitarian NFP/NGO boards over the past 22 year and is currently Chair of the NY Advisory Board of the Trust for Public Land (TPL). He has been on the Board of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) since 1995 where he was Co-Chair of the Board and is now Chairman Emeritus. As a Board member, he has visited many of the programs and comments that he is in awe of the refugees that IRC serves because of their courage and optimism. “Despite being driven from their homes, refugees want nothing more than the chance to rebuild their lives.” As a CEO and owner of a privately held apparel company, he has created a "mission" to adopt sustainable practices and achieved B Corp certification.
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
SOLD OUT: Straight into the Lions' Den: The Left, Zionism, and Antisemitism
How do we distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? How have thinkers on the Left wrestled with Zionism with and the actual State of Israel - sometimes championing it as a progressive cause, at other times seeing it as a racist or colonialist enterprise?
Join us as Bari Weiss, author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and Susie Linfield, author of The Lion's Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, tackle these urgent questions, moderated by Nextbook's Jonathan Rosen. Natan named both books Fall 2019 Natan Notable Books, and this is the first time the authors will be in conversation.
Presented by:
panel discussion
celebration
International Ladino Day: A Celebration of Story and Song
Celebrate Ladino—Judeo-Spanish— with acclaimed scholars and musicians. Hear Prof. Gloria Ascher, who has taught courses in Ladino at Tufts University for 17 years; Prof. Dina Danon, whose Stanford University Press book brings Izmir’s Ottoman Jewish community to life; two scenes from a New York Ladino play; a panel of Generation Y and Z Ladino enthusiasts; and musicians dear to our hearts, The Elias Ladino Ensemble and Sarah Aroeste. Light refreshments will be served.
Ladino is a bridge to many cultures. It is a variety of Spanish that has absorbed words and expressions from many languages, most notably Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and French. The mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, Ladino became the home language of Sephardim worldwide. While the number of Ladino speakers has sharply declined, distinguished programs like this one celebrate and preserve a vibrant language and culture for future generations.
Since 2013, Ladino Day celebrations have been held around the world. January 12th marks Manhattan’s 3rd Annual Ladino Day created by CUNY Prof. Jane Mushabac for the American Sephardi Federation at The Center for Jewish History.
Presented by:
celebration
lecture
Jewish Life in Putin’s Russia
For centuries Ashkenazi Jews claimed the Russian Empire as their home. After a history of pogroms, state-imposed antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and large waves of emigration to the United States and Israel, the post-Soviet era with its democratization of politics brought many Jews who had emigrated in 1970s and 1980s back to Russia to start businesses. Quite a few were successful.
In 1996 a Russian Jewish Congress was launched as an umbrella organization for all Russian Jews, whether secular or religious. Hundreds of Torah scrolls were returned to the community from museums and storages across the country. Shuls were reopened, rebuilt, renovated. Today there are kosher stores in Moscow, and the Chabad Lubavitch rebbe Berel Lazar is a frequent guest of Putin's state dinners. And yet, in the last several years, since Putin's return to the Kremlin in 2012, Russia has been marked by increased Jewish immigration to Israel — some 45 percent more in 2018, than in the previous year.
What do Jews know that the rest of the world seems not to? Why are they leaving Russia en masse? Yevgenia M. Albats, a former member of the Presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress, a current member of its Public Council, a prominent Russian journalist and an academic, currently a distinguished fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, will discuss Jewish life in today’s Russia.
Presented by:
lecture
