March 2024
The City Without Jews: A Centenary Film Soirée
Join us for a special screening of the historic silent film The City Without Jews accompanied live with original music composed and performed by klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and silent film pianist Donald Sosin. The screening will be followed by a conversation with UC San Diego Professor Emerita Cynthia Walk and UC Berkeley Professor and CJS affiliate Philipp Lenhard. Wednesday, March 20, 2024 | 5:30pm 5:00 pm: Doors open, light refreshments available 5:30 pm: Program begins Based on the controversial…
Find out more »American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York
Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Professors Nomi M. Stolzenberg (USC, Gould School of Law) and David N. Myers (UCLA) will relate the story of how a group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in suburban New York. Their co-authored book, American Shtetl: The Making…
Find out more »Book Panel: “When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash”
This book panel will focus on a new volume of work, When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash, by Professor and CJS Faculty Director Ethan Katz. Joining Professor Katz on the panel will be the book's co-editors Elisha Anscelovits (Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies) and Sergey Dolgopolski (University of Buffalo); as well as Professors Deena Aranoff (Graduate Theological Union), Duncan MacRae (UC Berkeley), and Masua Sagiv (UC Berkeley). As panelists will discuss, this book raises fundamental questions…
Find out more »April 2024
Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the “Jewish Question”
After a resounding defeat, France officially left the war and a new government, retaining some sovereignty over part of the country and settled in the city of Vichy put an end to the Republican regime and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. As a result, the Jews were faced with a double persecution, led by the German occupier as well as by the Vichy regime. Marginalization and exclusion led to internment before deportation to the East and extermination. A propaganda war…
Find out more »Atrocities’ Truth Tellers: Armenian and Jewish Victim Testimony in Interwar Europe
Annual Pell Lecture. This event will be recorded. Writing about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt recalled two murder trials from the 1920s in Europe. In 1921, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian man allegedly living as a student in Berlin, assassinated Mehmet Talaat, the former Ottoman Minister of the Interior, for his responsibility in the genocide of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Five years later, in Paris, Sholem Schwarzbard, a Ukrainian Jew who had recently become…
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