The Magnes Collection, in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies, presents “Roman Vishniac. In Focus: 1922-2022.” celebrating the reopening of The Magnes and the richness of the Roman Vishniac Archive. This 2-day event combines an Open House (May 1) featuring “A Glimpse of Vishniac,” a digital display of photographs of Jewish life from Eastern and Central Europe from before World War II, as well as a day-long virtual Symposium (May 2) with internationally acclaimed scholars discussing the historical…

The Magnes Collection, in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies, presents “Roman Vishniac. In Focus: 1922-2022.” celebrating the reopening of The Magnes and the richness of the Roman Vishniac Archive. This 2-day event combines an Open House (May 1) featuring “A Glimpse of Vishniac,” a digital display of photographs of Jewish life from Eastern and Central Europe from before World War II, as well as a day-long virtual Symposium (May 2) with internationally acclaimed scholars discussing the historical…

Spring 2022 Pell Lecture. This program is presented with the generous support of the Joseph and Eda Pell Endowed Fund for Jewish Studies, and is a part of the Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative. Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart…

The Center for Jewish Studies, in conjunction with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, is pleased to present this in-person poetry panel featuring Dan Alter with Erika Meitner and Daniel Khalastchi, two of the most exciting Jewish poets working in the US, with new books out now or in the spring. Naomi Seidman will moderate a discussion and reading, offering poetry as a lens into how particular sensibilities navigate these issues in a time of uncertainty and possibility. Dan…

Between 1933 and 1939, several dozen journalists writing for the Yiddish press in Poland traveled to Nazi Germany to cover political developments and Jewish life in the Third Reich from an investigative, ethnographic and uniquely Eastern European-Jewish point of view. Their personal and professional experience allowed them to document and interpret National Socialism from a dual perspective. As traveling Jewish journalists from Eastern Europe they were “outsiders” from German society and from the German-Jewish experience. However, as Jews travelling through Nazi Germany (and sometimes staying for weeks or months), they were also “insiders”…

Persecution caused thousands of Jews from Germany and German-occupied countries to seek refuge in France, or to travel through France on their way out of Europe, between 1933 and 1944. After Germany occupied a large part of France in June 1940, both the German administration governing the Occupied Zone and the French Vichy government in the Unoccupied Zone began persecuting Jews. For Jews seeking to leave France, one escape route was across the Pyrenees to Spain and then Portugal, where they…