The textual record from the southern Levant paints a picture of a complex and prolific network of cuneiform scribal communities in the late second millennium BCE. In this same period, a different community of text makers used the early alphabet in this region. Yet these early alphabetic inscriptions are limited to short inscriptions on clay vessels, or prestige objects made of refined materials. In the early first millennium BCE, there is a dramatic change in literacy practices. Cuneiform is no longer used and local variants of the alphabet are used as prestige and administrative...
This talk investigates how antisemitism has festered and flourished in global digital media. The public sphere of social media has globalized and changed “traditional” antisemitism, offering a new digital antisemitism. This talk center the phenomenon of the “Jew Goal”, an ignominious but broadly employed e-sports neologism that antisemitically labels an easy goal as “Jewish.” Jewish involvement in sports in the twentieth century has been trumpeted as a successful story of Jewish emancipation and gradual inclusion. How is it that in the 21st century the Jewish subject came to be constructed...
Identifying the Holocaust with other historical experiences has given rise to a series of debates in the public sphere in recent decades. In Argentina the Holocaust has been a sensitive topic from the 1940s to the present. In this talk, Emmanuel Kahan proposes a history of Holocaust memory and its "uses" in Argentina, focusing on four key moments. One, the time period contemporaneous to the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Two, the 1960s and polemics in Argentina about antisemitism and the conflict in the Middle East. Three, the period of the last...
Paul Lerner is a Historian of Modern Germany and Central Europe with particular interest in the history of the human sciences, Jewish history, gender, and the history and theory of consumer culture. He has written on the history of psychiatry, specifically on hysteria and trauma in political, cultural and economic context in the years around World War I in Germany, and he recently published a book on the reception and representation of department stores and modern forms of marketing and consumption in Germany...
This talk will explore the history of Jewish communities in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Orit Bashkin looks at the ways in which Jews in the Middle East and North Africa favored Ottoman rule, in its imperial and local-Arab forms, and how they perceived Ottoman military victories as components of a Divine plan. Based on Hebrew, Arabic, and Judeo-Arabic texts from the 16th century to the 19th, such as liturgical poems, travel accounts, chronicles, and works of narrative prose, that were rarely, if at all,...
For the sixty thousand German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in Mandatory Palestine between 1933 and 1940, migration meant radical changes: it transformed their professional and cultural lives and confronted them with a new language, climate, and society. In her talk, Viola Alianov-Rautenberg will tell the story of German-Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine/Eretz Israel as gender history. She will argue that this migration was shaped and structured by gendered policies and ideologies and experienced by men and women in a gendered form—from the decision to immigrate and...
This talk will offer an overview of Judaken’s recently published book, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism. In it, he offers a philosophical reflection on crucial problems in how we think about anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Judaken explores methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. The book examines theories from thinkers such as...
In person at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA
In Victoria Hannah at In Plain Sight: Sounds Create Worlds, Victoria Hanna will engage with Jewish language, liturgy, and symbols through voice, sound, and visuals. This performance draws on themes from the new Magnes exhibition, In Plain Sight: Jewish Arts and Lives in the Muslim World.
Join us for a conversation between author Liron Mor (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine), Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed (Comparative Literature), and Roni Masel (Comparative Literature) about Mor's new book, Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel (Fordham University Press, 2024). This book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial...
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...
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....
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...
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,...
In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive...
There has long been debate and disagreement over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. In recent months, this debate has become particularly intense and...
Join us for a bilingual reading featuring acclaimed French poet and translator Mireille Gansel and her English translator, poet Joan Seliger Sidney. Soul House (World Poetry, 2023) is Gansel’s first book of poetry in English translation and her second book in English since her...
There has long been debate and disagreement over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. In recent months, this debate has become particularly intense and often acrimonious. In an effort to...
Montreal’s 90,000-strong Jewish community presents unique features that differentiate it from the Jewish populations of other North American cities. Even those aspects that it shares – a large Ashkenazic immigration in the early decades of the 20th century, broad and successful...
Jewish midrash offers powerful evocations of divine lament, most famously through imagines of God weeping in response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. While scholars have often examined God’s emotional distress in the face of human suffering, this talk probes...
Almost 80 years after her tragic death in concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank still figures prominently in the public domain. Over the years, her diary and her life story have been the subject of an expansive output of adaptations and engagements, giving her an iconic status. While there is an unabated...
Larissa Remennick will compare three generations of Russian-speaking Israelis in terms of socio-economic mobility, Hebrew use and acculturation, and political and civic participation. She will discuss whether Russian-speaking...
The conceptual couple of majority/minority is viewed as a harmless way of identifying an arithmetic relationship. The idea of a dichotomy between majority and (Jewish) minority as a short hand to describe relations between ethnic or religious groups, however, is recent. In fact, as it did not exist before 1919 when in the wake of World War I the...
What happens if we place eunuchs and androgynes at the center of canonical Jewish sources? What can we learn about gender, Jewish law, and the project of transgender history from late ancient texts about these figures? The rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of sex/gender; rather than anomalies to be justified or explained away, eunuchs and androgynes profoundly...
This day-long symposium will probe what remains an under-examined topic in the history of World War II and the Holocaust: the multivarious paths through which ordinary men and women resisted the Nazis. While scholarship on the choices, backgrounds, and motivations of perpetrators and collaborators has become quite robust,...
Eric K. Ward, a nationally-recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and preserving inclusive democracy, is the recipient of the 2021 Civil Courage Prize – the first American in the award’s 21-year history. In his 30+ year civil rights career, Eric has worked with community groups, government and business leaders, human...
Eric K. Ward, a nationally-recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and preserving inclusive democracy, is the recipient of the 2021 Civil Courage Prize—the first American in the award’s 21-year history. In his 30+ year civil rights career, Eric has worked with community groups, government and business...
With the 80th anniversary of this momentous event upon us in April, Dr. Zachary Mazur will reflect on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in stark contrast against the stereotype of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. This presentation will draw upon some never before seen sources and images that were discovered in the process of preparing the POLIN...
In 2019, the shooter of the Poway synagogue near San Diego cited the story of Simon of Trent, a boy whose death during the Easter/Passover season in 1475 led to one of the most notorious persecutions of Jews in Europe, as one of...
Rudolphina Menzel was a Viennese-born, Jewish scientist whose pioneering research on canine psychology, development, and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Menzel was...
Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for three thousand years. Over time, the pig becomes a popular metaphor for Jewish/non-Jewish identity. In this talk, we explore this historical development. Starting in the Hebrew Bible, where the pig is tabooed but not necessarily singled out more than other food...
This talk will focus on private prayers found in Hebrew manuscripts from medieval northern France that both adapt and adopt known Christian prayers. It will trace the ways in which these prayers would have been known by Jews, and discuss the adaptations made by Jews to make these prayers usable. What do such prayers...
A unique phenomenon emerged in the heart of Berlin in the nineteenth century: a creative center for fashion and ready-made clothing. Hundreds of garment companies were established, manufacturing modern wear and developing new designs that were sold throughout Germany – and the world. The industry reached the height of its success in the 1920s. Freed from corsets,...
Noted historian, author, and collector Ted Merwin presents an interactive, multimedia lecture on the ever-shifting place of the Jewish delicatessen in American life. In New York, San Francisco, and cities in between, the deli was the lifeblood and linchpin of the Jewish community. The “soul food” and convivial atmosphere it dished up became a quintessential part of American...
In the last decade, graphic memoirs and novels have emerged as a significant form of historical (re)writing of past narratives and events. The medium of comics and its use of chronologically ordered panels allows the reader to create meanings through the combination of image and text. Aomar Boum argues for the use of graphic memoirs to re-construct the history of Saharan Vichy camps. He...
When did Jews first begin using material goods to communicate a religious identity? Why did such a practice arise, and what were its social and political consequences? In this lecture, Andrea Berlin couples archaeological remains with historical testimony to address these questions. The story begins in the second century BCE, with the rise...
In collaboration with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Faculty Director John Efron welcomes the German and Israeli Consul Generals to a reception and program showcasing ...
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...
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 featuringDan Alter with Erika Meitner and...
Between 1933 and 1939, several dozen journalists writing for the Yiddishpress in Poland traveled to NaziGermany to cover political developments and Jewishlife in the Third Reich from an investigative, ethnographic and uniquely Eastern European-Jewish point of view. Their personal and...
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...
The exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union transformed the Jewish landscape on three continents and has been called the preeminent case of Jewish human rights activism. It is often identified — and confused — with the Soviet dissident movement and the struggle for rights in Russia. What brought the two movements together — and what kept them apart? This talk explores the...
In the first decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Sephardi Jews migrated out of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and its successor states to build new lives in France. Most Ottoman Sephardi immigrants settled in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, which became known in common parlance as “Little Turkey.” With streets lined with Sephardi restaurants and...
The Hebrew imagination, incubated in ancient Zion, travelled with the Jews throughout their diasporas, generating rich mimetic cultures meant as temporary waystations along the path to eventual return and redemption. While Jerusalem and the site of the ruined Temple remained the focus of liturgical attention, distance, deferral and substitution liberated the poetic...
In 1713, plague ravaged the city of Prague. It struck Christians and Jews alike, but contemporary observers singled out the Jewish quarter of the city as a hotspot of contagion, and authorities acted to segregate and separate the Jews of the city from Christians. Jews actively crafted responses both to plague and...
With an estimated 120,000 members, Satmar is by far the world’s largest and wealthiest Hasidic court. It is also the most recognizable “brand” associated with Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy in America, with the possible exception of Chabad/Lubavitch. Moreover, Satmar is known for its leaders’ strict anti-Zionist policy and...
On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill–the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one.
In this talk, Liora Halperin tells the story of Zionist memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) that were established in late 19th-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries in British...
Michael Brenner, American University and University of Munich.
The Free State of Bavaria was established in November 1918 by the Jewish socialist, Kurt Eisner. After his assassination in February 1919, Bavaria went through intense political infighting, in the midst of which, Jewish politicians were very...
Arun Viswanath in conversation with Robert Alter (UC Berkeley).
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is the first book in the most-translated series of all time recently appeared in a new language: Yiddish (Heri Poter un der Filosofisher Shteyn). In this talk, Arun Viswanath, the translator, a native Yiddish speaker, will engage with...
Dina Danon (SUNY-Binghamton University) in conversation with Karen Barkey (UC Berkeley).
Synopsis: This lecture will tell the story of a long overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read...
Stargazing in the Atomic Age counters the assumption that Jewish history largely chronicles tragedy. Designed for the common reader, its essays take the nadir of modern Jewish experience as their starting point. But they are not elegiac. Life for Jews in the United States, the...
Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture Ruth Tsoffar (author) in a conversation with Chana Kronfeld and Naomi Seidman
In Life in Citations, I tell a complicated story about the relationship of secular Israelis to biblical narratives. From the early days of Zionism, the Bible has wielded an immense...
Nurit Stadler (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in conversation with Ron Hassner (UC Berkeley)
Voices of the Ritual, published with Oxford Universtiy Press is an analysis of the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders,...
Yavilah McCoy is the CEO of DIMENSIONS Inc. in Boston. She has spent the past 20 years working extensively in multi-faith communities and partnering specifically with the Jewish community to engage issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yavilah is an educator, activist and spiritual teacher. She is a Jewish woman and a person of color and has...
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 remembrance culture—its “theater of memory”—struck a nerve not just among Jews, but other minority groups...
Due to the Coronavirus situation and recent campus directives, The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES) has decided to cancel Professor Subotić’s trip to UC Berkeley. They plan to reschedule her lecture in the Fall.
Jelena Subotić (Georgia State University)
Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after...
Tapestry of Tongues: The Multilingual Matrix of Modern Hebrew Literature
Screening of “Amos Oz” Selected scenes from a work-in-progress In “Ha’Ivrim,” a documentary film series (https://ivrim.co.il)
Followed by: Conversation with Filmmaker Yair Qedar and UC Berkeley Professors Robert Atler and Chana Kronfeld
Cosponsors: The University of California, Berkeley Magnes Collection of Jewish Art, The Center for Jewish Studies, The Berkeley Institute of Jewish Law and Israel Studies, The Bernie H....
Over the last decade there has been a noticeable uptick in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents by left-wing groups targeting Jewish students and Jewish organizations on American college campuses.
Where is all this hatred coming from? Is there any significant difference between left-wing and right-wing antisemitism? What role has the anti-Zionist movement...
In the Name of the Cross: Christianity and Anti-Semitic Propaganda in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
Heated debate surrounds the question of the role Christianity and Christian churches played in the Nazi and Italian Fascist demonization of the Jews. This talk brings to light similarities and differences in...
How did early modern Jews settle disputes “between Jew and Jew”? Stemming from a reflection upon the functions of the early modern kehillah/communal corporate body, Evelyne Oliel-Grausz’s current research questions the Jewish community as a legal resource/ forum for dispute resolution. If institution of the Bet Din is somewhat well known, and has the been the subject of several key publications of late, it was not the only available internal forum: in most Ashkenazi and Sephardi early modern communities, lay courts operated side by side with the rabbinical court, and in cooperation with it...
‘The talk considers photographs that were taken by non-professional Jewish photographers under the National Socialist regime. By the early 1930s, most German-Jewish families had avidly used pocket-sized cameras to document their experiences, from domestic routines and family vacations to participation in political gatherings, youth movement ceremonies, sports and religious events. I argue that, gazing at a rapidly changing environment after January 1933, amateur Jewish photographers utilized their cameras to reflect on the new reality, to...
At some time after end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple. But its earliest effects can be traced...
How can an ancient religious ritual convey current social and political needs? This question emerged from eight years (2007-2015) of documentation of Sukkot, the Jewish festival that annually commemorates the Israelites’ Biblical journey through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land. This talk explores the holiday’s central rite of building and “...
Beginning in September 1941 and throughout the war, Central Asia and Iran became places of refuge to hundreds of thousand of Jewish and Catholic Polish citizens. Mikhal Dekel, whose father was a child refugee in Tehran, will recount the research and writing process of this epic yet relatively unknown Holocaust story, told in her new book Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey...
Hatred against Jews has re-emerged today as a major problem on the Left and the Right– in European and American politics, and frequently on college campuses. What accounts for this resurgence? What has been the historical evolution of antisemitism that helps explain the current moment? What forms is antisemitism taking today? How much is it connected to or distinct from the rise of other hateful ideologies? This panel of experts addresses these issues, with ample time for questions and discussion.
This is the inaugural event in a year-long Antisemitism Education Initiative of the...
For ten years Dory Manor lived in Paris and wrote poetry in Hebrew. Early on in his stay in France he debated trying to shift into French, but soon realized that poetry—as opposed to other sorts of writing—was an art he could perform only in his mother tongue, Hebrew. This is not surprising: as opposed to authors and playwrights, very few modern poets have written in an acquired language. Even poets who were immigrants and exiles generally clung to their mother tongues. The German-language poet, Paul Celan, took it a step further and asserted that, “Only in the mother tongue can one speak...
The Song of Songs is a puzzle: a collection of secular — often erotic— love poetry that stands alone within the sacred books of the Hebrew Bible. Many of these poems are riddles that lead readers to more than one solution. When we read them for the first time, we might think their solution to be patently clear, but a second reading shows another solution, more daring than the first and sometimes its mirror opposite. A sub-group within these riddles are three questions that appear in the book, each of which begins with the words, “Who is she that ….” In this lecture, we will examine and...
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is the author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, along with several other well-respected scholarly works on the Holocaust and genocide, including Hitler’s Army, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. He has written for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Cambridge,...
Jason Wittenberg is associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley and a former Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He is the co-author of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2018). His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge, 2006), won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics. He has published on a variety of topics, including electoral behavior, ethnic politics, historical legacies, and...
Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.She taught at Princeton University in 1990- 1992 and was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 1996 and 2006, and at Harvard in 2012. During the fall of 2009 she was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at Penn and in fall of 2017 she was a fellow at the Humanities Council at Princeton University. Her...
How are Holocaust survivors’ life stories informed by other narratives with which they are familiar? Jeffrey Shandler addresses this question in his research on the Shoah Visual History Archive, the subject of his most recent book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media...
Celebrated primarily as the poet who wrote the first sonnet in Yiddish, Fradel Shtok was also a masterful modernist stylist. Her short fiction grapples with the relationship between the aesthetic and the everyday. She published a single collection of short fiction in 1919 that...
This lecture draws from the research for Professor Summit’s new book Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2016), the first study of the meaning and experience of chanting Torah among contemporary American Jews. He...
Dr. Seow’s latest book-length publication isJob 1-21, the first installment of a two-volume commentary. This book best represents the kind of scholarship he most enjoys and how he sees himself contributing to biblical scholarship. The emphasis therein on philology, the ancient Near Eastern, and theology will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows his work, particularly Ecclesiastes in the Anchor Bible (1997). Yet the Job commentary goes beyond his earlier writings in a number of ways, most notably in its focus on poetry and especially...
In 2010 approximately 15 percent of all new marriages in the United States were between spouses of different racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, raising increasingly relevant questions regarding the multicultural identities of new spouses and their offspring. But while new census categories and a growing body of statistics provide data, they tell us little about the inner workings of day-to-day life for such couples and their children. This talk will explore some of the dynamics and larger social dimensions of a particular slice of this growing population. Specifically, this talk...
Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Demented of Jewish Eastern Europe
A talk by Natan Meir
In this talk, Natan Meir presents an analysis of Jewish society in 19th– and early 20th-century eastern Europe based on the experiences of and attitudes towards beggars, vagrants, disabled people, and the mentally ill and offers a new lens through which to view Russian and Polish Jewry: the lives of the marginalized.
Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University. His...
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was only eighteen when she died in a labor camp in Ukraine. In the course of a life cut short, Selma wrote over fifty poems in German. She recorded them in an album meant for her love, Leiser Fichman, who had already been...
Focusing on the period spanning the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, this talk explores the special place German-Jewish culture accorded medieval Spanish Jewry. In a broad array of cultural forms and genres, a portrait emerged that promoted an image...
Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was only eighteen when she died in a labor camp in Ukraine. In the course of a life cut short, Selma wrote over fifty poems in German. She recorded them in an album meant for her love, Leiser Fichman, who had already been deported to a Romanian labor camp. Selma was...
More than any other generation, Post World War II Jewish American authors were continually engaged in challenging their own tradition and defied any attempt to characterize their texts as distinctly “Jewish”. This talk will portray a new style of writing in literature that redefined a new...
What do we mean by home? In Drawn From Water, Jewish American writer Dina Elenbogen explores her thirty-year friendship with Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in Israel as they struggle in a new country while dealing with her own desire to join them there....
This two-session conference explores theology in Benjamin and Kafka. The first session, moderated by Karen Feldman, includes paper presentations by Gilad Sharvit and Vivian Liska, with a response by Niklaus Largier. The second session is a conversation between Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld.
2:30-4:30 pm: Session 1
Moderator: Karen Feldman
Gilad Sharvit, “Exile and Tradition: Benjamin and Scholem on Kafka ”
Graduate Student Workshop “Jews, Germans, and other Europeans: Modern Encounters” is jointly organized by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Institute for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley and Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. It is co-sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the UC Berkeley Department of History.
Contemporary Israel’s model of large-scale heterogeneous Jewish migration followed by complex processes of absorption and integration is not unique in Jewish history. To some extent the long-term experience of Jewish communities in Italy anticipated it and provided some yardsticks for comparisons. Of course the quantitative scale of migrations and population size was different, and while Jews in Italy were a tiny minority of total society, Jews in Israel formed a significant majority of the total population. However, both cases exemplify a confluence of people from many strands, the conflicts...
Join musicologist and klezmer music pioneer, Walter Zev Feldman, for a fascinating talk based on his new book, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory
This program was made possible in partnership with the following institutions: The Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Music at UC Berkeley.
Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (Oxford University Press 2016) is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music, the music of the Jewish musicians’ guild of Eastern Europe. Emerging in...
Known as a center of early 20th-century avant-garde and experimental theatre, Paris does not tend to figure on the map of pre-World War II Yiddish theatrical production specifically. This pop-up talk will realign our understanding of Yiddish theatre in Paris and ask whether or not we can consider Paris as the capital of a Western European Yiddish theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. Not only were there important Yiddish theatrical productions in Paris, but Parisian Yiddish theatre would make its mark outside of Yiddish-speaking circles, garnering praise from luminaries...
This presentation will discuss the Hellenistic Jewish text of the Sibylline Oracles which combines Greek oracular form and myth with themes from the Hebrew prophets to create a unique oracular voice that weaves together foundational narratives from both cultures. Examining this blend of traditions helps us frame questions on the elusive nature of identity constructions and what primary sources reveal about boundary formations and the complex spectrum between cultural acceptance, rejection, and adaptation.
Ashley Bacchi received her Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union in 2015...
Celebrate The Magnes’ acquisition of the Noah’s New York Bagels Collection (1989-1996) documenting the early history of Noah’s New York Bagels. The program will include an intimate display of select items from the collection, Noah Alper’s own reminiscences about the early days of the business, and of course a bagel–based reception (shmear provided). RSVP is required for this event.
Organizer The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
The pinnacle of Jewish immigration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with the rise of the phonograph disc (which was itself invented by a Jewish immigrant). This presentation will offer a guided tour of sound clips from the first decades of the twentieth century, including rare 78rpm discs from the Magnes collection, focusing on what these records tell us about the encounter of immigrant Jews and American culture.
Howard Freedman is the director of the Jewish Community Library in San Francisco and a longtime student and collector of Jewish music....
Center for Jewish Studies Faculty Director and Professor of Music, Ben Brinner, will interview Israel’s international singer, songwriter, and peace activist, Achinoam Nini.
Achinoam Nini, also known as Noa, an Israeli of Yemenite descent who was...
How do Jewish communities in the global diaspora transform the Passover Haggadah to meet their local needs (visually, symbolically, and textually), and what information do these transformations provide about the common beliefs held by each community?
In order to answer these questions, Zachary Bleemer, a Graduate Student in Economics has been collaborating with the Digital Humanities-focused Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) of The Magnes. Together with a team of undergraduate students, he digitized and textually organized 30 different editions of the Passover...
CO-SPONSORED PUBLIC LECTURE: “Why Can’t Alison Sell her Drill? Evidence from eBay” Tamar Kricheli-Katz, Visiting Professor at the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies (Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law)
Co-sponsored with The Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley
Organizer The Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law & Israel Studies
The talk will describe and analyze Professor Karen Barkey’s two seasons of ethnographic study of the sharing in Greek Orthodox Churches in Istanbul, Turkey. The study explores identities, practices and patterns of participation in church rituals and life. The presentation will delineate between different choreographies of sharing, the borrowing of traditions, and the bricolage of practices that occurs as generations of Muslims and Christians accommodate to each other’s religious needs and negotiate in public their otherness.
Karen Barkey joined the Department of Sociology at UC...
Dr. Mira Amiras, Professor Emerita of Comparative Religious Studies, San Jose State University, received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the daughter of the founders of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Seymour Fromer and Rebecca Camhi Fromer. Her presentation will focus on her experience growing up with one of the premiere Jewish museum collections as part of her life, and include excerpts of her current film project, The Day Before Creation.
Generously funded by The Joseph and Eda Pell Endowed Fund for Jewish Studies
Singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko a.k.a. Pavel Lion and historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) bring to life “lost” Yiddish songs of the World War II in this all-new concert and lecture...
Drawing on Dr. Patricia Munro’s research in Bay Area synagogues, Professor Claude Fischer and Dr. Munro will focus on how the Bar and Bat mitzvah developed into a major American Jewish ritual, how it has both responded to changes in the Jewish community (particularly rising egalitarianism and intermarriage), and how it has changed the Jewish community.
Patricia Keer Munro is a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Jewish Studies studying American religion and American Judaism in the 21st century. Her book, Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat...
Opening of the exhibition I-Tal-Yah: An Island of Divine Dew. Italian Crossroads in Jewish Culture with musical performances by Ars Minerva, a San Francisco-based non-profit performing arts organization created in 2013. Mezzo-soprano, Céline Ricci, and harpsichordist Derek Tam, will...
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
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....
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,...
Join us for a 
In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive...
There has long been debate and disagreement over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. In recent months, this debate has become particularly intense and...
Join us for a bilingual reading featuring acclaimed French poet and translator Mireille Gansel and her English translator, poet Joan Seliger Sidney. Soul House (World Poetry, 2023) is Gansel’s first book of poetry in English translation and her second book in English since her...
There has long been debate and disagreement over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. In recent months, this debate has become particularly intense and often acrimonious. In an effort to...
Montreal’s 90,000-strong Jewish community presents unique features that differentiate it from the Jewish populations of other North American cities. Even those aspects that it shares – a large Ashkenazic immigration in the early decades of the 20th century, broad and successful...
Jewish midrash offers powerful evocations of divine lament, most famously through imagines of God weeping in response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. While scholars have often examined God’s emotional distress in the face of human suffering, this talk probes...
Almost 80 years after her tragic death in concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank still figures prominently in the public domain. Over the years, her diary and her life story have been the subject of an expansive output of adaptations and engagements, giving her an iconic status. While there is an unabated...
Larissa Remennick will compare three generations of Russian-speaking Israelis in terms of socio-economic mobility, Hebrew use and acculturation, and political and civic participation. She will discuss whether Russian-speaking...
The conceptual couple of majority/minority is viewed as a harmless way of identifying an arithmetic relationship. The idea of a dichotomy between majority and (Jewish) minority as a short hand to describe relations between ethnic or religious groups, however, is recent. In fact, as it did not exist before 1919 when in the wake of World War I the...
What happens if we place eunuchs and androgynes at the center of canonical Jewish sources? What can we learn about gender, Jewish law, and the project of transgender history from late ancient texts about these figures? The rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of sex/gender; rather than anomalies to be justified or explained away, eunuchs and androgynes profoundly...
This day-long symposium will probe what remains an under-examined topic in the history of World War II and the Holocaust: the multivarious paths through which ordinary men and women resisted the Nazis. While scholarship on the choices, backgrounds, and motivations of perpetrators and collaborators has become quite robust,...
Eric K. Ward, a nationally-recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate violence, and preserving inclusive democracy, is the recipient of the 2021 Civil Courage Prize – the first American in the award’s 21-year history. In his 30+ year civil rights career, Eric has worked with community groups, government and business leaders, human...
With the 80
Annual Pell Lecture.
Rudolphina Menzel was a Viennese-born, Jewish scientist whose pioneering research on canine psychology, development, and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Menzel was...
Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for three thousand years. Over time, the pig becomes a popular metaphor for Jewish/non-Jewish identity. In this talk, we explore this historical development. Starting in the Hebrew Bible, where the pig is tabooed but not necessarily singled out more than other food...
Helen Diller Annual Lecture. 
A unique phenomenon emerged in the heart of Berlin in the nineteenth century: a creative center for fashion and ready-made clothing. Hundreds of garment companies were established, manufacturing modern wear and developing new designs that were sold throughout Germany – and the world. The industry reached the height of its success in the 1920s. Freed from corsets,
Noted historian, author, and collector Ted Merwin presents an interactive, multimedia lecture on the ever-shifting place of the Jewish delicatessen in American life. In New York, San Francisco, and cities in between, the deli was the lifeblood and linchpin of the Jewish community. The “soul food” and convivial atmosphere it dished up became a quintessential part of American
In the last decade, graphic memoirs and novels have emerged as a significant form of historical (re)writing of past narratives and events. The medium of comics and its use of chronologically ordered panels allows the reader to create meanings through the combination of image and text. Aomar Boum argues for the use of graphic memoirs to re-construct the history of Saharan Vichy camps. He...
When did Jews first begin using material goods to communicate a religious identity? Why did such a practice arise, and what were its social and political consequences? In this lecture, Andrea Berlin couples archaeological remains with historical testimony to address these questions. The story begins in the second century BCE, with the rise...
Presented by 
Save the date for a reception and program in celebration of The Magnes Collection’s newest exhibition, 
Speaker: 
The UC Berkeley archives contain a trove of original manuscripts that detail the persecution of Spanish Jews in the 16th and 17th century.
In collaboration with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Faculty Director John Efron welcomes the German and Israeli Consul Generals to a reception and program showcasing ...
The Magnes Collection
Spring 2022 Pell Lecture.
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
Between 1933 and 1939, several dozen journalists writing for the 
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...
The exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union transformed the Jewish landscape on three continents and has been called the preeminent case of Jewish human rights activism. It is often identified — and confused — with the Soviet dissident movement and the struggle for rights in Russia. What brought the two movements together — and what kept them apart? This talk explores the...
In the first decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Sephardi Jews migrated out of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and its successor states to build new lives in France. Most Ottoman Sephardi immigrants settled in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, which became known in common parlance as “Little Turkey.” With streets lined with Sephardi restaurants and...
The Hebrew imagination, incubated in ancient Zion, travelled with the Jews throughout their diasporas, generating rich mimetic cultures meant as temporary waystations along the path to eventual return and redemption. While Jerusalem and the site of the ruined Temple remained the focus of liturgical attention, distance, deferral and substitution liberated the poetic...
Joshua Teplitsky, Stony Brook University.
Menachem Keren-Kratz.
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University.
Liora R. Halperin, University of Washington.
Pell Lecture
Arun Viswanath in conversation with Robert Alter (UC Berkeley).
Dina Danon (SUNY-Binghamton University) in conversation with Karen Barkey (UC Berkeley).
Anne Goldman (Sonoma State University)
Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture
Nurit Stadler (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in conversation with Ron Hassner (UC Berkeley)
Ilana Pardes (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in conversation with Robert Alter (UC Berkeley), 
Yavilah McCoy is the CEO of DIMENSIONS Inc. in Boston. She has spent the past 20 years working extensively in multi-faith communities and partnering specifically with the Jewish community to engage issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yavilah is an educator, activist and spiritual teacher. She is a Jewish woman and a person of color and has...
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 remembrance culture—its “theater of memory”—struck a nerve not just among Jews, but other minority groups
Jelena Subotić (Georgia State University)
Ilana Pardes (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in conversation with
Over the last decade there has been a noticeable uptick in antisemitic rhetoric and incidents by left-wing groups targeting Jewish students and Jewish organizations on American college campuses.
David Kertzer (Brown University)
Tomer Persico (UC Berkeley Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies; Tel-Aviv University)
At some time after end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple. But its earliest effects can be traced...
How can an ancient religious ritual convey current social and political needs? This question emerged from eight years (2007-2015) of documentation of Sukkot, the Jewish festival that annually commemorates the Israelites’ Biblical journey through the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land. This talk explores the holiday’s central rite of building and “...
Beginning in September 1941 and throughout the war, Central Asia and Iran became places of refuge to hundreds of thousand of Jewish and Catholic Polish citizens. Mikhal Dekel, whose father was a child refugee in Tehran, will recount the research and writing process of this epic yet relatively unknown Holocaust story, told in her new book Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey...
How are Holocaust survivors’ life stories informed by other narratives with which they are familiar? Jeffrey Shandler addresses this question in his research on the Shoah Visual History Archive, the subject of his most recent book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media...
“The Past Is a Foreign Country: Poland Confronted with Holocaust History” with Dr. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs and Dr. Sven Erik-Rose.
