event-archived

2024 Annual Diller Lecture

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...

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.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

...

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....