event-archived

From Cuneiform to the Early Alphabet: A Craft-Based Approach to Ancient Literacy

November 21, 2024
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...

The “Jew Goal”: Digital Antisemitism and the New Far Right Cultural Code

November 19, 2024

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...

History and Memory of Public Uses of the Holocaust in Argentina 

November 18, 2024

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...

Radio, Propaganda, Terror: Austrian-Jewish Refugees and the Media

November 13, 2024

2024 Annual Feldman Lecture

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...

https://events.berkeley.edu/ies/event/259839-2024-annual-feldman-lecture-by-paul…

Happy Ottoman Purim! Commemorating Muslim Victories through Jewish Holidays, 1516-1860

November 7, 2024

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,...

Atrocities’ Truth Tellers: Armenian and Jewish Victim Testimony in Interwar Europe

April 10, 2024


Alexandra GarbariniWriting 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...

Gender and the German-Jewish Migration to Mandatory Palestine

October 15, 2024

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...

Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism

October 8, 2024

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...

Victoria Hannah at In Plain Sight: Sounds Create Worlds

September 23, 2024

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.

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Beyond Conflicts and Comparisons: A Conversation on Poetics and Politics in Palestine-Israel

September 19, 2024

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...