event-archived

Natan Meir–Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Demented of Jewish Eastern Europe

November 15, 2017

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...

Helen Kim–Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the American Jewish Community: Lessons learned from JewAsians

December 6, 2017
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...

C. L. Seow “Job 1-21”

January 25, 2018

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...

Rabbi Jeff Summit “Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism”

February 20, 2018

The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism”

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...

Allison Schachter “Friedrich Schiller in the Jewish Provinces: Fradel Shtok and the Aesthetics of Jewish Prose”

March 6, 2018

Fradel Shtok and the Aesthetics of Jewish Prose”

Description:

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...

Jeffrey Shandler “Tales Retold: Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List”

April 10, 2018

Holocaust Survivors on Schindler’s List”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...

Ilana Pardes

October 3, 2018

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...

Jason Wittenberg

October 11, 2018

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...

Yair Zakovitch “Song of Songs: Riddle of Riddles”

November 5, 2018

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 “Anatomy of a Genocide”

October 25, 2018

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,...