Upcoming
Upcoming Events
- IIJS Young Scholars Conference
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The Past - and Present - of Jewish Storytelling
Location: Sunday: 501 Schermerhorn Monday: Faculty House, Garden Room 2- Living Room Witnesses: American Television and the Holocaust
A Lecture by Jeffrey Shandler
Time - 11:00am till 1:00pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherThursday, November 1
Jeffrey Shandler
Professor of Jewish Studies
Rutgers University
Lunch will be provided (in accordance with dietary laws). Please RSVP to knm2121@columbia.edu by Tuesday, October 30.
- Jewish American War Novels of the 1940s
A Lecture by Leah Garrett
Time - 1:00pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherMonday, October 15, 2012
Leah Garrett
Loti Smorgon Research Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture
Professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies
Monash UniversityThe central role of Jews in fictionalizing War World II for a postwar readership has gone unnoticed in literary and historical studies. Either the Jewishness of the writers is uncommented on, or, the Jewishness of the text is negated. This factor is central, because as will be discussed, Jewish authors wrote about the war in very unique ways, and since their novels were bestsellers, they had a direct impact upon how postwar Americans understood the war effort.
Lunch will be provided (in accordance with dietary laws). Please RSVP to knm2121@columbia.edu by Friday, October 12.
- Design with Free Hand: Political Posters from Israel
A Lecture by David Tartakover
Time - 7:00pm till 9:00pm
Location: East Gallery, Maison Francaise (Buell Hall)Tuesday, October 16, 2012
David Tartakover (b. 1944, Israel) is a graphic designer, political activist, artist and design educator. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, where he has taught in the Department of Visual Communication for the past 36 years. Since 1975, Tartakover has operated his own design studio in Tel Aviv, specializing in cultural and political projects. His work has won numerous prizes in Israel and abroad, includinga gold medal at the 8th Lathi Poster Biennial, Finland (1989) and Grand Prix at the Moscow International Poster Biennial (2004). He is a 2002 Israel Prize laureate, celebrated for his contributions to Israeli design and culture. Tartakover's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions internationally and included in the permanent collections of museums in China, Europe, Japan and the United States. As a collector and researcher of the history of Israeli design, Tartakover also curates design exhibitions at museums in Israel and abroad. His publications include Where We Were and What We Did (Keter Publishing, 1996), an Israeli lexicon of the 1950s and 60s, and Tartakover, a monograph of his work from the past 40 years (Am Oved Publishing, 2011). He is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and was president of the Graphic Designers Association of Israel (GDAI).
- Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948): Towards a New Biography
A Lecture by Vassili Schedrin
Time - 7:00pm
Location: 411 FayerweatherTuesday, October 23, 2012
Dr. Vassili Schedrin
Visiting Scholar, Department of History
Franklin and Marshall College.
This talk presents Vassili Schedrin's current research project which examines the life and work of the beloved actor of the Soviet-Jewish stage, Solomon Mikhoels. He is best known for his theatrical role as the "Jewish King Lear," and for his political activities in the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. Limited to these roles by historians and biographers, the towering figure of Mikhoels still awaits further exploration. The focus of Schedrin's study is Mikhoels' ideas about art in general and Jewish art in particular.
This lecture will compare Stroitel` ("The Builder," 1919)—the only play written by Solomon Mikhoels—to Bygmaster Solnes ("The Master Builder," 1892)—one of the last and most philosophical plays by Henrik Ibsen. Schedrin will demonstrate how Mikhoels, using the dramatic language of the stage, revisited the intellectual and literary legacy of Ibsen and ultimately established continuity between modern European drama and Russian avant-garde theater in Yiddish.
- 'We United With Our Sisters of Other Faiths': The Religious Roots of American Jewish Women's Feminist Activism, 1890-1940
A Lecture by Melissa Klapper
Time - 4:00pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherTuesday, November 13
Melissa Klapper
Professor of History
Rowan University
American Jewish women participated enthusiastically in three of the great early feminist movements of the early twentieth century: suffrage, birth control, and peace. Members of Jewish women's organizations, eager to see Judaism and Jewishness as sources of activism, carved out a new role in the public sphere for women. Though on the surface they seemed to be focusing many of their energies on non-sectarian activism, they often saw their social and political commitments as extensions of their religious or culturally traditional roles. American Jewish women found in women’s social movements causes that bridged the sacred and the secular.
- Father's Court and Mother's Sabbaths: Fiction in Service of Truth that is Greater than Fiction
Annual Norman E. Alexander Lecture
Time - 6:00pm
Location: Kellogg Center, 15th FlTuesday, November 27
A lecture about the memoirs of Chaim Grade and Isaac Beshevis Singer. Featuring Ruth Wisse, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by Columbia University Libraries and the Institute for Israel & Jewish Studies.
- Olga Litvak on The Revolt of the Study House:
M. L. Lilienblum and the Jewish Origins of Jewish Nationalism in Russia
Time - 4:00pm till 5:30pm
Location: 513 Fayerweather HallJanuary 30, 2013
Olga Litvak is a professor of History at Clark University and a graduate of Columbia University. She specializes in Eastern European and modern Jewish history. Her first book, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Indiana UP, 2006), analyzes the cultural ramifications of Russian Jewry's first experience of conscription into the Russian army. She has written and lectured ona wide range of subjects related to the study of Russian Jewry, including urban violence, literary and artistic life, war, revolution and migration. This talk will focus on the Origins of Jewish Nationalism in Russia.
- Between State and Synagogue, The Secularization of Contemporary Israel: A Talk with Guy Ben-Porat
Time - 4:00pm
Location: 513 Fayerweather HallFebruary 21, 2013
Guy Ben-Porat is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Policy & Administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His most recent publication is Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel. A thriving, yet small, liberal component in Israeli society has frequently taken issue with the constraints imposed by religious orthodoxy, largely with limited success. However, Guy Ben-Porat suggests, in recent years, in part because of demographic changes and in part because of the influence of an increasingly consumer-oriented society, dramatic changes have occurred in secularization of significant parts of public and private lives. Even though these fissures often have more to do with lifestyle choices and economics than with political or religious ideology, the demands and choices of a secular public and a burgeoning religious presence in the government are becoming ever more difficult to reconcile. The evidence, which the author has accrued from numerous interviews and a detailed survey, is nowhere more telling than in areas that demand religious sanction such as marriage, burial, the sale of pork, and the operation of businesses on the Sabbath. The conclusion of this research lay beyond the Israeli case study and suggest that secularization, defined as the decline of religious authority, can evolve independently from secularism, a world view, and a liberal ideology. Consequently, while secularization can be observed in Israel, its political implications regarding liberalism, freedom and equality are by no means certain.
Co-Sponsored by The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.
- Leah Goldberg: The Shortest Journey Is Across The Years: A Reading and Discussion of the Writer's Life and Work by Annie Kantar
Time - 4:30pm
Location: The Jewish Theological Seminary, Kripke 406February 13, 2013
Annie Kantar, translator of With This Night - the final collection of poetry published by Israeli author Leah Goldberg during her lifetime - will discuss the author and her work. Light refreshments will be served afterwood. Dietary laws will be observed.
- Chalom and 'Abdu in Bed Together: Coexistence in Togo Mizrahi's Alexandria Films (1930-1939): A Talk with Deborah A. Starr
Time - 4:00pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherMarch 4, 2013
Deborah A. Starr, of Cornell University, will discuss films written, directed and produced by Togo Mizrahi (1901-1986), an Alexandrian Jew with Italian nationality. This presentation focuses on the portrayal of Alexandria as a cosmopolitan space in Mizrahi’s Arabic-language films produced in his studio in Alexandria between 1934 and 1939. All of these films are comedies of mistaken identity, many of which involve gender play, cross-dressing, and same-sex couples sharing a bed. Taking a cue from a scene in al-cIzz Bahdala [Mistreated By Affluence (1937)] in which Chalom and cAbdu, a Jew and a Muslim, are shown waking up together in their shared bed, Starr traces the interplay between the queering of the private space, specifically the bed, and the films' construction of fluid communal, civic identities. In other words, this talk approaches the phrase 'in bed together' as not just a metaphor of coexistence, but as a key to unlocking the films' projection of notions of sameness and difference, self and other, in 1930s Alexandria.
- The Changing Image of Ben Gurion: A Talk with Professor Anita Shapira
Time - 7:30pm
Location: 602 HamiltonProfessor Anita Shapira, one of Israel's most notable scholars and the author of Israel: A History (winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award for History), is a professor emerita at Tel Aviv University. An internationally acclaimed scholar with a special interest in social and cultural history, Shapira has published pathbreaking studies on the history of Zionsim, Jewish-Arab relations and the state of Israel.
- Hannah Arendt and the Struggle for Jewish Rights: A Talk with Natan Sznaider
Time - 4:00pm till 5:30pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherApril 3, 2013
This presentation tries to come to terms with Jewish politics right after the Holocaust. Usually, the understanding of Jewish politics after World War II is framed around the Jewish state of Israel and its meaning. This presentation will provide another angle, which connects Jewish particular politics with current concerns about cosmopolitan politics like human rights, genocide, and international law. I pay especially attention to Hannah Arendt's practical work for "Jewish Cultural Reconstruction" (JCR). This organization was founded in 1944 in order to re-define legally and morally the concept of Jewish cultural property, and to deal on a practical level with heirless Jewish cultural property stolen by the Nazis and liberated by the Allies. By looking more closely at the goals and struggles of this organization I will be able to evoke the urgency of Jewish politics that started immediately in 1945, and try to explain how the various positions of Jewish intellectuals shaped Jewish and Israeli politics in the years to come. The story being told here is a combination of two languages, political and theological as the story of pre and post-Holocaust Jewry.
Natan Sznaider is Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. He was born in Germany, educated in Israel and the United States. He has taught at Columbia University in New York, at Munich University in Germany and is part of an international research team investigating cultural memory in Europe, Israel and Latin America.
- Meet Yael Hedaya, novelist and writer of the hit TV series "BeTipul," the basis for HBO's "In Treatment"
Time - 7:30pm till 9:30pm
Location: 413 KentMarch 28, 2013 in 413 Kent
An open Q&A with Yael will follow a screening of two episodes of "BeTipul"
Time - 4:00pm till 5:30pm
Location: 513 Fayerweather- "We Bring Them Israel:" Israel's Policy Towards Israelis Abroad - 'Reaching-Out', Application and Implications"
- A talk with Galit Schir
Time - 4:00pm till 5:30pm
Location: 513 FayerweatherIsrael was founded and constructed as the home-land of the Jewish People. As immigrating to Israel and negating the diaspora are fundamental values in Zionist ideology, emigration is perceived a betrayal, and emigrants are called 'Yordim' (descenders). Keeping this in mind, it is puzzling to witness nowadays Israel 'reaching out' towards its citizens abroad. What is Israel's attritude towards Israelis abroad and what is the official policy? How did it develop, and how is it applied today?, and what tensions arise for the Israeli official staff in the diaspora while applying this policy? Relying on transnational theories of migration and reserach in home-state-diaspora relations, this study focuses on two Israeli programs operating in North America: the 'Israeli House' of the Israeli Ministry of Migration Absorption (MOIA), and 'Garin Tsabar' of the Israeli scounts in cooperation with the MOIA.
- NY Premiere! "Dr. Pomerantz" a new Israeli comedy directed/written by and starring Assi Dayan ("In Therapy")
Time - 7:30pm
Location: 614 SchermerhornDr. Pomerantz, a psychologist down on his luck, sees an opportunity when a patient jumps from his balcony: he can make a living by offering his apartment to potentially suicidal tenants. Funny and philosophical, this dark comedy raises the question of why we live or, more accurately, why we don't just give up on living.
Refreshments will be served. RSVPs to IIJS@Columbia.edu appreciated, but not required.
Presented by the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the 2013 Israel Film Center Festival.
