IIJS Panel Grapples with Campus Antisemitism

On Sunday, October 22, the IIJS and the American University Program in Jewish Studies co-hosted a webinar with academics Pamela Nadell and Britt Tevis, alongside Columbia student Rebecca Massel: “Unpacking Antisemitism on Campus.”

Their discussion spans a wide variety of relevant topics, such as defining antisemitism, understanding its relationship to anti-Zionism, American campus culture, and the importance of free speech. The panel also sets aside a significant portion of the session to answer student and general audience questions. This event is the second in our webinar series on the current Israel-Hamas war, which began last week with “Israel at War: Live Discussion from Tel Aviv,” featuring Avi Shilon and Rebecca Kobrin.

This discussion is available to view in full below.

Pamela S. Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's and Gender History and is Director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. A specialist in American Jewish history and women’s history, she teaches a variety of courses in Jewish civilization. Her awards include AU’s highest faculty award, Scholar/Teacher of the Year (2007). Pamela Nadell’s books include America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton, 2019), named Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Reviewed in the New York Times, America’s Jewish Women was praised as “a welcome addition to the American historical canon.” Past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, Nadell’s other titles include Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889–1985 (Beacon Press, 1998). She consults for museums including the National Museum of American Jewish History and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. She lectures widely, frequently appears on podcasts, and has written for, among others, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and Hadassah Magazine. In 2017, she testified before Congress about antisemitism on college campuses. She is currently writing a history of antisemitism in America.

Britt P. Tevis is the Rene Plessner Postdoctoral Fellow in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies at Columbia University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her research examines the intersections between Jews and American law and her work has appeared in American Jewish History, American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History. She has held fellowships at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

Rebecca Massel is a sophomore at Columbia College studying political science. Currently, she serves as the Vice President of Communications for Columbia Barnard Hillel, where she works with and supports the Jewish community. She is also a senior staff writer for the Columbia Daily Spectator, reporting on University-related matters, like demonstrations on campus, school policies and statements, and, most recently, campus responses to the Israel-Hamas War.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Kaye and Knapp Family Foundations.

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Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award Recipient Jules Riegel Shares their Research

On Thursday, October 19, the Institute hosted a virtual lecture with our Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award recipient, Jules Riegel—a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University—titled “The Voices of the Starving: Beggars’ Music in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

The Warsaw Ghetto—the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe—imprisoned roughly 460,000 Jews at its peak. Its society was marked by severe overcrowding and inequality, and many turned to begging to survive, drawing attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Though beggars’ desperation was clear to all ghetto residents, non-beggars’ reactions to their songs and other sounds were often uncomfortable and even hostile. Close readings of diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoir and testimonies, reveal that these reactions stemmed from longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as civilized and European. Examining how non-beggars—especially educated people and members of the prewar intelligentsia—wrote about beggars’ music in the ghetto also indicates the continuing relevance of polemics against shund (artistic “trash”) in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe. Even so, some beggars’ songs gained widespread popularity by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars were an intrinsic part of ghetto society, and the debates their music engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even at the moment of its destruction.

Dr. Riegel’s lecture about the musical culture of the Warsaw Ghetto is available to view in full below.

Jules Riegel (they/them) received their Ph.D. in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. They are currently a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. Their scholarship has been supported by a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies; a Fulbright Institute of International Education Grant to Warsaw, Poland; and a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Sosland Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.

Riegel’s book project, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, and are planning future research on transgender history in Eastern Europe. Their publications include a forthcoming article in Jewish Social Studies on beggars’ music in the Warsaw Ghetto and an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.

This event was made possible by the generosity of Rene Plessner and the Kaye family.

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Guest Essay by IIJS and CUJS Scholar Gershom Gorenberg in NYT Opinion Section

On October 18, IIJS’ Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, Gershom Gorenberg, published a guest essay in the opinion section of The New York Times. Gorenberg’s piece is titled “Netanyahu Led Us to Catastrophe. He Must Go.” It is available to read now on the New York Times website.

Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and coauthor of Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin that won the National Jewish Book Award.

Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other leading publications in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In August 2023, Gorenberg published another guest opinion in The New York Times discussing Israel’s ongoing “judicial reform.”

Click here to read Gershom Gorenberg’s essay in the Times.

Avi Shilon Discusses Attack on Israel and War in Gaza

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is devastated by the horrific attacks on Israel. We extend our deepest sympathies and support to the families of those who lost their lives and condemn the abhorrent slaughter and kidnapping of civilians. As it has since its inception in 1950, the Institute stands in solidarity with the people of Israel.

On Sunday, October 15, Avi Shilon—a journalist, historian, and political scientist who has taught at Columbia, NYU, Tsinghua University, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev—joined us for a webinar, “Israel at War: Live Discussion from Tel Aviv.” This talk was moderated by Rebecca Kobrin, IIJS Co-Director and Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History. Dr. Shilon discussed the terrorist attacks that took place in Israel on October 7th, as well as Israel’s response and impending military campaign, before answering audience questions.

This discussion is available to view in full below.

Avi Shilon has taught with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. He also has been a postdoctoral fellow at The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and at Tsinghua University, China. He has published the books The Decline of the Left-Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process (2020), Ben-Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (2016) and Menachem Begin: A Life (2012) as well as articles in Middle Eastern Studies, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Middle East Journal. Dr. Shilon also writes for the Ha’aretz newspaper. He received his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 2015.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Kaye and Knapp Family Foundations.

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The Institute Hosts Allison Schachter of Vanderbilt University for Book Talk

The IIJS and the Department of Germanic Languages hosted Allison Schachter, author of Women Writing Jewish Modernity: 1919-1939, on Thursday, October 12 for a Book Talk.

What role did women play in the making of Jewish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. The standard accounts of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary history exclude women’s writing and experience. When women appear they do so as poets, but not prose writers. This talk offers a counter history of modern Jewish literature from the perspective of women, focusing on the life and work of the modernist writer, Fradl Shtok. Shtok was a well-regarded poet, who published a short story collection in 1919 and then mysteriously withdrew from Yiddish public life. Tracing her life story through archival records, and closely reading her literary work, Dr. Allison Schachter pieces together a story of women’s artistic and literary lives in the first half of the twentieth century and offer a new account of Yiddish modernism.

Dr. Schachter’s talk is available to view in full below.

Allison Schachter is Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Russian and East European Studies, as well as Chair of Jewish Studies, at Vanderbilt University. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century modern Jewish culture in comparative perspectives. Her research interests include diaspora, transnational and world literary cultures, gender studies, and minority cultures. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2012) traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern 2022), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern 2021), which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies.

She received her B.A. with honors in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1996. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2007 to pursue research on Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U. C. Berkeley in 2006. She has received grants in support of her work from the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Foundation of Jewish culture, Vanderbilt University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Yiddish Book Center, and the Simon Dubnow Institute.

She has published widely in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including PMLA, Jewish Quarterly Review, Prooftexts, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature, and Mekhere yerushalayim be-sifrut ivrit.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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"The Road to Eilat" Begins 2023 Fall Film Series

The IIJS Fall 2023 Film Series began this week with The Road to Eilat, a new film from writer-director Yona Rozenkier.

In The Road to Eilat, Albert, an aging war veteran, makes a drunken bet: he will drive his beat up tractor (top speed: 35km/hour... downhill) the length of Israel to Eilat, in one week. Ben, his grumpy, unemployed son, is obligated to join him. Their funny and bittersweet journey towards forgiveness and understanding takes them on a road trip from their kibbutz through Israel's neglected backyard, meeting others along the way who also strive for a better life. The Road to Eilat premiered at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival, where it won prizes for Best Israeli Feature, Best Actor (Shmuel Vilozni), and Best Cinematography. It was later nominated for 8 Israeli Film Academy Awards, including Best Picture. (105 minutes)

On October 9, the Institute hosted a virtual Q&A with Yona Rozenkier, the writer and director of The Road to Eilat.

Yona Rozenkier is an actor, writer, and director. Born and raised on Kibbutz Yehiam, Rozenkier's short films and two features examine kibbutz culture, IDF culture, masculinity, and their impact on family relationships (often casting his brothers and himself). His prior feature, The Dive, was screened by Columbia IIJS in March, 2020.

Yona Rozenkier’s October 9 Q&A is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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Roni Cohen Speaks about "the Myth of Jewish Humor"

On October 4, 2023, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program welcomed an in-person crowd for a lecture with Columbia University Fulbright fellow Dr. Roni Cohen, titled “The Myth of Jewish Humor: A Medieval Take.”

The existence of a distinctive Jewish sense of humor is a widely recognized phenomenon, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. This unique ethos is often associated with early 20th-century Yiddish literature, theater culture, as well as Jewish-American comedians and entertainers. However, it is important to note that humoristic pieces also existed in the early modern and medieval times within Jewish communities. In this talk, Dr. Roni Cohen explores a specific genre of humorous literature that gained popularity in Europe during the late Middle Ages: parodies of the Talmud and the Hebrew Bible. By delving into the historical background of this literary phenomenon, Dr. Cohen suggests new insights into its place within the broader history of Jewish humor.

Dr. Roni Cohen is a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Carnival and Canon: Medieval Parodies for Purim," was written in the Jewish History department at Tel Aviv University. Roni's research focuses on European Jewish popular culture in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, as well as the relationships between textual pieces and communities. In his current project, "In Search of the Early Modern Earworm," Roni maps and analyzes short textual pieces that were added by scribes and book owners in the margins of late medieval and early modern Jewish manuscripts.

Dr. Cohen’s talk is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Appel families.

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IIJS Hosts Golan Moskowitz for First Book Talk of Fall Semester

On Tuesday, September 19, the IIJS and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender welcomed Golan Moskowitz, author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, in-person at the Institute’s temporary home in Uris Hall.

In Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020), Golan Moskowitz investigates the evolution of Sendak’s artistic vision and its appeal for American, Jewish, and queer audiences. Dr. Moskowitz's talk examines how Sendak’s multiple perspectives as a gay, Holocaust-conscious, American-born son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Poland informed his life and work. It also explorse how his creative output interacted dynamically with his cultural surroundings, offering insights into experiences of marginality and emotional resilience that remain relevant and visionary to this day. 

Golan Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Catherine and Henry J. Gaisman Faculty Fellow at Tulane University, where he teaches courses on Jewish gender and sexuality, American pop culture, Holocaust studies, and comics and graphic novels. He is the author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) and of several publications on intergenerational memory in post-Holocaust family narratives. Golan’s work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.

Dr. Moskowitz’s lecture, and the Q&A session that followed, are available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Summer Film Series Continues with "Nelson's Last Stand"

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies continued its 2023 Summer Film Series with Nelson’s Last Stand, a new documentary written and directed by Avi Maor Marzuk.

Nelson’s Last Stand, a “Best Israeli Film” nominee at the 2021 DocAviv Film Festival, is a fascinating exploration of a little-known piece of Israeli history, with abundant archival footage to bring us back to the freewheeling 1970s. When Israel gained control of the Sinai in the 1967 Six-Day War, vacationers and adventurers came in droves. Few were as committed as Rafi Nelson, an eccentric, bearded bohemian who set up a beach resort village in Taba that flourished in the 1970s as an anything-goes getaway for average Israelis, international celebrities, and quite a few Members of the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament). The 1978 Camp David Accords signaled a new era of peace between Israel and Egypt, but for Rafi Nelson, they marked the beginning of a decades-long campaign to keep his beach village and the surrounding area inside Israel’s borders. (81 minutes)

On Monday, August 7th, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg joined the Institute for a virtual Q&A discussing Nelson’s Last Stand and its historical, political, and social contexts.

Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and coauthor of Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin that won the National Jewish Book Award.

Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other leading publications in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Most recently, Gorenberg published a guest opinion in the New York Times discussing Israel’s ongoing “judicial reform.”

You can view Gershom Gorenberg’s virtual Q&A with Stuart Weinstock, the IIJS Film Series Coordinator, in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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2023 Summer Film Series Kicks Off with "Karaoke"

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies kicked off its 2023 Summer Film Series with Karaoke, the feature-film debut from writer-director Moshe Rosenthal.

In Karaoke, winner of “Best First Film” honors at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival, Sasson Gabay (The Band’s Visit, Shtisel) and Rita Shukrun (When Heroes Fly) star as a middle-class couple in their 60s, whose life of quiet disappointment and regret is upended when they meet their new neighbor, Itsik, a modeling agent and international bon vivant (Lior Ashkenazi: Walk on Water, Footnote, IIJS guest speaker in October 2022). The couple is fascinated and transformed by their new friend, who forces them to decide what they really want from their life together. This late-coming-of-age story is equal parts comic and dramatic, anchored by a trio of engaging, unpredictable performances. Gabay and Shukrun won Israeli Film Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively.

Moshe Rosenthal is a graduate of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. He worked in music videos, commercials, short films, and web series for about a decade before writing and directing Karaoke, his first feature. Karaoke had its international premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, and won Best First Film at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival.

On July 17, 2023, Moshe Rosenthal joined the Institute for a virtual Q&A with Stuart Weinstock, the IIJS Film Series Coordinator. You can view their conversation in full below.

If you'd like to see more of Moshe's work, you can view two of his short films using the following information:

Leave of Absence (2017)

https://vimeo.com/208324784

Password: shabaton

Our Way Back (2018)

https://vimeo.com/252525491

Password: ourwayback

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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Director Emeritus Jeremy Dauber Featured in Columbia Magazine

On June 12, 2023, Columbia Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Dauber, the Director Emeritus of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. Dr. Dauber discusses the inspiration behind, and content of, his latest book, a biography of Mel Brooks titled Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press Jewish Lives, 2023).

The interview touches on Mel Brooks’ lasting relevance, the power of humor as a weapon against hate, and Brooks’ life in the context of the American Jewish story. An excerpt from the interview is quoted below; you can view this interview in full on Columbia Magazine’s website.

Your book is part of the Jewish Lives biography series, which spotlights a pantheon of greats — Einstein, Anne Frank, Wittgenstein. Why include the man who gave us Blazing Saddles?

The short answer is “because they asked.” But really because Brooks did so much to shape not just Jewish comedy and American comedy, but also how American Jews thought about themselves in the second part of the twentieth century. With all the documentaries and books we’ve seen, that story is still under told. 

Virtual Book Talk: Yechiel Weizman, "Unsettled Heritage"

Dr. Yechiel Weizman of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, joined the Institute on Wednesday, April 26, via Zoom for a virtual book talk about his new book Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022).

In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust. He asks how postwar Polish society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources and anthropological field work, the book uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of Poland’s material Jewish remnants and shows how their presence became the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation. In so doing, the book offers a methodological channel to analyze how postwar societies approach their own material remnants of populations past, especially those whose presence alludes to enduring animosities and conflicts unresolved.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He studied history, philosophy and cultural studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and completed his PhD (2018) at the University of Haifa. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow and at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research interests focus on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, post-WWII Jewish Material Culture and property restitution, Polish-Jewish relations in the 20th and 21st centuries, and Holocaust photography.

Dr. Weizman’s talk is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Appel families.

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Award-Winning Author Ruby Namdar Speaks at Lecture Honoring Prof. Dan Miron

Award-winning Israeli-American author Ruby Namdar joined us at the Institute on April 25, 2023 for the Professor Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature for an engaging talk titled “To the Land That I Will Show You: The never-ending journey of Hebrew language and literature and its fraught relationship with geographic and political boundaries.”

Namdar’s lecture honors the legacy and contributions of Professor Dan Miron, Leonard Kaye Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Columbia University. Prof. Miron is the author of over 20 books in Hebrew and English. In 1980, he received the Bialik Prize for Jewish thought and, in 1993, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature. Across his vast and impactful career, the uniting thread has been a deep passion for Hebrew and Jewish literature, a devotion similarly visible in Namdar’s work and espoused in this lecture.

Ruby Namdar is an Israeli-American author born and raised in Jerusalem to a family of Iranian-Jewish heritage. His latest novel, The Ruined House (2013), won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award. The English edition of The Ruined House (translated by Hillel Halkin) was published in the US by Harper Collins in November 2017. The French edition of the novel (translated by Sarah Tardy) was published in September 2018 by Belfond, and was nominated for the Prix du premier roman étranger 2018. He currently lives in NYC with his wife and two daughters, and teaches Jewish literature, focusing on Biblical and Talmudic narrative.

Ruby Namdar’s lecture at the Institute is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Knapp family.

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The Institute Hosts Michael Frank and Dr. Isabelle Levy for Yom HaShoah Book Talk

On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the IIJS hosted a book talk with Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, in conversation with the Institute’s Dr. Isabelle Levy—a cousin of Stella Levi. This event commemorated Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which took place on April 18.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award, and named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten books of 2022, One Hundred Saturdays recounts the remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi, whose conversations with the writer Michael Frank over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.

Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.

Michael Frank is the author of What Is Missing, a novel, and The Mighty Franks, a memoir, which was awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The Telegraph and The New Statesman.  The recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives with his family in New York City and Camogli, Italy.

Isabelle Levy (BA Columbia; PhD Harvard) is Academic Program Director and Lecturer at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. She has held positions as fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, both at Columbia. She was previously a Fulbright fellow in Spain. She is the author of Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022) and has published articles in Medieval Encounters; La Corónica; A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, Volume II; and Digital Dante. Her research specializes in the relationships among Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance literary traditions of the medieval Mediterranean.

Michael Frank and Dr. Levy’s conversation is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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IIJS and Columbia School of Journalism Host Panel Discussion: "Does It Matter She's Jewish? (or Muslim? or Mormon?)"

The Institute, in collaboration with the Columbia University School of Journalism, hosted a panel of scholars and journalists for a discussion at the School of Journalism’s World Room on March 29, 2023.

When should a journalist include the religion or ethnicity of a politician, celebrity, or businessperson? This is a practical and ethical question that journalists regularly face but don't always articulate. When is it essential to note a person's identity in your reporting, when is it an option, and when is it offensive?

Prof. Samuel Freedman of the Columbia Journalism School, as well as journalists Emma Green and Arun Venugopal, tackled the above questions in a panel discussion moderated by Jane Eisner of the Columbia Journalism School, with an introduction by Gershom Gorenberg. The full discussion is available to view below.

Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University.

Jane Eisner is Director of Academic Affairs at Columbia University's School of Journalism.

Samuel G. Freedman, a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, is the author of nine books.

Emma Green is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Arun Venugopal is Senior Reporter in the Race & Justice Unit at WNYC in New York.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Knapp family.

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What Kind of Book is the Guide of the Perplexed? A View from the Middle Ages—2023 Warren and Susan Stern New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Award Lecture

On March 22, 2023, Yonatan Shemesh, 2023 Warren and Susan Stern New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Award recipient—and the Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Thought in the Judaic Studies Program and the Philosophy Department at Yale University—joined us for a lecture at the Institute.

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed resists classification. In modern scholarship, it is sometimes described as a work of philosophy, sometimes as a work of theology, and sometimes as a work of biblical exegesis. Yet the book does not fit neatly into any of these genres. This talk addresses the literary character of the Guide by exploring the perspective of the fourteen-century Jewish philosopher Moses Narboni, whose commentary on the Guide greatly influenced the interpretation of the book for centuries. The talk examines how Narboni classifies the Guide within the medieval Aristotelian framework as a work of dialectic, and then considers how that classification helps explain the book’s primary purpose and the specific senses in which it is a work of philosophy, theology, and exegesis.

Yonatan Shemesh is a Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Thought in the Judaic Studies Program and the Philosophy Department at Yale University. He is a scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy and intellectual history, with a focus on texts and ideas that originated in the Islamic world and later transformed the Jewish communities of Christian Europe. Yonatan received his MA in Religion and PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and his BA in History from Bowdoin College.

Supported by the generosity of Warren and Susan Stern and the Radov family.

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IIJS Faculty Member Jeremy Dauber Releases New Biography of Mel Brooks

We are pleased to announce the release of a new book by Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press Jewish Lives, 2023) is a spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy.

Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream.

In Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, Jeremy Dauber considers Brooks’s extensive body of work, illuminating the man behind Your Show of Shows, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs. Dauber argues that Brooks has seen the most success when he has found a balance between his unflagging, subversive, manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores.

Dauber also explores how Brooks’s American Jewish humor went from being solely for niche audiences to an essential part of the American mainstream, paving the way for generations of Jewish (and other) comedians to come. This is a book for anyone interested in movies, humor, American culture, or Jewishness.

The book is available for purchase through Yale University Press.

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IIJS Film @ Home: All I Can Do

On February 27, 2023, the IIJS continued its spring Film Series continues with a screening of and Q&A about All I Can Do, the debut feature film of writer and director Shiri Nevo Fridental.

Fridental’s short film debut, The Prosecution, was featured in the 2015 Tel Aviv International Film Festival. All I Can Do debuted at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival as a candidate for the Haggiag Competition for Israeli Feature Films.

In All I Can Do, Reut, an ambitious, young prosecutor, takes on a sexual assault case based on the sole testimony of Efrat, the volatile accuser. The experience leads Reut to reevaluate her career goals and her relationship with her mother.

The Institute’s Q&A session for All I Can Do, featuring Shiri Nevo Fridental and IIJS Film Series coordinator Stuart Weinstock, is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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Dr. Elly Moseson, "The Divine Presence on the Lips of a Gentile: The Dynamics of an Early Hasidic Controversy"

On February 22, 2022, the IIJS welcomed Dr. Elly Moseson, the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Columbia University, for a lecture discussing the research he’s undertaken during the course of his IIJS fellowship.

One of the most foundational and controversial doctrines of the Hasidic movement was the immanence of the divine within all material beings. This talk focuses on one particularly radical formulation of the doctrine of divine immanence attributed to the purported founder of Hasidism, Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, according to which even gentiles embody the divine presence. It traces the transmission and reception of this teaching and discuss the political, ideological and literary responses it provoked both within the movement and without. A recording of this lecture and the Q&A session that followed is available below.

Elly Moseson is the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and Lecturer in the Religion department at Columbia University. Moseson earned his B.A. at Columbia University where he studied literature and philosophy and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Boston University. He has been a Visiting Professor at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Hamburg, Tel Aviv University and Haifa University. His research interests include early modern Jewish movements and literatures, the cultural and political functions of texts, and the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis and religion. He is currently working on a monograph on the role of literature in the formation of the Hasidic movement and a series of studies on dreams and magic in Jewish culture.

Supported by the generosity of Warren and Susan Stern.

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