On May 25, the Institute hosted a presentation by Michelle Margolis Chesner, Norman E. Alexander Jewish Studies Librarian, titled Salo Baron and “the Finest Collection” as part of Columbia College’s Alumni Week. Professor Salo Wittmayer Baron has been called “the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century” and was the first chair of Jewish history at Columbia. Participants learned about his legacy and contributions to Jewish studies worldwide.
IIJS@Home: War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East
On May 11, Samuel G. Freedman spoke with Gershom Gorenberg on his latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. War of Shadows is a true-life spy thriller: the story of the World War II espionage affair that brought Germany's Erwin Rommel to the very brink of conquering the Middle East - bringing with him the S.S. officer already responsible for the murder of half a million Jews. Only a last-minute intelligence breakthrough cut off Rommel's secret source and defeated the Nazis.
Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling. Set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East, it presents a new picture of a crucial period in the pre-state history of Israel, and challenges the conventional memory of World War II and and of the Holocaust.
Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg's next book is War of Shadows: Code Breakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, forthcoming from Public Affairs. War of Shadows demolishes myths of World War II in the Middle East and solves the mystery of the spy affair that nearly brought Rommel’s army and SS death squads to Cairo and Jerusalem.
Gorenberg's last book was The Unmaking of Israel, on challenges to Israeli democracy and the history behind them. He is also 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.
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the nine acclaimed books, and is currently at work on his tenth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic convention.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Knapp Families.
IIJS@Home: The Electrifiers
On Tuesday, April 20, the Institute was joined by Zvika Nathan (writer/lead actor) and Boaz Armoni (director) for a Q&A for their latest film, The Electrifiers.
The film is about The Electrifiers, a band that won the 1984 Best New Artist Award for a smash hit which no one remembers, and have been stuck in traffic on the fast track to international stardom ever since. Thirty years later, the band members continue to drag themselves between gigs at nursing houses and cheap motels while their lead singer still believes he is a 20-year-old rocker. But just as everyone is about to become completely fed up with him, a surprising opportunity presents itself, which could propel the Electrifiers straight to the top. (90 min)
IIJS@Home: Reporting From The Inside Out: Ultra-Orthodox Journalists In A Time Of Covid
On Monday, April 5, the Institute hosted a panel conversation along with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
The pandemic raised tensions between ultra-Orthodox communities and governments in both the United States and Israel. A new breed of ultra-Orthodox journalists has covered the crisis, and faced the challenge of reporting with both independence and attachment to a media-shy society. Their experience has wider implications for minority journalists. Please watch the video below with moderator Jane Eisner and journalists Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, Tali Farkash, and Jacob Kornbluh.
Jane Eisner is an accomplished journalist, educator, non-profit leader and public speaker who is currently director of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, overseeing the Masters of Arts program. For more than a decade, she was the Forward’s editor-in-chief, the first woman to hold the position at America’s foremost national Jewish news organization. Eisner is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia Journalism School. She was a fellow of the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center at Bryn Mawr College in its inaugural year and participated in the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program in 2009. She lives in New York City with her husband, Dr. Mark Berger.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt is a writer living in New York City. She was previously the Life editor at the Forward, and a reporter for Haaretz. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vox, and Salon, among others. She does pastoral work alongside her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt in Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Tali Farkash is a haredi journalist writing for the Israeli news site Ynet, a feminist activist, and a doctoral student in gender studies at Bar Ilan University. She was previously a senior writer for the haredi magazine “Bakehila” and a news editor for the “Kol Chay” radio station.
Jacob Kornbluh is the senior political reporter for the Forward. Kornbluh covers politics with a Jewish angle and regularly interviews government officials, political commentators and security experts on issues that matter to the broader Jewish community. He was featured in JTA’s 2018 list of top 50 Jews to follow on Twitter. He previously worked as a national politics reporter for Jewish Insider, City Hall reporter for JP Updates and and covered the 2013 NYC mayoral race for the Yeshiva World News.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye Family and Knapp Family Foundation.
IIJS@Home: What Is Maintenance, And Why Does It Matter?
On Monday, March 15, the Institute along with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies hosted the third 2020-21 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture with Pratima Gopalakrishnan.
The concept of “maintenance” — food, clothing, or other in-kind provision to family members labeled dependents — has a long history from antiquity to modernity, in both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts. This talk explores the rich history of this term, as well as its more remote use in classical rabbinic texts. For the rabbis, maintenance was not just a legal obligation, but a malleable concept for defining and thinking through relationships within the household. The talk considers maintenance not only as a legal term but as an entry point into constructions of gender and labor in the ancient Jewish household.
Pratima Gopalakrishnan is a scholar of late antique Jewish religion and history, who uses theoretical approaches drawn from feminist and queer theory, and slavery and labor studies. She works primarily with late antique rabbinic Jewish texts, as well as the textual and material artifacts of late antique and early medieval legal cultures and considers how ostensibly economic ancient discussions — of the household, the agricultural field, but also the laboring body itself —were always imbricated with the projects of defining religious, ethnic, and sexual difference. Pratima received her Ph.D. from the Religious Studies Department at Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation titled “Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household.” She is currently the Perilman Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.
The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.
Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
IIJS@Home: Multiple Identity Politics: The Passing Narratives Of Dahn Ben-Amotz
On Wednesday, February 24, Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies hosted Roy Holler in a conversation with Katya Gibel Mevorach. In 1938, Mussia Thilimzogger’s parents put their thirteen-year-old son on a boat from Poland to Palestine. Three years later they perished in the Holocaust. Alone, rejected, and failing to fit in, the young Jewish-Polish immigrant adopted a new biography, changed his birthplace from Rivne to Tel-Aviv, and Hebraicized his foreign sounding name Mussia into Dahn Ben-Amotz (1924-1989). Ben-Amotz was one of many immigrants forced to change their identities and conform to the Zionist vision of the Hebrew: heroic and rough idealist, with a shared hatred of the Jewish diaspora. With his new persona, Ben-Amotz became a cultural icon for generations. But this author who shaped Israeli culture was haunted by little Mussia to his very last day, and the central trauma in his 1968 autobiographical novel, Lizkor veliskoakh (To Remember, to Forget) was not the Holocaust, but his own act of passing.
Focusing on integrationist demands of the Zionist narrative and the transformations of Jewish identities, the talk will introduces the concept of passing to Ben-Amotz's novel. Holler argues that the resettlement of the Jewish diaspora in Palestine did more than move physical bodies in and out of the land: it also called for an erasure and restructuring one’s identity in an effort to create a new Israeli culture and an improved Jewish race. Passing describes the turning away from the Jewish past to claim belongingness to the new Hebrew identity in Israel. Ben-Amotz’s fiction is obsessed with lost identities, showing that when a Jew wished to pass as a Hebrew, all prior ethnicities, memories, languages and cultural heritage had to be erased.
Roy Holler is an assistant professor of Israel Studies in the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his B.A. in English from the City University of New York. His current book project, Passing and the Politics of Identity in Israeli and African American Literatures, explores the phenomenon of passing in a comparative context. A part of a chapter from this project is forthcoming publication in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
Katya Gibel Mevorach holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in African Studies from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Gibel Mevorach is Professor in Anthropology and American Studies at Grinnell College. She is the author of Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (1997), and articles, review essays and position papers have appeared in journals which include American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Biography, Developing World Bioethics, Identities, Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, נוגה (Noga: Israeli Feminist Journal), עתון אחר (Iton Aher) and The Jerusalem Post (Israel).
The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.
Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
IIJS@Home: Here We Are
On February 17, we were joined by Nir Bergman (director) and Shai Avivi (lead actor) of the wonderful film Here We Are.
Nir Bergman’s warm and moving tale of parental devotion focuses on divorced dad Aharon (Shai Avivi), who has given up his artistic career to look after his autistic son Uri (Noam Imber). They live a quiet life, and as the boy reaches young adulthood, his mother decides that he needs to be placed in a boarding facility more equipped to cater to his needs. Resisting this change, Aharon runs away on a road trip with Uri. With gentle humor, this beautiful film—winner of multiple Ophir Awards, including Best Director—examines the intricacies of love, disability and community, and change. (94 min)
Please enjoy the Q&A below.
IIJS@Home: Israel And The New/Old Middle East
On February 9, over 180 participants joined us for a discussion exploring the changing geopolitical dynamics shaping Israel and the Middle East with Ambassador (Ret.) Daniel Kurtzer. In light of the recent normalization of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, Ambassador Kurtzer discussed the history and circumstances that led to such historic regional cooperation, and about the geopolitical possibilities for the region, including in relation to the new Biden administration and its priorities in the international realm.
Daniel C. Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During a 29-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Ambassador Kurtzer served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. He was also a speechwriter and member of the Secretary of State George Shultz’s Policy Planning Staff; and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research.
Kurtzer was a member of the “peace team” for Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. He played an instrumental role in formulating and executing American policy, in particular helping to bring about the Madrid peace conference. Following that breakthrough, Kurtzer was named as the coordinator of the multilateral peace talks; served as the U.S. representative to the bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Israel and Syria; chaired the U.S. delegation to the multilateral refugee negotiations.
Kurtzer is the co-author of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, co-author of The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011, and editor of Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. After retiring from the State Department, he served as a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and as an advisor to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. In 2007, he was named the first Commissioner of the professional Israel Baseball League.
Ambassador Kurtzer received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye family.
IIJS@Home: Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, And The Jewish Community In Germany, 1945-1989
On Monday, February 1, Tina Frühauf gave a presentation on her latest book Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, And The Jewish Community In Germany, 1945-1989.
By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. In this book talk, author Tina Frühauf provides a glimpse into the rich kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust, followed by a discussion with Michelle Chesner, Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, on the newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections.
Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. The study of Jewish music in modernity has been her primary research focus for two decades, culminating in monographs from Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur (Georg Olms Verlag, 2005) to Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021). Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions is Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American Musicological Society, and the collection of essays, Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts (Boydell Press, 2020). Her current work focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the twentieth century and the conditions of globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience.
Purchase the book and save 30% on Transcending Dystopia [global.oup.com] and enter the code AAFLYG6 at the checkout.
IIJS@Home: On Turning Local Sites Into Global Sights: When Zionist Politics Met Photography
Last week, Dr. Rebekka Grossmann gave a wonderful lecture on Zionist politics and photography. Throughout the existence of the Palestine Mandate photography was considered a prime means to draw global attention to the Zionist presence in the Middle East. Photographers' insights into Zionist building activities were produced and disseminated in large numbers. The ways the different photographers and image agents staged these views according to their own imaginations of the Jewish presence in Palestine, however, have found little consideration in historical research. This talk approaches local and international discussions on the nature of Jewish statehood through the photographer’s lens to challenge the assumption that the production of Zionist visual arts merely corroborated the political ideology of the Labor Zionist establishment. It places particular emphasis on the mobile nature of photographic communication thereby offering insights into neglected nuances of Zionist political thought in a highly transnational decade.
This lecture is part of the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture series supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and conducted in partnership with Fordham University's Jewish Studies program. Please join us for additional New Voices lectures this spring.
Rebekka Grossmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on the intersections of Jewish political history, migratory mobility, and global visual culture. Before joining the Franz Rosenzweig Center she was a Tandem Fellow at the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has also been supported by the George L. Mosse Program in History, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her dissertation, which is currently transformed into a book manuscript, discusses photography as a space of formulations of concepts of national belonging in Jewish migratory history. Aspects of this research have been published for example in Jewish Social Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook.
Mystics, Music, and Microscopes: Celebrating Ten Years of the Norman E. Alexander Lectures in Jewish Studies
In honor of the tenth anniversary of the Norman E. Alexander Lecture in Jewish Studies, this year's event highlighted the work of scholars doing research in the collections. Dr. J. H. (Yossi) Chajes discussed his work on kabbalistic manuscripts; Dr. Francesco Spagnolo shared music relating to the Jewish community in Corfu; and Alexis Hagadorn described what she discovered in analyzing paint samples and bindings.
J. H. Chajes is the Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of History at the University of Haifa and the Director of the Ilanot Project.
Francesco Spagnolo is the Curator of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Music at University of California at Berkeley.
Alexis Hagadorn is the Head of Conservation and Preservation at Columbia University Libraries.
IIJS@Home: Nostalgia: Remembering The Jewish Community In Egypt
Over 180 people joined us for the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellowship Lecture with Dr. Alon Tam. In this lecture, Tam explored the history of different Nostalgias that have been created around the Jewish community in Egypt since its demise in the middle of the 20th century. How have Egyptian Jews remembered and commemorated their lives in Egypt from the places they migrated to? How have the Egyptian state and society remembered and commemorated the Egyptian Jewish community? How have these memories been shaped by different political, social, and cultural interests, agendas, and historical developments? How have these memories changed over time, right until the present?
Additional Resources:
Dr. Tam provided a list of sources to continue to learn about this topic.
Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies also wrote a blog post on a French/Hebrew Siddur that is part of the Fordham archives.
Alon Tam is a social and cultural historian of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, and of that region's Jewish communities. His research interests broadly include urban history, social relations and identities, historical anthropology, culture and politics. Tam received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with an award-winning dissertation about Cairo’s coffeehouses, while his current research focuses on Jewish social identities in twentieth century Cairo. A recent fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, Tam presently holds the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia and Fordham.
In partnership with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Supported by the Rabin and Shvidler families.
IIJS@Home: Salo Baron: Celebrating 90 Years Of Jewish Studies At Columbia
On Sunday, November 15, we welcomed over 155 people to the virtual Institute to explore the legacy of Salo Baron. 2020 marks the 90th anniversary of Baron’s arrival at Columbia University and the first chair in Jewish History at any secular university in the United States.
We heard from Bernard Cooperman on Finding the Future in the Jewish Past: Salo Baron at Columbia and Jason Lustig on Salo Baron’s Legacy and the Shaping of Jewish Studies Into the Twenty-First Century. Stay tuned for more on Salo Baron in the coming months.
Bernard Cooperman holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History at the University of Maryland where he has served as Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and of the Center for Historical Studies. His research focuses on the history of Jews in Early Modern Italy, on ghettoization, on the development of rabbinic culture in the western Sephardic diaspora, and on the development of Jewish historiography and the concept of anti-Semitism. Recent papers include “Inventing the Jewish People by Periodizing Jewish Time,” to be published in Chronologics: Periodization in a Global Context, ed. Thomas Maissen, Barbara Mittler and Pierre Monnet (Heidelberg: [2020]), “Cultural Pluralism from the Ghetto—What Might It Have Meant?”in Pierre Savy and Alessandro Guetta, eds., Non contrarii ma diversi (Rome: Viella, 2020), and “Defining Deviance, Negotiating Norms. Raphael Meldola in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Dr. Cooperman is presently at work on a study of Spinoza's attitude towards religious tolerance and a book-length study tentatively titled The Right to Exclude: Jewish Competition, Community, and Self-Government in Early Modern Tuscany.
Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. at the UCLA Department of History, and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. His research focuses on the development of Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine in the twentieth century, the topic of his book manuscript in preparation, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. He also is the creator and host of the Jewish History Matters podcast.
Supported by the Kaye Family.
IIJS@Home: The Storm Within: Yiddish Children’s Literature And The “Invention Of Childhood”
On Tuesday, November 10, over 130 participants joined the Institute for the Annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture with Miriam Udel.
Every children’s literary tradition is marked by the circumstances of its founding moment. The first decades of the twentieth century marked a period of political upheaval and possibility across the Yiddish-speaking world, which coincided with the increasing centrality accorded to childhood throughout the West. By addressing children directly through a new literature aimed specifically at them, Yiddish cultural leaders forged a novel pathway toward building a modern Jewish nation. How did they imagine a secular yet Jewishly rooted collectivity? How did their vision account for complexities in the emotional lives of children?
Supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. Her first book, Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016) won the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Honey on the Page: An Anthology of Yiddish Children’s Literature appeared in October with New York University Press. She is currently working on a critical study of Yiddish children’s literature and translating Khaver Paver’s Labzik: Stories of a Clever Pup as a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center.
The Annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity for the public to explore topics of Yiddish language and linguistics, the history of Yiddish, Yiddish children’s literature and education. The lecture is supported by the Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation, Inc., which is dedicated to reimagining education. The Naomi Foundation champions Yiddish, Naomi’s lifelong passion, as a vibrant, rich, and contemporary language. The Naomi Foundation advances the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings.
IIJS@Home: From Left To Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz And The Politics Of Jewish History
On October 19, Nancy Sinkoff, Professor of Jewish Studies and History and the Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University, discussed her latest book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life, and as vital link between the European and U.S. diasporas.
Please note the full recording of this event will be on our website until November 16.
IIJS@Home: Mossad!
On Wednesday, October 7, the Institute hosted a Q&A with writer/director Alon Gur Arye and actor Tsahi Halevi, of the film Mossad!
In this parody of popular Israeli military/spy films, Tsahi Halevi mocks his own tough-guy persona as a clueless Mossad operative who teams up with the CIA to rescue a kidnapped tech billionaire and save... his commander's chance of lighting a torch on Independence Day. This joke-a-minute comedy, inspired by American parody hits like "Airplane!," "The Naked Gun," and "Scary Movie," is the first of its kind by an Israeli filmmaker. (95min)
Please enjoy this hilarious Q&A. The film an be rented here.
Film@IIJS is supported by the Appel and Kaye Families.
IIJS@Home: Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism
On Wednesday, September 16, the Institute welcomed Clemence Boulouque, Carl and Bernice Witten Assistant Professor in Jewish and Israel Studies at Columbia University, to discuss her latest book Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism with Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.
Another Modernity is the study of the life and thought of the nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher Elia Benamozegh of Moroccan descent, a prolific writer and transnational thinker who corresponded widely with prominent religious and intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East and whose work and legacy needs to be brought out of its relative - but undeserved - obscurity. This idiosyncratic figure, who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for interreligious engagement, came to influence a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel.
What Benamozegh proposed was unprecedented: that the Jewish tradition presented a solution to the religious crisis of modernity. According to Benamozegh, the defining features of Judaism were universalism, a capacity to foster interreligious engagement, and the political power and mythical allure of its theosophical tradition, Kabbalah—all of which made the Jewish tradition uniquely equipped to assuage the post-Enlightenment tensions between religion and reason. In this book, Clémence Boulouque presents a wide-ranging and nuanced investigation of Benamozegh's published and unpublished work and his continuing legacy, considering his impact on Christian-Jewish dialogue as well as on far-right Christians and right-wing religious Zionists.