Ilan Stavans Delivers 2023-2024 Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture

The Israel and Jewish Studies & The Naomi Foundation hosted the 2023-2024 Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture on Monday, April 8, at 12:00 PM, with academic and cultural critic Ilan Stavans, a virtual talk titled “Yiddish and Ladino: Forking Paths.”

Yiddish and Ladino have unique histories, each reflecting the sprawling civilizations they fostered. What elements do they share? How do we define their individual character? Was their route foreseeable? At what points have the two intersected and what has come from that encounter? Do the two have the same survivalist spirit? Born and raised in Mexico City in a Yiddishist milieu and among fervent Ladinists, Ilan Stavans reflects on the divergent, at times perplexing, and even tragic routes these two Jewish languages have taken.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. The recipient of numerous international awards and prizes, his books for adults and children include On Borrowed Words, Dictionary Days, Resurrecting Hebrew, How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, Selected Translations: Poems 2000-2020, and The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language. He has rendered Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Juan Rulfo into English, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish, Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish, Juan Gelman from Ladino, Yehuda Halevi and Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew, the Popol Vuh from K'iche',and Don Quixote, Alice and Wonderland and The Little Prince into Spanglish. An essayist, cultural commentator, linguist, translator, and editor, his work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted into film, theater, TV, radio, and music.

Dr. Stavans’ talk is available to view in full below.

This event was supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.

The Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual 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.

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An Anthropological Investigation of West Bank Settlers with Amir Reicher

On Wednesday, April 3, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies hosted a lecture with Amir Reicher (Hebrew University), a recipient of the IIJS’ Kingdon New Voices in Israel and Jewish Studies Award for 2023-2024.

Over the past two decades, the building of “illegal outposts” became the main tool in advancing the West Bank settlement project. Established deep within the territories, the people who live in these outposts—mostly second-generation settlers born in “Judea and Samaria” to parents from the Gush Emunim movement—are considered the most radical and “fundamentalist” within West Bank settlement society. In 2019, Dr. Amir Reicher immersed himself in one of these communities for nearly two years of anthropological research.

In this talk, Dr. Reicher aims to unravel the mindset driving a specific segment of outpost settlers, who, as he shows, diverge from the nationalist-messianic vision of their parents’ generation. Specifically, he demonstrates how through a process of ‘metaphysical detachment,’ these frontier settlers gravitate toward the physical realm in a desperate quest for an existential anchor. Dr. Reicher argues that rather than the abstract and the transcendental what drives these people is a radical turn to the concrete and tangible. In this way, he analyzes how a sense of religious crisis serves to infuse their settler-colonial practices with ever more energy. By tracing this process, Dr. Reicher reflects on contemporary political dynamics unfolding in the West Bank and outlines the emergence of what he sees as a distinct religious modality invented in the outposts.

Dr. Reicher’s lecture is available to view in full below.

Amir Reicher holds a PhD in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University. He is an anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of religion and settler-colonialism. His research is based on almost two years of anthropological fieldwork among West Bank settlers, during which he lived in an illegal outpost settlement in the Judean Desert area. He is currently completing his book manuscript titled Between Two Messiahs, in which he presents a granular account of how the West Bank settlement project expands, as he analyzes the rise of a post-messianic imagination among a specific segment of settlers. In doing so, at the center of his work is an investigation of the unfolding of political violence in the aftermath of messianic and ideological fervor.

This event was made possible by the generosity of Mark Kingdon and Anla Cheng Kingdon, as well as the Radov and Kaye families.

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Kingdon Postdoc Presents Research at IIJS

On March 26, 2024, the Institute hosted a lecture with Rachel Smith, the Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Dr. Smith shared some of her ongoing research in a presentation titled “Superstition and the Haunting of Sephardic Modernity.”

This talk examines ethnographic writing about superstition among Sephardic communities of the late Ottoman Empire. Dr. Smith demonstrates how Sephardic reformers deployed the category of superstition in efforts to draw new social and intellectual boundaries that condoned various social groups—including women, the elderly, and traditional rabbis—and the knowledge they held as superstitious. She shows how this was part of a larger political project to assert their newfound authority as an intellectual class at a time of great social, cultural, and political upheaval across the empire.

Rachel Smith is the Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research examines the history, politics, and ethics of knowledge production and representation among Ottoman Sephardic communities. Against the backdrop of expanding empires, the rise of anthropology, and shifting notions of race, she explores how travelers and teachers, rabbis and journalists produced, circulated, and mobilized ethnographic and racialized knowledge in service of different visions of reform. She earned her PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, and holds a BA/MA in Linguistic Anthropology from New York University and a dual-MA in Jewish History and Education from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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

This event was made possible by the generosity of Mark and Anla Cheng Kingdon and the Kaye family.

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Jeremy Eichler Discusses Award-Winning Book "Time's Echo" at IIJS

On Wednesday, March 20, Jeremy Eichler joined us at the Institute for a discussion about his new book, Time’s Echo, with Columbia’s Jeremy Dauber, a former director of IIJS.

An award-winning writer, scholar and critic, Jeremy Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo, a new book on music, war and memory that has been named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Times and hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by The Times Literary Supplement. Published by Knopf in North America and Faber in the U.K., Time’s Echo was a finalist for the UK’s premier non-fiction prize, and is currently being translated into six languages.

Eichler is the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing published in The New Yorker, a fellowship from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He earned his PhD in modern European history at Columbia University and has taught at Brandeis University. His criticism has appeared in The New York Times and many other national publications, and since 2006, he has served as chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. For more information, please see www.timesecho.com.

Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and Director Emeritus of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies; he also teaches in American studies. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press, 2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (Schocken Books, 2013); and Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (W.W. Norton, 2017). He is also the co-editor and -translator, with Joel Berkowitz, of Landmark Yiddish Plays (SUNY Press, 2006), an anthology of Yiddish drama. He is also editor, with Barbara Mann, of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, a leading journal in the field of Jewish literature.

His research interests include Yiddish literature; comparative Jewish literature; the Yiddish theater; American Jewish literature and popular culture; and American literature and popular culture.

Jeremy Eichler and Jeremy Dauber’s discussion, and the Q&A that followed, are available to view in full below.

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

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Barnard and IIJS Host Liora Halperin and Derek Penslar for "Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Palestine and Israel" Series

On February 26, 2024, IIJS, Barnard College, and the Barnard Program in Jewish Studies hosted a lecture with Liora Halperin (University of Washington) and Derek Penslar (Harvard University), titled “Israel and Palestine: A History of the Present.”

Liora R Halperin is Professor of History and International Studies, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (2021) and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948  (2015). She is currently writing a book about the Old Yishuv, the urban Jewish communities who lived in Palestine before Zionism, and the complex and varied ways that their descendants narrated, commemorated, and appropriated these pasts over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His books include Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001), Jews and the Military: A History (2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022), and Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. He is a past president of the American Society for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Much of Dr. Halperin and Dr. Penslar’s discussion is available to view below. Unfortunately, the end of Dr. Penslar’s talk and the audience Q&A session are omitted due to recording issues.

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Leo Baeck Institute Joins IIJS in Hosting Yaniv Feller and Markus Krah

On February 21, 2024, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute hosted a talk in Kent Hall with Yaniv Feller (University of Florida) and Markus Krah (Leo Baeck Institute): "The Political Thought of Leo Baeck."

Leo Baeck was the revered leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust and one of the leading Jewish public intellectuals of the twentieth century. He was a man steeped in the religious discourse of his time, but he was not merely a religious thinker. Rather, Baeck was profoundly shaped by the imperial constellations in which he lived. This insight sheds new light on his work as a political thinker during the Wilhelmine Empire as well as his writings and decisions during the Holocaust. The result is a new appreciation of his thought, including as it emerges from Baeck’s unpublished manuscripts and his lectures in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Yaniv Feller is an assistant professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought, which won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. Yaniv has published articles on themes such as moral value of resentment, modern gnosis, and Christmas trees.  

Markus Krah is the Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute. An American-trained, Germany-based scholar, Krah earned his Ph.D. at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, in Modern Jewish Studies with a dissertation that became the basis for his monograph, American Jewry and the Re-Invention of the East European Jewish Past (DeGruyter, 2019). In 2021, he was awarded the LBI’s Gerald Westheimer Fellowship to support his research on Salman Schocken’s efforts to promote a Jewish intellectual and spiritual renaissance in post-war America with the US Schocken imprint’s initial program of classic German-Jewish texts. He has published numerous peer-reviewed scholarly articles and served as editor of PaRDeS, the journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany. Before he began his academic career, Krah worked for over a decade as a journalist, including as the chief correspondent of the German-language service in Reuters’ Berlin Bureau.

The discussion with Dr. Feller and Dr. Krah, as well as the audience Q&A that followed, are available to view in full below.

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

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Rodrigo Cortés Discusses "Love Gets a Room" in First Spring Film Event

The Spring 2024 IIJS Film Series began on Monday, February 12, with writer-director Rodrigo Cortés, who joined us via Zoom to discuss his latest film, Love Gets a Room (2021).

Inspired by true events, Love Gets a Room is the story of a Jewish stage actress who must make the gut-wrenching decision to follow her heart or escape the Warsaw Ghetto in the midst of a performance by her beleaguered theater company. Moving nimbly between the stage, the theater corridors, and the bleak Ghetto outside, Love Gets a Room balances life-and-death struggle with the art we create to survive and transcend it. (103 minutes; English with open captions)

Born in Spain, Rodrigo Cortés is a Goya-Award-Winning writer, director, and editor of the internationally-produced films Concursante, Buried (starring Ryan Reynolds), Red Lights (starring Sigourney Weaver and Robert DeNiro), and Down a Dark Hall.

Rodrigo Cortés’ discussion with IIJS Film Series Coordinator Stuart Weinstock is available to view in full below.

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

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New Voices Award Winner Giacomo Loi Lectures at IIJS

On Wednesday, February 7, IIJS hosted an in-person lecture with Giacomo Loi (University of Haifa), a recipient of the IIJS’ Kingdon New Voices in Israel and Jewish Studies Award for 2023-2024.

Since the nineteenth century, Hebrew writers integrated Greco-Roman culture as a non-Jewish sub-system within Hebrew culture to address various topics, ranging from literary aesthetics to issues of collective relevance. In contrast to previous studies organized around the “Hellenism and Hebraism” or “Athens and Jerusalem” dichotomy, Dr. Loi offers a new, “four cities” model to expand and better examine the picture of the reception of classical culture in Modern Hebrew literature. Following this model, this lecture demonstrates how Zionism, as a form of Jewish nationalism, serves as an essential backdrop for contextualizing classical reception throughout the history of Modern Hebrew literature. In fact, Zionism inherited the religious opposition with the classical world from Jewish tradition—but restructured it into an ethno-national one at the turn of the twentieth century, as Dr. Loi shows through a selection of political and literary texts.

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

Giacomo Loi is an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. He earned his BA and MA in Classics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and obtained his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 2023 with the dissertation “‘Our Quarrel Is Of Old’: Classical Reception in Modern Hebrew Literature,” where he explores the presences, uses, and shifting meanings of Greco-Roman culture in modern Jewish Hebrew culture (1890s-2010s). As a 2021/22 doctoral fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, he developed his project There Is No Analogy Within History: Classical Myth and Holocaust Literature, and initiated the project “Gentile” Antiquity: The Reception of Antiquity in Modern Italian Jewish Culture. He has published articles, online essays, and reviews on classical reception in Italian, European, and Jewish culture.

This event was made possible by the generosity of Mark Kingdon and Anla Cheng Kingdon, as well as the Radov and Kaye families.

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IIJS Hosts Book Talk for New Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies

On Wednesday, January 31, at 12:00 PM, IIJS and the Department of Music hosted a discussion on the new Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies at 617 Kent Hall.

We were joined by select scholars for a panel discussion on this new handbook, introduced and led by its editor Tina Frühauf. The discussion centers on the concept and content of the handbook and is illustrated with musical examples.

This discussion, and the Q&A session that followed, are available to view in full below.

Tina Frühauf teaches at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the Executive Director of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and Director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at CUNY. Among her recent publications are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 and Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American Musicological Society; as well as Postmodernity's Musical Pasts (2020). She has been serving on various committees of the American Musicological Society and as Council Member, and is on the board of the Louis Lewandowski Festival in Berlin and the DAAD Alumni Association USA.

Jessica Roda is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, an anthropologist, and ethnomusicologist. She specializes in Jewish life in North America and France, and in international cultural policies. Her research interests include religion, performing arts, cultural heritage, gender, and media. Her articles on these topics have appeared in various scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes in French and English. The author of two books and the editor of a special issue of MUSICultures, her more recent book (Se réinventer au present, PUR 2018) was finalist for J. I. Segal Award for the best Quebec book on a Jewish theme. It also received the Prize UQAM-Respatrimoni in heritage studies. Her forthcoming monograph, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age, investigates how music, films, and media made by ultra-Orthodox and former ultra-Orthodox women act as agents of social, economic, and cultural transformation and empowerment, and as spaces that challenge gender norms, orthodoxy, and liberalism.

Samantha M. Cooper (she/her) is the Ariel and Joshua Weiner Family Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for the 2023-2024 academic year. Samantha Cooper is a historical musicologist specializing in American Jewish cultural history. Dr. Cooper is currently working on her first monograph, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, which she began as a Harry Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. Cooper received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at New York University in May 2022 for her dissertation, “Cultivating High Society: American Jews Engaging European Opera in New York, 1880–1940.” Cooper is the producer and host of “The Sounding Jewish Podcast,” and the associate executive director of the Jewish Music Forum, a project of the American Society for Jewish Music.

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

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Adam Teller Delivers First Spring Lecture of Israel-Hamas War Webinar Series

On Sunday, January 28, at 4:00 PM, the IIJS hosted a webinar with Adam Teller, titled “Jewish Hostages in Captivity: A Historical Perspective.” This webinar is the first entry of Spring 2024 in our Israel-Hamas War Webinar Series.

Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University in the USA. Born in London, he studied at Oxford University and completed his graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in the history of the Jews in eastern Europe. He taught at the University of Haifa in Israel for 15 years before moving to Brown in 2010.

Dr. Teller has written widely on the economic, social, and cultural history of the Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. He has written three books on the subject and edited (or co-edited) a further four. He is the author of many academic articles in English, Hebrew, Polish, and German.

His newest book, Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which deals with how the Jewish world organized in order to help the waves of Polish Jewish refugees that spread out across Europe, Asia, and North Africa following the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648, was published by Princeton University Press in 2020.

Dr. Teller was a member of the core academic team that created the exhibit at the prize-winning POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently a member of the museum’s Academic Advisory Council.

Dr. Teller’s lecture is available to view in full below.

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

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“Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Palestine and Israel” Speaker Series Begins with Ethan Katz

On Thursday, January 25, UC Berkeley’s Ethan Katz visited Barnard College for the first installment of the “Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Palestine and Israel” speaker series, sponsored by Barnard College, the Barnard Program in Jewish Studies, and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Katz’s talk, “The Debate Over Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Terms and the Stakes,” was followed by an animated audience Q&A session.

Dr. Katz’s talk, and the Q&A session, are available to view in full below.

Ethan Katz is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the award-winning The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard, 2015) and the co-editor of several other volumes, including Colonialism and the Jews, and most recently When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash, which just appeared from Routledge last fall.

Pertinent to our series, Professor Katz has played a leading and thoughtful role in promoting complex and often difficult dialogues about antisemitism on college campuses. As the Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Student Life and Campus Climate, as a co-founder of the Antisemitism Education Initiative at Berkeley, and as the chair of a taskforce of the Association for Jewish Studies on antisemitism and academic freedom, he has worked toward creating guidelines of education and engagement for students, campus leaders, and teachers across the United States. Through his scholarship and his public-facing work, he has developed considerable knowledge of the subject, as well as wide-ranging experience in dialoguing across differences. 

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Derek Penslar Joins IIJS for Third Installment of Webinar Series on Israel-Hamas War

On Sunday, December 3, Derek Penslar (Harvard University) joined the Institute to continue our webinar series on the Israel-Hamas war, presenting a talk titled “American Jews and Israel: From Love to Anguish” and answering audience questions. Dr. Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His most recent book, Zionism: An Emotional State (2023), examines the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices over the course of the movement’s history.

This event is the third in our webinar series on the current Israel-Hamas war, which has featured “Israel at War: Live Discussion from Tel Aviv,” with Avi Shilon, and “Unpacking Antisemitism on Campus,” with Pamela Nadell and Britt Tevis.

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

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He is the director of undergraduate studies within the history department and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is also affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology (Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine 19870-1918, 1991), economic history (Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, 2001), military history (Jews and the Military: A History, 2013), biography (Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader, 2020), and the history of emotions (Zionism: An Emotional State, 2023). In two co-edited volumes, Penslar has brought Jewish studies into conversation with postcolonial studies (Orientalism and the Jews, [2005] and Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism [2023]). Penslar’s current interests lie in international history, and he is writing a book about worldwide reactions to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Penslar’s teaching reflects his interests in integrating Jewish history into global contexts. In addition to teaching courses in modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism and Israel, he teaches courses on nationalism, military history, and the history of emotions. He brings these themes into his General Education course on war and anti-war movements in the modern world.

Before coming to Harvard, Penslar taught at Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was the inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Israel Studies. He has taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He has held research fellowships in Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 

Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.

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

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"Antisemitism, Critical Race Theory, and the Politics of Anti-Discrimination Scholarship," the Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award Lecture with Mia Brett

On Wednesday, November 15, we were joined virtually for a lecture by our Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award recipient, Mia Brett, titled “Antisemitism, Critical Race Theory, and the Politics of Anti-Discrimination Scholarship.”

In this political moment the academy is under attack from the weaponization of Critical Race Theory and American Jewish history to justify erasing historical education and politicize academic scholarship. Accusations of antisemitism are being used to attack Critical Race Theory when CRT is a vital tool to better understanding antisemitism and historical legal discrimination against Jews in the United States. This lecture will discuss the importance of studying legal antisemitism in the United States to fighting both current attacks on the academy and Jews in American life.

Mia Brett holds a PhD in History from Stony Brook University specializing in American legal history and the study of the legal construction of race and gender. Her dissertation, "The Murdered Jewess: Jewish Immigration and the Problem of Citizenship in the Courtroom in Late Nineteenth Century New York," used Critical Race Theory to study anti Jewish bigotry in American law. She is currently teaching at Suffolk Community College.

Dr. Brett’s lecture is available to view in full below.

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

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Irena Klepfisz and Agnieszka Legutko Discuss "Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021"

On Wednesday, November 8, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, the Department of Germanic Languages, and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender welcomed lesbian poet, essayist, political activist, and Yiddishist Irena Klepfisz and Agnieszka Legutko, Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University, for a discussion about Klepfisz’s latest book, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 (Wesleyan UP, 2022).

Irena Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. She survived the war hiding in an orphanage and later in the Polish countryside with her mother. After the war they lived in Lódz and Sweden before settling in New York in 1949. Klepfisz’s poetry broke new ground in its brazen lesbian voice, while also finding new ways to poetically investigate the trauma of the Holocaust. Klepfisz played a key role in the emergent Jewish lesbian movement starting in the 1970s. She has been dedicated to the recovery and transmission of women’s writing in Yiddish, as an active scholar, translator, and teacher. Her own poetry engages the Yiddish language, writing bilingually to create a Jewish feminist poetics for the past and present.

Klepfisz recently ended 22 years of teaching Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College. She has been a recipient of an NEA fellowship and NYFA grant in poetry and a finalist for the poetry Lambda Award. In 2016 she was honored to receive the Dreaming in Yiddish Prize from the Adrienne Cooper Fund and currently serves on the Board of the Workers Circle. The author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue (poetry) and Dreams of an Insomniac (essays), she is preparing the manuscript for a bilingual collection of her poetry and prose to be published next year by the Polish publishing house słowo/obraz terytoria (word/image territories).

Agnieszka Legutko is Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University. She specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, and spirit possession in Judaism. She is the author of a historical guidebook, Krakow’s Kazimierz: Town of Partings and Returns (2004, 2009), and her publications have appeared in several journals and essay collections on Yiddish literature and culture, such as Cwiszn, Bridges, Lilith, Jewish Quarterly, Silent Souls? Women in Yiddish Culture (2010), Dybbuk: Na Pograniczu Dwóch Światów (2017), and Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (2020). She received her Ph.D. in Yiddish studies with distinction from Columbia University and her research interests include trauma, memory, performance, and the body represented in Jewish literature, theater, and film. She is currently completing a manuscript exploring the trope of dybbuk possession in modern Jewish cultures.

Their 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 Film Series Continues with "Zorki"

The IIJS Film Series continued with Zorki, a documentary from Zohar Wagner, on Monday, October 30.

Zohar Wagner, then 34, used her documentary camera to tear away the cloak of silence that enveloped her bourgeois family. Her mother had a five-year affair with a man ten years her junior, and Zohar, at the age of twelve, was an accomplice to the secret. Twenty years after the difficult episode that had torn the family apart, Zohar's mother is selling her childhood home and Zohar gathers her family to open their personal Pandora’s Box. The resulting film is called “Zorki,” the family nickname for Zohar. (54 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles; 2006)

On October 30, the Institute hosted a virtual Q&A with Zohar Wagner, the writer and director of Zorki.

Zohar Wagner directs feature and television documentaries in Israel, which have screened at festivals worldwide. Savoy opened at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival and won awards for Best Documentary Director and Best Editing. It also won Israeli Film Academy Awards for Best Editing and Best Makeup, with nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Actress.

If you would like to view Zohar Wagner’s most recent film, Savoy, it is available at the following link: https://vimeo.com/643056899 (Password: savoy270770).

Zohar Wagner’s October 30 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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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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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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