IIJS@Home: Honeymood

On Thursday, September 23, the Institute welcomed Talia Lavie, writer and director of Honeymood. The film tells the story of what happens to a bride and groom after their wedding. Instead of relaxing and enjoying a romantic night together, they get into a fight that soon develops into a dazed, midnight odyssey throughout Jerusalem, confronting them with past loves, repressed doubts, and the lives they have left behind. HONEYMOOD, a romantic comedy hybrid of THE PHILADELPHIA STORY and AFTER HOURS, is the second feature by Talya Lavie, the multi-award-winning writer and director of ZERO MOTIVATION. (90 min)

IIJS@Home: Salo Baron and "the Finest Collection"

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.

 OrderWar of Shadows here.

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.

Spotlight on Gershom Gorenberg

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Gershom Gorenberg, Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism, published his latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. Join us for a book conversation between Gershom and Samuel G. Freedman in May.

In addition, he recently wrote two articles for The Washington Post:

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.

Getting to Know…Solomon Mengesha

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Solomon Mengesha is an M.A. Candidate in Jewish Studies.

1-    How did you get involved with Jewish Studies?

While working with the formerly incarcerated, I decided to continue my education and enrolled in graduate school, where I earned a M.A. in public administration (MPA). After that, I went to work for various private and non-profit organizations. However, in the back of my mind, I remembered two things about my late father. He used to call me Dr. Solomon for as long as I can remember and expected that I, one day, become a Doctor, which did not happen in his lifetime as he died in 2001. Second, I used to see my father, whom we called Abbe which is Amharic for father, listening to the AM/FM radio for information about Israel. I did not know why then, but before he died in 2001, I realized how much Israel and the Jewish people meant to him. He never got to see Israel but left me with his passion for Israel and the Jewish people. Now I'm seeking to do the things he wanted to do for himself but could not do in his lifetime. This is what led me to enroll in the Jewish Studies M.A. program at Columbia and research the Betha Israelis, in particular. In this regard, Dr. Isabelle Levy (M.A. Program Director), has been a great mentor and superb guide who is gentle yet challenged me to do better throughout my studies on Ethiopian Jews. I was also lucky to have studied with Dr. Debra Glasberg Gail last Spring in the Jews, Magic, and Science course, where I fell in love with the work of Isaac Luria, a leading rabbi and Jewish mystic of the 16th century. This course exposed me to Jewish poets, physicians, astronomers, rabbis, and thought leaders in Jewish history, including Maimonides. 

2- What are you currently researching and working on?

As part of my M.A., I am currently researching Betha Israel (Ethiopian Jews) material culture. As an outgrowth of my studies, I incorporated a non-profit organization named Our Story (Yegna Tariq in Amharic), which seeks to build bridges to share information in real-time through relevant data mining and evaluation, education, cultural interchange, and technology sharing. It aims to help create a local Betha Israel Material Culture Center that houses books, oral tradition, customs, and music.The information will be centered around and embedded within language, faith, education, contact with other communities, and the pursuant survival and development of its unique Jewish identity. Our Story aims to bring policy changes in Israel via public opinion, shaped by data-driven information gained when local communities create space, access resources, and allow other stakeholders to be directly or indirectly involved. I am also co-authoring a book about the Betha Israelis with the help, guidance, and support of Prof. Yehoshua Frenkel of University of Haifa. 

 3- What are you most looking forward to this Spring?

 I am looking forward to traveling to California to see my daughter. 

Faculty in the News: Prof. Rebecca Kobrin in the Washington Post & a Panel Discussion

Rebecca Kobrin moderated a panel titled Teaching about Antisemitism (see below) at the annual Association for Jewish Studies conference. She presented a lecture to school educators titled United States, Refugee Policy, And Antisemitism, 1924-1954, as part of the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’s professional development program for teachers. Her articles on anti-Semitism and immigration were published in The Washington Post.

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.