IIJS@Home: The Art of Leaving

On February 16, the Institute welcomed Israeli-Canadian author Ayelet Tsabari to speak about her latest book, The Art of Leaving. This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions.

In The Art of Leaving, Tsabari tells her story, from her early love of writing and words, to her rebellion during her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She travels from Israel to New York, Canada, Thailand, and India, falling in and out of love with countries, men and women, drugs and alcohol, running away from responsibilities and refusing to settle in one place. She recounts her first marriage, her struggle to define herself as a writer in a new language, her decision to become a mother, and finally her rediscovery and embrace of her family history—a history marked by generations of headstrong women who struggled to choose between their hearts and their homes. Eventually, she realizes that she must reconcile the memories of her father and the sadness of her past if she is ever going to come to terms with herself.

With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves.

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was long listed to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, and has been published internationally. She teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph Writing MFA and the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction.

IIJS@Home: It Could Lead To Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing And Jewish Modernity

On February 10, we welcomed Sonia Gollance to the virtual Institute to speak about her book, It Could Lead To Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing And Jewish Modernity. Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression.

Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

Sonia Gollance is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Yiddish at University College London. She is a scholar of Yiddish and German-Jewish Studies whose work focuses on dance, theatre, and gender. Her first book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, was published by Stanford University Press in May 2021.

To purchase this book please visit the Stanford University Press website. Please use GOLLANCE20 for the coupon code.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye Family.

IIJS@Home: The Medieval Jewish Community Of Cologne: History, Memory, Archeology

On January 24, the Institute began its spring slate of events with the inaugural Yerushalmi Lecture on History and Narrative. Professor Ephraim Shoham-Steiner opened up the unique aspects of a medieval Jewish community and its people based on a variety of archeological as well as literary sources. Over the past century, and particularly in recent years, archeological projects have yielded a treasure trove of material artifacts that yield rich new insights into the Jewish community in the German city of Cologne. By incorporating the material finds of archaeologists into his scholarship, Professor Shoham-Steiner methodologically extends the work of the late Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who grappled with the complexities of the relationship between history, historiography, and memory. In one of his most memorable contributions to this discussion, his brief book Zakhor (1982), Yerushalmi argued that the primary pre-modern Jewish vessels for memory of the past were liturgical and ritual. It was only from the sixteenth century that history writing, he argued, began playing a more significant role in remembering the Jewish past. One of the media that Yerushalmi passed over in his analysis was the role of archeology and the emergence of Jewish material artifacts from the past, especially during the twentieth century. In this lecture Professor Shoham Steiner addresses that lacuna with fascinating examples from medieval Cologne that make its medieval Jews spring to life.

Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner, is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History and an associate professor at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er-Shevah Israel (BGU). From 2018-2021 he served as director of The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC) at BGU. In 2021-2 he is a research fellow at the New-York Public Library and the Center for Jewish Studies at Fordham University.

His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe, the real and imagined “margins of society”.

His first book published originally in Hebrew titled:  חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (מרכז שז"ר: ירושלים 2007) was published in English titled : On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy Madness and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press: Detroit 2014). He edited a collected essays volume titled: Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages (History of Daily Life 5 :Brepols; Turnhout 2016). His recent book published by Wayne State University Press in November 2020 is titled :  Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe.  He is currently researching and writing about The Jewish Community of Cologne in the High Middle Ages.

Faculty in Columbia News

  • “A glimpse into New York City at the turn of the 20th century can now be viewed at an exceptional level of detail: 6.5 million unique census records from 1850, 1880, and 1910 are pinpointed to residential addresses on the recently launched website Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas. “ Read more here.

  • Columbia News caught up with Jeremy Dauber to interview him about his latest book, American Comics: A History, as well as which comics he read as a child, what he’s teaching this year, and who he would like to sit next to at a dinner party. Read more here.

IIJS@Home: Plan A

On December 6, the Institute welcomed Doron Paz and Yoav Paz, writers/directors of Plan A.

In 1945, a group of Holocaust survivors plans to poison the German water system to kill 6 million Germans in revenge. Led by Vilna partisan (and later, Israeli poet) Abba Kovner, and including soldiers from the British Army's Jewish Brigade and the Haganah, this desperate group of survivors will ultimately be forced to decide between shedding more blood in Europe or pivoting towards a new future in Israel. Based on a true story and new scholarship by Dina Porat, the Chief Historian of Yad Vashem. (109 min)

Please enjoy the Q&A.

IIJS@Home: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, A Global History

On Tuesday, November 30, the Institute partnered with Columbia University’s European Institute and the Department of History, to host a conversation with the editors of Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, A Global History.

The emancipatory promise of liberalism – and its exclusionary qualities – shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume, edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam, challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world. 

Panelists:

Abigail Greene, Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Brasenose College

Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University

Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History and Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University

Simon Levis Sullam, Associate Professor of History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Moderator: Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, Columbia University

IIJS@Home: Film Screening of Breaking Bread

On November 15, the Institute welcomed Beth Elise Hawk, writer/director of the documentary Breaking Bread. Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel -- the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's MasterChef -- is on a quest to bring people together through food. She founded the A-sham Arabic Food Festival, where pairs of Arab and Jewish chefs collaborate on dishes like kishek (a Syrian yogurt soup), and qatayef (a dessert typically served during Ramadan). A film about hope, synergy and mouthwatering fare, Breaking Bread illustrates what happens when ethnic, religious, and political boundaries crumble in the kitchen. (85 min) Please enjoy the Q&A below.

IIJS@Home: Golden Ages: Chassidic Singers And Cantorial Revival In The Digital Era

On November 10, the Institute welcome Jeremiah Lockwood to give the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture. Annually, the Institute along with Fordham have worked to find unique and compelling scholarship from those just starting their academic explorations. A cadre of young Chassidic singers who have embraced a style of early 20th century recorded sacred music illustrates the contested nature of prayer practices in the contemporary Jewish American community and pushes at the limits on individual creativity in the Haredi world. Cantorial revivalists are artists who surface sounds of the Jewish sonic past as a means of aesthetic self-cultivation and a utopian effort to revive an approach to prayer characterized by the transportive experience of listening. Beyond a revival of musical style, their work with the archive of early Jewish records attempts to reanimate the role of artists as communal leaders, facilitating an experience of listening as a sacred act while opening up channels for the articulation of creative identities within the context of a conservative social milieu that places limits on expressive behavior.

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. He is currently a Research Fellow at the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience, and the Lead Researcher of the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive, a new undertaking of the Cantors Assembly Foundation. Jeremiah is the recipient of the 2021 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the 2019-20 recipient of the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater. Jeremiah has played around the world as the leader of The Sway Machinery and guitarist in Balkan Beat Box. He was a recipient of a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists and a Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Composer Fellow. Jeremiah successfully defended his dissertation, which focuses on the work of cantors in the Brooklyn Chassidic community, in the Stanford Graduate School of Education in the Fall of 2020.

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: The Genius Of Yosef Yerushalmi

On November 3, the Institute along with The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center welcomed Sylvie Anne Goldberg, to discuss Transmitting Jewish History, based on conversations with Dr. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. In this book, originally published in French, Prof. Yerushalmi discusses his personal and intellectual journey and the mark he’s left on Jewish scholarship and thought.

No people has navigated the tightrope between history and memory with greater doggedness than the Jews. We dig up, investigate and argue about the facts of our past — even as we cling to memories that might not be quite accurate but that serve as our national glue.

That tension was at the heart of the work of Dr. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, a towering Jewish scholar, the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University.

During his long career, Dr. Yerushalmi plumbed an eclectic assortment of Jewish subjects, from the Spanish expulsion to Freud’s relationship with his religion. But Jewish memory was his signature concern as he wrestled with the question as to whether scholarship alone could nurture a living culture.

Goldberg is associate professor at the Center for Historical Research and head of the Jewish Studies Program at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris. She is the author of three other books on Jewish history.

Sylvie in conversation with Elisheva Carlebach, who helped translate and publish the book, and Alexander Kaye, who wrote the book’s introduction.

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University as well as the current Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia. She is an award-winning author and she has twice held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served as Editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review and chaired the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History.

Author Alexander Kaye is the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University. His research includes the history of Jewish thought, with a special focus on political thought, the history of law and theories of Jewish modernity. He is also an expert in Israel Studies, and he focuses on the relationship between law, religion, and politics, and in particular the history of religious Zionism.

In partnership with the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center.

IIJS@Home: Mameloshn! The Story Of Yiddish As Told At POLIN Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews

On Wednesday, October 20, the Institute welcomed Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to present the the Annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture. Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews completes the memorial complex. At the monument, we honor those who died by remembering how they died. At the museum, we honor them – and those who came before and after – by remembering how they lived. This illustrated lecture explores the story of Yiddish – the vernacular of Polish Jews for hundreds of years and the language in which they created a rich modern culture – as presented in POLIN Museum’s multimedia narrative exhibition, a journey of a thousand years. The story of Yiddish at POLIN Museum, the first and only museum to offer a Yiddish audioguide, begins in the Middle Ages and comes forward to the present.

In addition to the video below, we invite you to explore some additional resources related to the POLIN Museum.

Supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She is currently Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw. Her books include Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted and Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt); The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp); and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, (with Jeffrey Shandler), among others.

She was honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received the Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University, the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry, and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Dan David Prize in Israel. She serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States.

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: Places, Spaces And Travel Around The World In The Norman E. Alexander Collections

This year's Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections on October 12 focused on researchers studying space and place using resources from the collections. Francesca Bregoli (Queen's College) discussed her research in the archive of a cross-Mediterranean family of hatmakers between Livorno and Tunisia; Maarten Hell (University of Amsterdam) discussed his work on the multi-ethnic Vlooienburg neighborhood of Amsterdam between 1600-1800; and Lea Schäfer (University of Duesseldorf) described her work mapping the variations in the Yiddish language using the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry.

IIJS@Home: Against My Will: Free Love And Forced Love In Miriam Karpilove's Diary Of A Lonely Girl, Or The Battle Against Free Love

On October 5, we welcomed Jessica Kirzane for a lecture on Yiddish author Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956.). Karpilove was a prolific Yiddish author of short stories and serialized novels. She was known for her sharp-tongued, daring, and unapologetically women-centric attitude. Kirzane will explored Karpilove's pointed criticism of turn-of-the-century Yiddish free love that came at considerable expense to women.

Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She is the translator of Miriam Karpilove's Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020).

To purchase Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove (Syracuse UP, 2020), please visit the Syracuse University Press site and save 50% on fiction with discount code 05LEAF21. Offer expires November 1, 2021.

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)