A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity

On Wednesday, November 2, the Institute welcomed Yitzhak Lewis, author of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity.

The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing, and with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and the emergence of “modern literature” in the storytelling of R. Nachman. Reading his tales and teachings alongside the social, legal, and intellectual history of the time, the book’s guiding question is literary: How does R. Nachman represent this changing environment in his writing? Lewis paints a nuanced and fascinating portrait of a literary thinker and creative genius at the very moment his world was evolving unrecognizably. He argues compellingly that R. Nachman’s narrative response to his changing world was a major point of departure for Jewish literary modernity.

IIJS@Home: Perfect Strangers

On October 23, we welcomed the director of Perfect Strangers, Lior Ashkenazi.

In this Israeli remake of the 2016 Italian hit, seven childhood friends with a lot of shared history and experiences meet for an extravagant dinner party. They agree to play a game that puts all their relationships to the test: every text message, call, and notification they receive on their phones must be revealed for all to see. "Perfect Strangers" is the feature directing debut of iconic actor, Lior Ashkenazi ("Late Marriage," "Walk on Water," "Footnote").

IIJS@Home: Let It Be Morning

On October 3, we welcomed the writer and director of Let It Be Morning, Eran Kolirin.

In Let It Be Morning, Sami, a white-collar telecom worker in the throes of a midlife crisis, returns to the Arab village of his birth for his brother's wedding. When he and his family try to return to Jerusalem, they find the entire village locked down by the IDF. A Kafkaesque fable ensues. Let It Be Morning is written and directed by Eran Kolirin, (The Band's Visit) and adapted from a novel by Sayed Kashua, (A Borrowed Identity).

The Netanyahus, An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

On Wednesday, September 14, the Institute welcomed Joshua Cohen, recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his book The Netanyahus, An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

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IIJS@Home: Jews Of Eastern Europe Series, Part I: Book Talk With Saul Noam Zaritt And Samuel Spinner

On Wednesday, September 21, the Institute had the first of a two part series on The Jews of Eastern Europe featuring Saul Noam Zaritt, author of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody and Samuel Spinner, author of Jewish Primitivism.

Until the Second World War, Eastern Europe was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. This demographic concentration fostered the development of many important religious, cultural, literary, and political movements that continue to define Jewish life to this day. Focusing on recent scholarship that deals with Yiddish literature and Jewish life in interwar Yiddishland, this book series hopes to shed light on how the history of this important Jewish community a century ago has much to teach us today.

IIJS@Home: Speer Goes To Hollywood

On August 16, we welcomed the co-director, co-writer and co-producer of Speer goes to Hollywood, Vanessa Lapa. Albert Speer was one of Hitler’s closest confidants and his chief architect, tasked with rebuilding Berlin as the capital of a global empire. Appointed Minister of Armaments and War production in 1942, Speer was responsible for 12 million slave laborers. And yet, even now, he has the reputation of being the "good Nazi" – a myth he constructed himself with his bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.

IIJS@Home: Forgiveness

On July 12, we welcomed the director of Forgiveness, Adar Shafran. In this comedy/drama set near the border with Gaza, longtime pals Shaul and Nissan (co-writers/directors Guy Amir & Hanan Savyon) attempt to rob a postal bank. The mismanaged job lands Shaul in prison. Years later, upon his release, Shaul is less than pleased to be greeted by the newly-religious Nissan, desperately seeking his forgiveness.

A Look at How Salo Baron Transformed Jewish Studies in America

Professor Rebecca Kobrin has edited a book that examines the multifaceted, pioneering Jewish scholar.

By Eve Glasberg

In 1930, Columbia University appointed Salo Baron to be the Nathan L. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions, marking a turning point in the history of Jewish studies in America. Baron not only became perhaps the most accomplished 20th-century scholar of Jewish history, he was also the author of many books, including the 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews. He created a program and a discipline, mentoring hundreds of scholars, establishing major institutions—including the first academic center to study Israel in the U.S.—and exerting an unparalleled influence on what it meant to study the Jewish past.

Click here to read the article.

Click here to purchase Professor Kobrin’s book, Salo Baron: The Past and Future of Jewish Studies in America

IIJS@Home: AJL Presents Salo Baron: Historian Of The Jews And Champion Of Libraries

Much has been written about the academic legacy of Salo Baron as a result of his scholarship and research. A recent book from Columbia University Press broadens our perspective of his legacy, by reflecting on the role he played in reshaping Jewish studies in the United States from his perch in Morningside Heights. Collecting articles from numerous scholars to mark the 90th anniversary of Baron’s arrival at Columbia University, this book features analysis of his impact as a public intellectual, the creator of the first academic center to study Israel, and champion of libraries. Rebecca Kobrin and Michelle Chesner discussed the recent book and how it informs Baron’s important impact on Columbia University and the world.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, where she is also co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize. She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (2012) and is coeditor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (2015). Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870–1930, will be published by Harvard University Press.

In the News: Awards

  • Rebecca Kobrin (Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History; Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies) and historian Mae Ngai’s “Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas” won two prizes as part of the Cartographic and Geographic Information Society of the Smithsonian Institution’s annual competition. They won Best in Digital/Interactive Map and Best in Show.

  • Dr. Tamar Menashe (Ph.D. ‘21) is the recipient of the 2022 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize. Tamar’s dissertation reconstructs Ashkenazi and Sephardi German Jews' intensive pursuit of civil and religious rights before Germany's Imperial Supreme Court (Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Chamber Court) in the context of the wide-ranging religious and legal reforms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The dissertation reveals that the study of Jews' surprising strategies of interconnecting law and religion in defense of themselves and their religious laws promoted Jews' civil rights in radical ways, and attained a de facto status of imperial citizenship for Ashkenazi and Sephardi-Portugese Jews.

IIJS@Home: American Comics: A History

On April 5, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for Humanities celebrated the publication of Prof. Jeremy Dauber’s latest book, American Comics: A History.

Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prize–winning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial, and deeply profound.

In American Comics, Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history, starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting and iconic images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus; the golden age of newspaper comic strips and the first great superhero boom; the moral panic of the Eisenhower era, the Marvel Comics revolution, and the underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s; and finally into the twenty-first century, taking in the grim and gritty Dark Knights and Watchmen alongside the brilliant rise of the graphic novel by acclaimed practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel.

Dauber’s story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell. Striking and revelatory, American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.

About the Author:

Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (2013); and Jewish Comedy (2017). His research interests include Yiddish literature; comparative Jewish literature; the Yiddish theater; American Jewish literature and popular culture; and American literature and popular culture.

About the Speakers:

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photograpahy (2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (2019).

Rachel Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, disability studies and health humanities, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, and food studies. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013 and winner of the 2014 Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award.

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. Her interests revolve around comics and visual narrative, contemporary feminist literature, and memoir studies as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish American literature and culture. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016).

Victor Lavalle is Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. His most recent novel, The Changeling, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by Time Magazine and USA Today, and was a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and more. He is also the author is Slapboxing with Jesus, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the writer/creator of a comic book, Destroyer. His awards include the Whiting Writers Award, a USA Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award and a British World Fantasy Award, among others.

IIJS@Home: The Authentic Paganism of Shaul Tchernikhovsky

On March 30, the Institute welcomed Prof. Robert Alter for the Miron Lecture on Jewish Literature with Prof. Robert Alter.

Shaul Tchernikhovsky, one of the two major Hebrew poets of the earlier twentieth century, over the years wrote a series of poems celebrating the power and beauty of paganism, much to the consternation of many of his readers. The lecture will try to show how these poems were not simply an ideological gesture but the expression of an authentically felt experience of pantheistic vitalism in the natural world articulated through the ancient gods. Special attention will be devoted to the sonnet cycle To the Sun, one of this poet's most original achievements.

Supported by the generosity of the Knapp Family Foundation.

Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.   He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.   He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.  He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on  American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.   He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible.  His twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses.  He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into ten different languages.   Among his publications over the past thirty years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991),  Imagined Cities  (2005),  Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Art of Bible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021).  His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies.  In 2019 the American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature.  He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and three other institutions.