Michelle Margolis on "Jews at Columbia: The first hundred years (1754 - 1854)"

IIJS’ Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, Michelle Margolis, chronicled the early history of Jews at Columbia for the University Library page. Her article, “Jews at Columbia: The first hundred years (1754 - 1854), is available online.

Michelle Margolis is the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies. She is responsible for developing the current library collections, both rare and general, as well as supporting research in Judaic and Israel Studies from around the world and in all languages.  Ms. Margolis is also available to help with any level of questions in research of Judaic or Israel studies.  Michelle represents the library to students and faculty.  

Columbia Libraries’ Judaica collection includes materials from the 10th to the 21st centuries, and represents Jews from across the globe. Columbia’s Judaica manuscript collection is the third largest in the United States.  A 2012 exhibition highlighted some of the most important manuscripts in the collection, and an exhibition in 2016 displayed highlights from Columbia’s Yiddish collection. More information about Judaica in the libraries, including subject specific guides to the collection, can be found here.

Click here to read Michelle Margolis’s article on The Columbia University Libraries page.

Jonathan Dekel of “Checkout” Joins for Q&A to Conclude IIJS Summer Film Series

The IIJS Summer Film Series concluded with Checkout, the Israeli “psychedelic spy comedy” from director and co-writer Jonathan Dekel. Dekel joined us online on Monday, July 15, at 12:00 PM for a virtual Q&A with IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock.

In this spy comedy, Dov, an aging and feckless Mossad operative, has just been given notice of his mandatory retirement. About to leave his Istanbul hotel on a wave of self-pity, he decides to stay when he identifies an Arabic-speaking traveler as "Gilgamesh," a notorious terrorist. No spoilers: Dov's pursuit of Gilgamesh plays out more like Curb Your Enthusiasm than Fauda. (97 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles)

Jonathan Dekel’s 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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2024 IIJS Summer Film Series Begins with Erez Tadmor and "Matchmaking"

The IIJS Summer Film Series began this year with “Matchmaking,” the Israeli hit from director and co-writer Erez Tadmor. On Monday, June 17, at 12:00 PM, the Institute hosted a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker and IIJS Film Series Coordinator Stuart Weinstock.

A box office hit in Israel and on the Jewish film festival circuit, Matchmaking tells the comic story of Moti Bernstein, the ideal yeshiva bucher and the perfect match for any Haredi Orthodox bride-to-be. While Moti seems to be on a path towards marriage with an exceptional match, his Ashkenazi world is thrown into turmoil when he falls in love with Nechama, a Mizrahi girl. When the matchmakers of his Haredi community refuse to pair him with Nechama, Moti seeks an unconventional solution to bridge the social gap between them.  (98 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Erez Tadmor is an Israeli-born filmmaker working across genre lines with diverse short and feature-length films. His internationally-acclaimed films include: A Matter of Size (2009), Magic Men (2014), the Ophir-Award-winning Wounded Land (2015), The Art of Waiting (2019), and Children of Nobody (2022). His 2004 short film, Strangers, won the Audience Award for Short Films at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Q&A with Erez Tadmor 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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Israeli Organizers Discuss the Democracy Movement Post-October 7 in IIJS Webinar

On April 28, the IIJS hosted a webinar with Dr. Ronit Levine-Schnur (Tel Aviv University) and Shany Granot-Lubaton (NYC Hostages Families Forum), titled “Fighting for Democracy: Reflections on the Israeli Democracy Protest Movement from the Post-October 7 World.”

The past year has been unprecedentedly dramatic and tumultuous for Israeli citizens. Ever since the newly elected far right-wing government declared its plan for a judicial overhaul in January 2023, there have been protests throughout the country—creating the largest protest movement in Israel’s history and one of the most persistent in recent global history—culminating after 9 months with the October 7th attack. With global democratic deterioration, and the upcoming contentious elections in the US, two leading Israeli organizers, Ronit Levine-Schnur and Shany Granot-Lubaton, recount the challenges, successes, and failures of the democratic protest movement, reflect on the impact of October 7th events on the movement, and offer insights on fighting for democracy.

Dr. Ronit Levine-Schnur is a Senior Lecturer at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. She was the co-founder and the leader of “The Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy” until Oct. 7th. Currently she is a co-leader of “The Day After the War Forum”.

Shany Granot-Lubaton is the leader of the New York City protests for Israeli democracy (the largest protest community outside of Israel). Right after Oct. 7th she co-founded the Hostages Families Forum in NYC. She was previously the chief of staff and spokesperson of the former head of the labor party, MK Shelly Yechimovich and deputy director of the “Darkenu” movement.

The event was organized and moderated by Maya Gayer - Journalist, Fulbright fellow in Public Humanities and MA student in the Oral History Program at Columbia University, who is building an oral history archive of the Israeli democracy protest movement as her thesis project.

This webinar is available to view in full below.

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

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2024 Miron Lecture Investigates "The Place of Hebrew" with Maya Arad and Shachar Pinsker

On Wednesday, April 17, the Institute hosted the Professor Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature with bestselling Israeli-American author Maya Arad (Stanford University) and Prof. Shachar Pinsker (University of Michigan), who participated in a discussion called “The Place of Hebrew.”

Pinsker and Arad discuss the possibility of writing Hebrew in America, expanding the setting and characters of Hebrew literature beyond Israel. Using the translation of Arad's collection of novellas, The Hebrew Teacher (Translated by Jessica Cohen), which came out last month (New Vessel Press) as an example, they raise the question of the place of Hebrew in today’s Israel, in America, and elsewhere.

Maya Arad is the author of eleven books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is currently writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Her most recent book, The Hebrew Teacher, will be released in English translation for the first time on March 19, 2024.

Shachar Pinsker is a Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies, and Associate Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. His scholarly writings include two award-winning books: Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (2011), and A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (2018). He is also the editor (with Sheila Jelen) of Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity (2007), Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores (2016), and Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (2021). He is currently writing a book on Yiddish in Israeli literature, and co-directing the NEH supported research project: The Feuilleton, the Public Sphere, and Modern Jewish Cultures.

Dr. Arad and Prof. Pinsker’s talk is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Knapp family.

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Pierre Birnbaum Chronicles American Antisemitism at the 2024 Yerushalmi Lecture

On Thursday, April 11, the IIJS and the Columbia Alliance Program hosted French historian and sociologist Pierre Birnbaum for the 2024 Yosef Yerushalmi Annual Memorial Lecture. Dr. Birnbaum’s talk was titled: “The Vanishing of Hope?”

Pierre Birn­baum is a his­to­ri­an and polit­i­cal soci­ol­o­gist who is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris 1 Pan­théon-Sor­bonne. His books in Eng­lish include Paths of Eman­ci­pa­tion: Jews, States, and Cit­i­zen­ship (coedit­ed with Ira Katznel­son, 1995), Jew­ish Des­tinies: Cit­i­zen­ship, State, and Com­mu­ni­ty in Mod­ern France (2000), The Anti-Semit­ic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (2011), and Léon Blum: Prime Min­is­ter, Social­ist, Zion­ist (2015). His most recent book, Tears of His­to­ry: The Rise of Polit­i­cal Anti­semitism in the Unit­ed States, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023.

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

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

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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.

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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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IIJS Lecturer Wins Top Faculty Honor

We are delighted to announce that Agnieszka Legutko, Senior Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program in the Department of Germanic Languages, has been awarded Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

The Lenfest Award is “given annually to faculty of unusual merit across a range of professional activities, including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement — with a primary emphasis on instruction and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students.”

According to Dean of Arts and Sciences Amy Hungerford’s announcement, Dr. Legutko was recognized “for her exceptional record of teaching and mentoring students through dynamic and interactive classes and field engagements, her innovative course design that integrates digital tools into the study of Yiddish language and culture, and her contributions to the ongoing success and expansion of the Yiddish language program at Columbia.”

Dean Hungerford’s announcement, as well as the full list of 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award recipients, can be viewed on the Columbia Arts and Sciences website.

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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