Join us for an in-person screening of My One and Only. IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock will lead a discussion following the screening.

Tuesday, September 29, at 6:00 p.m. | 617 Kent Hall

This Gemara-inspired mystery orbits an ensemble of characters around a young, religious mother who is convinced her husband has been replaced by an imposter. Through three intertwined story threads, My One and Only examines how people change in relationships, the difference between falling in love and staying in love, and how relationships can endure.

(104 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles)

*Guests must register by Friday, September 25, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and Former White House Senior Advisor Amos Hochstein join IIJS for a discussion, moderated by IIJS Prof. Rebecca Kobrin.

Wednesday, October 7, at 12:30 p.m. | Zoom

*Registered guests will receive the Zoom webinar link via email on the morning of the event.

After October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, the United States government responded with support and empathy. While the attack not only shattered assumptions about Jewish sovereignty, security, and politics, it has also reshaped Israel’s relationship with the United States, its ally for decades. In the months that followed, the U.S. government offered thoughtful support and made key interventions.

In this discussion, Jack Lew, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and current Professor of International and Public Affairs and faculty policy director of the Institute of Global Politics, and Amos Hochstein, Senior Advisor to President Biden and his Lead Envoy to the Middle East and currently Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at SIPA's Institute for Global Politics, reflect on this transformational moment from the vantage point of the American government.  

How did the Biden administration see and make sense of October 7 and its consequences?  How should this moment be integrated into the broader history of US/Israel relations? What insights do those from inside the Situation Room offer for understanding this moment? In what ways are they making sense of the current shifts in the Democratic Party as a result of the Hamas–Israel conflict reshaping the Middle East?

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies continues this vital conversation with the third event in our series, Framing October 7.

Secretary Jack Lew returned to Columbia/SIPA as Professor of International and Public Affairs and faculty policy director of the Institute of Global Politics after serving as United States Ambassador to Israel in the Biden Administration. Previously, he served as the 76th Secretary of the Treasury and White House Chief of Staff in the Obama Administration.  Earlier, under President Obama, he served as Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a position he also held in President Clinton's cabinet when the U.S. budget operated at a surplus for three consecutive years.  

Lew began his service in the White House in the Clinton Administration as Special Assistant to the President. In that position, he played a lead role in designing AmeriCorps, the national service program, and worked on health care reform with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.  He began his career on Capitol Hill where he was Executive Director of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee under House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.  

In the private sector, Lew served as managing director and chief operating officer for two different Citigroup business units and as Managing Partner at Lindsay Goldberg.  Prior to that, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of New York University, where he was responsible for budget, finance, and operations, and served as a professor of public administration. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Amos Hochstein serves as Managing Partner at TWG Global, a diversified holding company focused on scaling innovative businesses across AI, technology, financial services, energy, and sports. He is a recognized global energy expert, senior negotiator, and business executive with extensive experience in national security, economic strategy, and international investments. He has been at the forefront of shaping US national security, energy security, infrastructure investments, and high-stakes negotiations.

With over 20 years of experience in the White House, State Department, and Capitol Hill, Hochstein most recently served as deputy assistant and senior advisor to President Biden. He was the lead US negotiator in securing the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon, negotiating a truce between Israel and Hezbollah. Previously, he negotiated several global economic and diplomatic agreements, including the Israel-Lebanon maritime boundary agreement, which resolved a long-standing dispute and enabled significant investment opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Hochstein led negotiations leading to the historic India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC).  Launched by leaders at the G20, IMEC connects the rail, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure of India and Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.

Hochstein was the driving force behind the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI), leading global efforts to successfully mobilize billions of USD in investments in critical minerals and energy, high-speed digital infrastructure, commercial rail, and agribusiness. He also led the effort to revitalize the Lobito Corridor, a transformative infrastructure initiative that enhances trade and connectivity across Africa, as well as the Luzon Economic Corridor, which helped develop infrastructure in the Philippines and accelerate growth in critical industries by reducing energy and logistics costs.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She also served as the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia.

Co-Sponsored by:

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

IIJS is pleased to welcome Prof. Nicholas Lemann for a discussion of his new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, joined by IIJS Prof. Jeremy Dauber.

Tuesday, October 13, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

Nicholas Lemann, a veteran New Yorker correspondent, grew up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege. Yet in contrast to his parents’ generation, which always sought to downplay their religious background, Lemann was intrigued by his roots, thinking he wanted to be like Jack Burden, the ever-curious reporter in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

And like his fictional hero, who gets drawn into a web of Southern political intrigue, Lemann in Returning delves deeply into the family story—from their arrival in the 1830s as peddlers from Germany, to their becoming plantation owners and department store owners after the Civil War, to their emergence as aspirants in the aristocratic world of New Orleans, where they could never quite belong.

Nicholas Lemann was born and raised in New Orleans. He began his journalism career there as a 17-year-old staff writer for an alternate weekly paper called the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was president of The Harvard Crimson, in 1976, magna cum laude in American History and Literature. He has worked as a reporter and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic (where he was national correspondent from 1983 to 1999) and The New Yorker (where he has been a staff writer for twenty-five years), and contributed to many other publications. From 2003 to 2013 he was dean of Columbia Journalism School, leading a period of significant growth and change for the school, and since then he has been a professor there. At Columbia he has also helped launch Columbia Global Reports, a publishing venture that he continues to lead, Columbia World Projects, and the Knight Columbia First Amendment Institute. He is currently one of three co-chairs of the university’s antisemitism task force. His books include The Promised Land (1991), The Big Test (1999), Redemption (2006), Transaction Man (2019), and, most recently, Higher Admissions (2024). He is a member of several honorary societies, including the American Philosophical Society, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves as co-chair of the academy’s Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.

Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and, for a decade, directed the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. He is also currently the Mendelson Professor of American Studies and the director of Columbia’s Center for American Studies. For twelve years, he co-edited Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History with Barbara Mann. His books include 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); Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (W.W. Norton, 2017); American Comics: A History (W.W. Norton, 2021); and Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press: 2023). His most recent book, American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King (Algonquin: 2024), was named a best book of 2024 by the Boston Globe. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

*Guests must register by Thursday, October 8, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Please join the East Central European Center, the Harriman Institute, and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies for the first installment of the Polish-Jewish Past and Present series, featuring a book talk by Sarah Zarrow. Professor Emerita Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (NYU) and Professor Rebecca Kobrin (Columbia) will serve as discussants. Moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.

By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the many ways Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context and sheds light on how ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in museum spaces.

About the author:
Sarah Ellen Zarrow is a historian and an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College (CUNY). Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where she also held the Endowed Professorship in Jewish History. Her ongoing research focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. She is especially interested in Jewish museum practices, language politics, and schooling. Her latest research concerns technical/vocational education for girls in interwar Poland, focusing on a network of girls’ schools. She previously was a Research Fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and she holds a doctorate from the joint program of the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and the History Department at NYU.

About the discussants:
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She is currently Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) and, most recently, A Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930.

Join the Institute for a presentation by Zisl Slepovitch on the Jewish fiddle in the pre-World War II southeastern Belarus from Sofia Magid’s collection.

Thursday, October 15, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

Sofia Magid’s recordings of Jewish musicians in Volyn and southeastern Belarus made between 1928-38, constitute one of a kind document that preserves and conveys styles and repertoire of Jewish instrumentalists and folk singers, of various age groups, professional, semiprofessional, and amateur alike. Following publication of these pieces’ transcriptions done by D. Zisl Slepovitch, this presentation is the first attempt to systematize this relatively small but uniquely important collection.

D. Zisl Slepovitch, born and raised in Minsk, Belarus, a New Yorker since 2008; he is a Jewish music scholar (PhD, Belarusian State Academy of Music), a sought-after classical, klezmer, and improvised music performer (woodwinds, keyboards), conductor, music producer, band leader, educator (music, Yiddish language), composer/arranger, and a musician-actor. He is a founding member of the Litvakus klezmer band, a Musician-in-Residence at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, a pianist and music coordinator at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (NYC), and a frequent contributor to the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYC). His critically acclaimed credits include Musical Treasures from Sofia Magid's Jewish Collection (music folios series), Songs from Testimonies with the Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble and Sasha Lurje (3 albums), Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (off-Broadway, cast album), Defiance (movie), and more. @zislepovitch http://DmitriSlepovitch.com

*Guests must register by Tuesday, October 13, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Prof. Joseph Zeira joins the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies for a discussion of the long-term economic impact of conflict, conscription, and defense spending in Israel.

Tuesday, October 20, at 6:00 PM | 617 Kent Hall

This talk describes the costs of the Israeli-Arab conflict to Israel. These are direct costs, which are mainly military spending, and indirect costs, which are mainly forgone output. During the period of the wide conflict with the Arab countries, between 1948 and 1980, the direct costs of the conflict were very high, as it involved conventional wars. After the Peace with Egypt the conflict became narrow, between Israel and the Palestinians mainly. This involved fighting with militias, which has low direct costs. However, the indirect costs remained high and even increased. First, every eruption of the conflict with the Palestinians causes a recession. Second, conscription delays entry of young people to their work career and that is costly as it reduces their human capital for many years. The largest indirect cost is a result of the high risk of the conflict, which deters investment. As a result, the conflict reduces the relative size of physical capital in Israel. Hence, the reduction of this risk could increase output by more than 26 percent.

In contrast to these high costs, the economic benefits of the conflict are rather low.

Joseph Zeira is professor emeritus of Economics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the years, he visited Harvard, Brown, Brandeis, the University of Crete, Columbia University and Northwestern University. Joseph Zeira is a macroeconomist, who specializes in a number of areas: technology and economic growth, income distribution, money and liquidity, and the economy of Israel. His book, The Israeli Economy: A Story of Success and Costs, was published in 2021 by Princeton University Press.

Joseph Zeira has also been involved in a number of professional activities, as an advisor to the Minister of Finance in Israel, as a board member of a Pension Fund, and in the Aix Group, where Israelis, Palestinians, and Internationals study the economic aspects of a potential peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. In 2014, he was a member of a government committee for reducing poverty in Israel. In 2016-2020, he served as the president of the Israeli Economic Association. Since 2020 he is the Chair of the Magid Institute for External Education in the Hebrew University.

*Guests must register by Friday, October 16, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Prof. Karen Underhill joins IIJS to discuss her recent book, Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity, which examines Bruno Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism and his use of the Polish language to reflect on the modern Jewish experience.

Wednesday, October 21, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

In the 1930s, through the modernist prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), in two short volumes—Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like a number of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged in formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.

Karen Underhill is Associate Professor of Polish and Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research focuses on multilingual Polish Jewish Culture, changing memory of Poland’s Jewish past, and hybrid and diasporic cultural forms that arose in the multilingual context of 19th and 20th century Poland and Central Europe. Her book Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2024) received the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, the AATSEEL Best First Book Award, and the ASEEES Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies. Her current research focuses on uses of the figures of Adam Mickiewicz and Jacob Frank in the Polish-Jewish cultural imagination. She is co-founder of Massolit Books & Café in Krakow, Poland; a member of the editorial board of POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry; and on the Board of Directors of the Chicago YIVO Society.

*Guests must register by Monday, October 19, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye family.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join us for a virtual screening of Cabaret Total. Watch the film at home, then join us for a discussion with Roy Assaf, writer, director, and star of the film.

Monday, October 26, at noon | Zoom

*Registered guests will receive an email on Friday, October 23 with a link to watch the film. The film will be available to view at any time through Monday, October 26.

A separate email with the Zoom link to the Q&A will be sent the morning of Monday, October 26, ahead of the discussion at noon.

Acclaimed Israeli actor Roy Assaf (Ophir Award winner for Wounded Land and God's Neighbors) co-writes and stars in his feature directing debut about a high school drama teacher who stages vivid cabaret shows in his Negev town’s community center. When a comment to his students makes him a target of social media rage, his art and life merge in escalating performances of 21st-Century anxiety.

Assaf sings, dances, juggles, and monologues in a virtuosic performance, shot with Ophir-Award-winning cinematography reminiscent of the Oscar-winning Birdman. Frequent attendees at IIJS film events will recognize Roy Assaf from his films Matchmaking, All I Can Do, and Wedding Doll.

(90 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

The Institute is pleased to welcome Prof. Seth Schwartz for a discussion of his forthcoming book, The Jews of Asia Minor, 214 BCE to 500 CE: Text and Materiality. He will be joined in conversation by Prof. John Ma of Columbia University’s Department of Classics.

Wednesday, November 4, at noon | 617 Kent Hall.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean.

The Jews of Asia Minor, 214 BCE to 500 CE: Text and Materiality,  explores the benefits and pitfalls of writing about an archaeologically rich but literarily poor topic. The results of this inquiry are strongly revisionist: The Jews in ancient Asia Minor, or Anatolia, are shown to have been far from having achieved a perfect balance between integration in their host cities and self-preservation that scholars have long ascribed to them. Rather, the Jews experienced conflict and poverty, struggling to carve out a place for themselves in the Greek cities of Asia. Jewish communal institutions played little role before Late Antiquity, but Jews sometimes achieved a diffuse sense of community through trade guild membership and participation in theatrical events. Surprisingly, many of them expressed pride in their Roman identity but rarely, or never, their local civic identity. Even during the Jews’ brief period of prosperity and heightened civic engagement, c. 400 CE, their Jewish lives were characterized by strong localism, featuring many elements that distinguish the Jews of Asia sharply from those elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

Seth Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Graduate Program in Classical Studies. He received his PhD in History at Columbia in 1985. Before returning to Columbia in 2009, Schwartz taught at Cornell, the University of Rhode Island and the Jewish Theological Seminary, had research fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Society of Fellows and King’s College Cambridge. He wrote Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987)(with Roger Bagnall, Alan Cameron and Klaas Worp), Josephus and Judaean Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1990), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), and The Ancient Jews From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

John Ma teaches in the Department of Classics at Columbia. He completed a BA in Classics and a DPhil in Ancient History at Oxford, where he taught for 15 years before moving to Columbia. He is interested in ancient history, principally Hellenistic, epigraphical evidence, historical geography, paying particular attention to the interaction of local communities and empire. His latest monograph is an essay on the history of the Greek city-state: Polis (2024).

*Guests must register by Monday, November 2, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Noa Yedlin joins IIJS to discuss her new book, House Arrest.

Monday, November 9, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

Barak Fogel, an unemployed professor, newly separated from his wife, awakes one morning to startling news: his beloved mother, deputy director of the Theodore Hirsch Centre for Sustainable Peace, professor of Israel studies, a refined collector of Israeli art and an avid member of several charitable associations—is suspected of embezzling 3.4 million shekels from her place of work.

Barak now attempts to navigate within this turbulent reality: between his sister, who is convinced their mother is innocent, and his skeptical brother; between the wife he has just separated from and who is still present in everyone’s lives, and his friends who disappear; between old mistakes and new insults – all played out in front of a relentless Media.

More than anything, he must reconsider the character of the mother that he knows so well. Who is this woman with the wonderful sense of humour, sharp wit and a ready inclination for righteousness, who now sits under house arrest?

House Arrest takes apart its characters with a sharpened knife, building from them an original, tumultuous novel about family and money, motherhood and children, failure and success, social standing and self-image.

Noa Yedlin is an Israeli author, the recipient of the Sapir Prize (the Israeli Man Booker) and the Prime Minister's Literature Award and author of the bestselling House Arrest, Stockholm, People Like Us and The Wrong Book. Yedlin was named by Haaretz Magazine one of "66 Israeli Women You Should Know”.

Yedlin is also the creator of a two-season TV series based on her bestselling novel Stockholm (the Israeli Best Mini-Series TV Award). A German remake of the series (You Don't Die Among Friends) won Best Scripted Format at 2021 International Format Awards and Best European Series at La Rochelle Festival De La Fiction 2021. The series is now being re-made by SVT Sweden (broadcast: Christmas 2022). Her bestselling novel People Like Us is currently being developed into a series in Israel. A stage adaption of House Arrest is now playing at Beit Lessin Theater in Tel Aviv.

Yedlin is considered one of Israel's top writers. Her novels – widely known for their dark and subtle humor - sketch with biting precision the complex relationships both within the family and outside of it, while capturing and deconstructing the spirit of the times. Yedlin deals with global phenomena that infiltrate the personal realm and shape our everyday lives - the rise and fall of social elites, shifts in the balance of power and the never-ending battle between individualism and conformism.

*Guests must register by Thursday, November 5, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

IIJS is pleased to welcome Prof. Shai Ginsburg for the fall 2026 Professor Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature: “From Timber to Text: Hebrew Culture and Class in Imperial Russia.”

Thursday, November 19, at 2:00 p.m. | 617 Kent Hall.

In his paper, Prof. Ginsburg traces the surprising entanglement of commerce, capital, and Hebrew culture in the Jewish communities of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Focusing on the town of Kapyl (Kopyl) and drawing on autobiographical and fictionalized autobiographical writings by Abraham Jacob Paperna and Sholem Yankev Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim), it argues that the transformation of Hebrew education—and, with it, the “emergence” (though this term itself is debatable) of modern Hebrew fiction—cannot be understood simply as the triumph of Maskilic ideology. Rather, new forms of Hebrew learning emerged alongside the expansion of capitalist networks, the circulation of goods and people across the Russian Empire and beyond, and the rise of a Jewish middle class eager to redefine its social identity.

Using Kapyl as a case study, the talk will reflect on the relationship between different historiographical frameworks: between so-called Jewish and general history; between social, economic, and literary history; between the history of Hebrew literature and Jewish literatures in other languages; and between the history of Hebrew literature and the history of the Hebrew language itself.

Shai Ginsburg teaches at Duke University. His work focuses on modern Jewish cultures and politics, with particular attention to Hebrew and Jewish intellectual histories. He has published on Israeli literature and cinema, Zionism, the history of the Hebrew language, and critical theory. In recent years, he has also developed a strong interest in games—both video games and board games—and has devoted much of his teaching to the study of games and play. His current project traces the emergence of Hebrew speech across the Jewish world in the years leading up to the First World War.

*Guests must register by Tuesday, November 17, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Knapp family.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

IIJS Prof. Ofer Dynes will discuss his new book, The Fiction of the State, in conversation with Prof. Naor Ben-Yehoyada.

Tuesday, November 24, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

In a compelling new interpretation, this book locates the origins of modern Jewish literature within the turbulent events which reshaped Europe during the late eighteenth century: the partitions of Poland, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. As Austria, Russia, and Prussia consolidated their rule over the Polish lands and banned most forms of political expression, literature became a central venue for reflecting on the new political order. Dynes argues that Jewish intellectuals turned to fiction—prose, poetry, and drama—to engage in political debates and make sense of new state structures. Through their writing, Jewish intellectuals positioned themselves as interpreters, mediators, and, at times, collaborators with the new imperial powers.

Combining meticulous archival research and nuanced textual readings, Dynes contextualizes modern Jewish literature as rooted in the awareness of major political upheaval. Rather than an internal Jewish struggle between tradition and modernity, he presents Hebrew and Yiddish literature as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings. Radically expanding the literary canon, he uncovers a diverse and often unexpected array of figures and texts, including a Catholic Austrian bureaucrat who wrote poetry in Yiddish, a Prussian rabbi and French count who jointly composed a poem to the Russian Tsar; and a Hebrew novel born out of its author's collaboration with the secret police. Connecting Jewish texts with broader trends in European history, this book presents an untold story of how Jewish writers used literature to grapple with a shifting political landscape in the age of Enlightenment and empires.

Ofer Dynes is the Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught courses on the literature and history of Eastern European Jewry and served as Head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. His first book, The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature, received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. His articles have appeared in Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Eastern European Jewish Affairs, AJS Review, and other scholarly journals. He is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New York–based workshop for scholars of Hebrew literature. In 2027, he will be a research fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Associate Professor of anthropology at Columbia University and is the author of The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017). His work examines unauthorized migration, criminalization, the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean.

*Guests must register by Friday, November 20, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join us for an in-person film screening of The Floaters, followed by Q&A with director, Rachel Israel.

Tuesday, December 1, at 6:00 p.m. | 617 Kent Hall

Just fired from her rock band, Nomi (Jackie Tohn, Nobody Wants This) takes a last-resort job from her best friend Mara (Sarah Podemski, Reservation Dogs), who is now the director of their Jewish sleepaway camp. As Mara contends with all manner of chaos at camp, she tasks Nomi with supervising an eclectic group of teenage misfits. Nomi and the teens must confront their insecurities and band together to save their camp by winning a Maccabiah against their overprivileged rival camp. Featuring a cast of veteran comic actors (Aya Cash, Seth Green, Steve Guttenberg) and hilarious up-and-coming teenage actors, The Floaters offers multigenerational perspectives on Jewish summer camp with affection for all the ways camp shapes identity – Jewish and otherwise.

(101 minutes; English with English subtitles)

Rachel Israel received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she has also taught Screenwriting and Directing Actors. Rachel’s feature film debut, Keep the Change (2017), won Best Narrative Feature Film and Best Director at Tribeca Film Festival, among other honors. The Floaters, her second feature, won the NYWIFT Best Directing Award at the Woodstock Film Festival. Her third feature, Influenced, is currently screening in theaters and digitally.

*Guests must register by Friday, November 27, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Prof. Yedidah Koren joins IIJS to discuss “How the Amoraim Reshape Lineage” and the multiple ways lineage and identity are imagined in rabbinic sources.

Wednesday, December 2, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

Scholars of ancient Judaism have discussed lineage for well over a century. These studies have tended to focus on the extent to which various groups “valued” lineage or merit. Using this dichotomic lens, scholars have posited an ideological divide between Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis, claiming that the former were more lenient regarding lineage, while the latter were more stringent.

This divide, however, does not align with many sources, which Prof. Yedidah Koren has examined in previous research. More importantly, several central rabbinic sources on lineage do not neatly fall on either side of the stringent/lenient divide, and scholars have offered conflicting interpretations of them. In this talk, Koren argues that the very question of rabbinic attitudes towards lineage assumes that “lineage” itself is a stable construct—one that the rabbis either value or disregard—thereby overlooking the multiple ways in which the rabbis envision and construe lineage.

Koren focuses on two primary sets of such sources. One, unique to Babylonian Amoraim, connects lineage to geography and uses it to put into place inner Jewish separation based on geography. The other, found in both Palestinian and Babylonian Amoraic sources, identifies lineage with character. In both cases, she shows how the rabbis reshape lineage while drawing on Greco-Roman tropes. Additionally, she highlights developments particular to the Babylonian Amoraim, demonstrating how they not only re-envision lineage but also genealogical knowledge itself, and how they deploy lineage to advance other goals of separation and delegitimization.

By drawing out the pluriformity and malleability of lineage in rabbinic sources and by offering a more nuanced account, this talk contributes to the study of the history of Halakhah and Jewish thought. By looking at the multiple ways in which lineage is imagined and separation is initiated, this talk sheds new light on ancient Jewish constructions of identity. 

Yedidah Koren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Specializing in Ancient Jewish and Rabbinic literature, her work focuses on identity, constructions of Jewishness, the body, Jewish practice in antiquity, and the formation of Halakhah. She is currently completing her first book, Blemished Jews: Descent, Identity, and Social Control in Rabbinic Literature, which shows how the rabbis used the notion of blemished lineage to define Jewishness and belonging.

*Guests must register by Monday, November 30, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Norman E. Alexander Library for Jewish Studies on Zoom on Thursday, December 3, at 1:00 p.m. (ET) for the Annual Norman E. Alexander Celebration of Collections: The Stories Contained Within.

Six scraps of printed text on paper. An old record book with beautiful signatures. A manuscript with unusual diagrams. What tales do these documents tell? Stories of wandering and of homes, of mystical inquiry and practical craftsmanship. For this year's Alexander Celebration of Collections, we are pleased to welcome Professors Yaron ben-Naeh (Hebrew University), Agata Paluch (University of Cologne), and Noam Sienna (University of Minnesota), to discuss their research using the unique material in our collections.

Join the Institute for a seminar with Prof. Marjorie Lehman and Prof. Mira Wasserman as they explore slavery in the Talmud.

Wednesday, December 9, at noon | 617 Kent Hall

This presentation will introduce two slaves from within the pages of the Babylonian Talmud, Tavi and Minyamin. As part of Marjorie Lehman’s and Mira Wasserman’s larger project on slavery in the Talmud, they will show how interpretations of the sources that discuss Tavi and Minyamin reflect divergent conceptions of the institution of slavery and of Jews as slaveholders. In this lecture, they will complicate the meaning of the word “eved” (slave) in rabbinic sources to expose different redactional agendas in different talmudic contexts.

Marjorie Lehman is Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Area Chair of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures. Her books include: The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus (Wayne State University Press, 2012)  and Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma (Brandeis University Press, 2022). She has co-edited two books, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization at Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How It Happens (Academic Studies Press, 2017). She is also the co-director of the digital humanities project in Jewish Studies called Footprints: Jewish Books in Time and Place (http://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/). She co-directs the Jewish Librarianship Certificate Program, a joint endeavor between the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Association of Jewish Libraries. 

Mira Beth Wasserman is Vice President for Academic Affairs at Reconstructing Judaism, where she serves as Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is co-editor of Modern Jewish Ethics Since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources and Issues (2025), part of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. Her book, Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities (Penn Press, 2017), was awarded the Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies published in 2017.  As director of the Center for Jewish Ethics from 2017 until 2025, Wasserman pursued public scholarship on race, gender, and Jewish ethics. She led the NEH-funded project Race, Religion & American Judaism, sparking new scholarship and developing resources forstudying the multiracial, multicultural realities of Jewish life.

*Guests must register by Monday, December 7, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye family.