Jewish and Israel Studies Blog

Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program will sponsor a series of events in the Spring Semester, lectures, films, and readings.

The Israeli Film Festival will screen new Israeli films on five consecutive Thursdays between  January 28 and February 25. Among films shown will be: A Matter of Sizel; Touch Away (TV series); My Father, My Lord; Eli and Ben.  All films will be screened at 8pm, Goldsmith Family Cinema.
We are delighted to announce several upcoming lectures:

On March 4, Elisheva Carlebach will speak on “Jewish Time/Christian Time: Calendar and Polemic in Early Modern Europe”

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Baron Professor of Jewish history at Columbia University.  She is the author of an award winning book “The Pursuit of Heresy :Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies” (Columbia University Press, 1990; 1994) and “Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750″ (Yale University Press, 2001) which was the finalist for the 2001-02 National Jewish Book Award; please check for time and place.

On April 12, Hilit Surowitz will speak on “Blood and Identity: Picart’s La Circoncision des Juifs Portugais,” time and place will be announced.

Other speakers will include, Professor Moshe Rosman, Professor Bernard Cooperman, and Israeli writers.  Please check back for details.

On behalf of the Committee for Middle Eastern Studies at Wesleyan University, we would like to invite you to the Middle Eastern Film Series, which includes the following films:

Wednesday, November 4, The Band’s Visit, a film from Israel
Wednesday, November 11, The Extras, a film from Syria
Wednesday, November 18, Dunya, a film from Egypt.

All films will be screened at PAC 001 at 7pm. Admission is free.

The first film from Israel, “The Band’s Visit,” is about an Egyptian band that came to Israel to play at the opening of an Arab Cultural Center in a major Israeli city, but by mistake the band arrives at an isolated village where as one of the villagers informs them, “there is no Arab culture, no Israeli culture, no culture at all.”
The film won the official Cannes Festival selection as well as 8 Israeli academy awards. It is 90 minutes with English subtitles.

Next semester the Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program will present the Israeli Film Festival, please check for updates here or on the Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program’s website http://www.wesleyan.edu/jis for updates.

We have reached the “midterm” period.  Israel and Jewish Studies Certificate Program has hosted several lectures and events, in September, Professor Lawrence Fine gave a lecture “We are bound to one another as if we were one person: Spiritual Friend”.

In early October, we hosted an event “Rembering Vilna.”  A new documentary, “The World Was Ours,” on pre-war and wartime Vilna by Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren was screened. Following the film, in a musical interlude, vocalist Maria Krupoves sang songs of the Vilna Ghetto. The program also included a panel discussion by Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren, Executive Producer, and the director of The Vilna Project; Professor Samuel Kassow, Trinity College; and Dr. Michael Good, author of “The Search for Major Plagge”. The event was also made possible by a gift from the Denise and Gary Rosenberg Fund.

And just this week, Michael Morgan, Chancellor Professor of Philosophy & Jewish Studies, Emeritus, at Indiana University  spoke on “Messianism, Israel, and Judaism in America”. The event was co-sponsored by College of Letters and Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program.

For the remainder of the semester we have several exciting events:
Thursday, October 29, Loren Spielman, our visiting instructor in the Religion Department, will speak on Gladiators and God-fearers: Jewish and Christian Reactions to Sport and Spectacle, at 4:15pm in PAC 421

Thursday, November 4, Professor Sara Lipton will lecture on “Becoming Visual: The Emergence of the Visible Jewess in Later Medieval Art,”  at 4:15 at PAC 001. Professor Lipton is the author of Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee, which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize for Best First Book and was a finalist for the Koret Jewish History Book Prize.  The lecture is based on her new book Dark Mirror: Jews, Vision, and Witness in Medieval Art (forthcoming from Metropolitan Books).  The lecture breaks new ground in the study of medieval Jewish and Christian history, visual evidence, and Christian theology. The event is co-sponsored by Jewish & Israel Studies Certificate Program, History Department, & Medieval Studies.

On Thursday, November 11, Dan Bahat, a leading Israeli Archaeologist and a member of the Faculty of the University of St. Michael’s College at the School of Theology, University of Toronto, will discuss his research with us.  4:15, 118 Downey House.

We hope you will join us!

Wesleyan’s Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate Program welcomes Loren Spielman as our visiting professor in Jewish Studies in 2009-10. Loren Spielman comes to Wesleyan with a Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Ancient Judaism.

He will be teaching courses ” Jewish Attitudes to Entertainment and Leisure in the Ancient World” (RELI 219) in the fall, and Introduction to Rabbinic Literature, along with a seminar in his specialty in the Spring semester.

Please join me in welcoming Loren Spielman to Wesleyan.

FENIA AND YAAKOV LEVIANT MEMORIAL PRIZE IN YIDDISH STUDIES AWARDED TO GABRIELLA SAFRAN AND STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN; CHANA MLOTEK AND MARK SLOBIN RECEIVE HONORABLE MENTION

New York, NY-2 December 2008-The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its fourth Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for an outstanding scholarly study in the field of Yiddish to Gabriella Safran, of Stanford University, and Steven J. Zipperstein, of Stanford University, for The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, published by Stanford University Press.  Chana Mlotek, of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and Mark Slobin, of Wesleyan University, will receive honorable mention for Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive, published by Wayne State University Press.  The prize is awarded each even-numbered year and is awarded alternately to an outstanding translation of a Yiddish literary work or an outstanding scholarly work in English in the field of Yiddish.  Safran and Zipperstein will each receive a certificate and a check in the amount of $500. Mlotek and Slobin will each receive a certificate.

The Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies is one of sixteen awards that will be presented on 28 December 2008 during the association’s annual convention, to be held this year in San Francisco.  The members of this year’s Leviant Prize Selection Committee were Joseph Landis (Queens Coll.); David G. Roskies (Jewish Theological Seminary); and Nina Warnke (Univ. of Texas), chair.  The selection committee’s citation for the winning title reads:

Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein’s  scrupulously edited, multidisciplinary volume represents the fullest exploration of S. An-sky’s complex life, work, and legacies to date. It includes a wide range of essays by leading scholars of their fields, a translation of an early Russian manuscript of The Dybbuk, and a CD with some of An-sky’s field recordings and modern recordings of judiciously rendered songs that An-sky collected and created. With its wide spectrum of scholarly perspectives it makes a significant contribution to the fields of Yiddish and Jewish studies and will be a fundamental resource for any scholar of An-sky and Russian-Jewish culture at the turn of the last century. This ambitious volume raises the bar for future multidisciplinary collections.

Gabriella Safran is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University.  She received her BA from Yale University and her PhD from Princeton University.  Her publications include Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire, which received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages’ Best Book in Literary or Cultural Studies award, and a National Jewish Book Award.  She is the coeditor, with Lazar Fleishman and Michael Wachtel, of Word, Music, History: A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson and, with Benjamin Nathans, of Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe.  Her essays have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Prooftexts, Modernity/Modernism, Russian Review, and Slavic Review.  In 2007, she received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.  During academic year 2008-09, he was Harvard University’s Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professor of Jewish History, and this year he is Schuyler Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to Stanford, Zipperstein taught at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and at UCLA.  His first book, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881, won the Smilen Prize, and his second book, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism, won the National Jewish Book Award.  He is also the author of Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity and Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, which will be published in 2009. He has coedited four volumes, including, with Jonathan Frankel, Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  He is coeditor of the journal Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society.  He is president of the Conference on Jewish Social Studies and has received the Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal from the American Friends of the Hebrew University and the Koret Prize for outstanding contributions to Jewish life.

The selection committee’s citation for the honorable mention reads:

Ruth Rubin’s singular dedication to fieldwork over a lifetime, and her commitment to keeping it simple, in the spirit of the culture bearers themselves, produced a lasting and authentic corpus. Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin deserve praise for this meticulously edited work of Rubin’s manuscript. They avoided the pitfall of hagiography: where her theoretical or metahistorical pronouncements were out of date, they admit as much. Where Rubin showed her particular strength, they applaud her. The song texts and melodies can and will be mined by scholars for linguistic, ethnomusicological, and historic purposes and for gender, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives.

Chana Mlotek is the music archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and an editor for the Yiddish Forward.  She is editor or coeditor of Perl fun der yidisher poezye, Favorite Yiddish Songs (Mir trogn a gezang), Pearls of Yiddish Song, Songs of Generations, Yomtevdike teg: Songbook for the Jewish Holidays, Twenty-Five Ghetto Songs (25 Geto-lider), and We Are Here: Forty Songs of the Holocaust.  She is also coeditor of YIVO Bibliography, Volume 2 and the YIVO journal Yidisher Folklor and compiled A List of Fifty-Five Yiddish Records and Index of Five Hundred Recorded Songs.  Mlotek is the recipient of life achievement awards from the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and Jewish Theological Seminary and the Workmen’s Circle.  She received the Performing Arts Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Atran Prize of the Congress for Jewish Culture, and awards from the New York Folklore Society, YIVO Klezkamp, and Klezkanada.

Mark Slobin is a professor of music at Wesleyan University, where he has taught since 1971.  He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Michigan.  He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World and Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants, both of which received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.  Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.  His most recent book is Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music.  He has been president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and of the Society for Asian Music.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.  PMLA, the flagship journal of the association, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years.  Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December.  The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

Established in 2000 by the family of Fenia and Yaakov Leviant, the award honors those writers who have published an English translation of Yiddish literary works and scholars who have written a cultural study or critical biography in the field of Yiddish or edited a work on Yiddish folklore or linguistics.  Previous winners of the prize are Joseph Sherman (2002), Dov-Ber Kerler (2004), Amelia Glaser (2006), and Goldie Morgentaler (2006).

Israeli Films at Wesleyan University, Spring 2008

The Secrets (February 4, 2008)

The Center for Film Studies, The Goldsmith Family Cinema, 7:30 p.m

Guest speaker: Avi Nesher, director of The Secrets and recipient of Jerusalem International Festival Achievement Award 2006

Two young Jewish Orthodox women embark on a spiritual journey set in Sefad, the Kabalistic city, to solve a mystery surrounding a non- Jewish woman.

The Ring Family Wesleyan Israeli Film Festival
Spring 2008

All the films will be screened at 7:30 pm at The Goldsmith Family Cinema (The Center for Film Studies), Screening Room 100.
A presentation/discussion will follow the screening of each movie.

Aviva My Love (February 11, 2008)

Directed by Shemi Zarchin.
A portrayal of a woman’s passion to become a writer despite the many obstacles in her personal life and with the encouragement of her funny and creative sister.

Presentation/discussion led by Dr. Miri Talmon-Bohm, visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University.

Sweet Mud (February 18, 2008)

Director by Dror Shaul
A teenage boy who lives in a kibbutz in Israel during the 70s struggles to navigate between his mother’s emotional instability and the kibbutz’s principles.

Presentation/discussion led by Laura Blum, film critic.

Year Zero (February 25, 2008)

Director by Joseph Pitchhadze
Multi interconnected stories of modern Israel that show people at a turning point in their lives.

Presentation/discussion led by Isaac Zablocki, a filmmaker and director of Film and Literary Programs at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

Someone to Run with (March 3, 2008)

Director by Oded Davidoff

A boy who tries to track down, through the streets of Jerusalem, the owner of a lost Labrador and to piece together the incredible story behind the owner’s disappearance. Based on David Grossman’s best selling novel.

Presentation/discussion led by Isaac Zablocki, a filmmaker and director of Film and Literary Programs at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

Live and Become (March 24, 2008)

Director by Radu Mihaileanu

The story of a Christian boy (from Sudan) whose mother forced him to assume a Jewish identity of another boy who died in order to send him to Israel and save him from hunger and death in his own country.

Presentation/discussion led by Laura Blum, film critic.

Jellyfish (April 29, 2008)

Written by Shira Geffen and directed by Etgar Keret

The story of Three women whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life

Presentation/discussion led by Etgar Keret, director and acclaimed writer, who will talk about this film and read some of his short stories.

Welcome to the Jewish and Israel Studies Blog at Wesleyan University. On this blog we will be posting upcoming events sponsored by Jewish and Israel Studies. The blog welcomes follow-up comments from readers concerning matters raised at these events. In addition, the blog will be a site for reader responses to audio and video recordings we will be posting of academic lectures, poetry readings, conference papers, and other cultural events sponsored by JIS.

We intend to be experimental with this blog over the next few months, and we look forward to hearing suggestions from readers about ways we can make it useful to them. Readers can subscribe to this blog using the “RSS” button on the right. Readers who prefer to receive updates by e-mail can choose the “email notifications” link instead. For additional information about Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan University, please see our Website at http://wesleyan.edu/jis/index.html