Two Events on April 13

Join us for two Jewish Studies and History related events on Monday, April 13:

Lunch Series — History MattersMarianne Szegedy-Maszak: Turning Families into Memoirs: History, Journalism, and Memory:
This talk will offer students a window into the creative process of combining historical documentation with personal letters and larger family stories. How does one approach personal stories with journalistic detachment? How does one use the historians arsenal of archives, documents, and other historical tools to expand the range of sources and create a richer and more authoritative narrative? How does one interview subjects for stories that are often very personal? What are some strategies for organizing material that can occasionally be overwhelming? We will discuss the skills that journalists and historians share, but also where they differ and examine the process of creating personal, literary nonfiction. NOON, PAC 002

And an evening talk: Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, “Charmed Lives: History, Family and Fate During Hungary’s Holocaust” – The Hungarian Holocaust differed in some fundamental ways from the Holocaust in the rest of Europe. In her book, “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak examines Hungary’s World War II history and the country’s troubled relationship with its Jewish population, through the lives of her extraordinary family. Szegedy-Maszak’s lecture will examine the paradoxes and the tragedies of the Holocaust in Hungary, the history of anti-Semitism in Hungary, and the story of two families that embodied many of the forces that both created and destroyed the country. PAC 001, 8pm

FrankelPoster-small

 

The Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture

Samuel Kassow, the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, will deliver this year’s Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture.  Professor Kassow will speak on “Time Capsules in the Rubble: The Secret Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

April 28, 8PM RUSSELL HOUSERingelblum archive

Within months of the start of World War II, the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum established a secret archive called Oneg Shabbat, “the Sabbath pleasure.” Over the years, Ringelblum and his associates would document the life and death in the Warsaw ghetto. It was, as Professor Samuel Kassow argues, “the biggest example of cultural resistance during WWII.” Between 1940 and 1943, members of Oneg Shabbat group buried thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Only some were recovered.

Professor Kassow is the author of many books including, most recently, Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive.  In 2010, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

Spring Semester Events

Spring semester means the Ring Family Israeli Film Festival, which always happens before the Spring Break and as always was fantastic thanks to Professor Dalit Katz’s curatorship. The festival featured: Fill the Void by Rama Burshstein (2012), Zaytoun bywhereverEran Riklis (2012), By Summer’s End by Noa Haroni, a documentary Six Million and One by David Fisher, and two shorts Wherever You Go by by Rony Sasson Angel and Welcome and Our Condolences by Leon Prudovsky.

Since director Haim Tabakman is this year’s Silverberg Distinguished Visiting Scholar, his film Eyes Wide Open was also screened

In the second half of the semester, Jewish and Israel Studies hosts several talks:

Tuesday, April 8, 4:30, 41 Wyllys Room 112: Rabbi Adam Mintz, Ph.D., will speak on “Rabbis and Young Mothers: The Challenges of Adapting Jewish Law to Social Realia.”  Mintz

Jewish law finds its roots in the Bible and has slowly evolved and adapted to social, cultural and technological realities. The laws of the Sabbath are a wonderful example of this evolution. How have the laws of the Sabbath developed? This lecture will focus on the question how the laws of the Sabbath have adapted to the changing role of women in the last third of the twentieth century. As women gain a greater voice in society, do their concerns impact the evolution of Jewish law?

Monday, April 28, 2014, 8 pm, Russell House: SAMUEL & DOROTHY FRANKEL MEMORIAL LECTUREProfessor Samuel Kassow will  deliver the annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture on “Time Capsules in the Rubble: the Secret Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and a visiting professor of history at Wesleyan University. He is the author of numerous books and publications on east European Jewish history. Most recently he published the award winning “Who Will Write Our History” Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto” (2007).

Monday, May 05, 2014, Noon, Allbritton 311: We will venture into the world of science.  Dr. Orna Levran P ’09 ’15, the Rockefeller University in New York, will speak on “Race, ethnicity, and ancestry: a medical genetic perspective”

genetic geneticsInteractions between genetic, environmental, and social factors have been proposed to explain the observed differences in disease prevalence and severity among different populations. Populations vary in terms of history (expansion, migration, and natural selection), allele frequencies, and other properties that affect the importance of genetic risk variants. In this talk we will discuss current methods to infer fine personal global ancestry and admixture with examples from several distinctive populations (including Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jewish cohort) obtained for the study of the genetics of drug addiction. We will also discuss examples of targeting specific groups for prevention and treatment efforts, as well as the reevaluation of the relevance of racial/ethnic labels in the genomic era of personalized medicine.

Events in November

The short fall break brings a little relief for everyone exhausted by midterms and papers.  Soon we will be back and JIS will present three events:

Thursday, November 7, 8 pm: Ron Leshem will talk about  “Israel as Number One Exporter of TV Shows”

Ron Leshem, is an award-winning writer and acclaimed novelist. With only two television networks – hardly 20 years old, barely profitable – faraway, isolated and war-weary, the Israeli industry has become a premier exporter of TV formats, from drama series to game shows and docu-reality. The production cost of a drama episode in Israel is parallel to the refreshments’ budget on a set of an American production. Yet Showtime’s “Homeland”, and HBO’s “In Treatment”, both adaptations of original Israeli shows, have expanded the influence of the young industry across the world.  The lecture will be at the Russell House.

Friday, November  8: A Symposium on “Archaeology and Politics” 1:30-5pm in Allbritton 311

Archeology

  • Michael Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Anthropology, College of William and Mary: Epistemology and Ethics of an Activist Science at the African Burial Ground
  • Anne E. Killebrew, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University: The Role of Archaeology and Community: The Shared Past of Israelis and Palestinians in the Present
  • Dorothy Lippert, Repatriation Office, Smithsonian Museum: The Politics of Naming and Knowing: Repatriation and Indigenous Identity
  • Carla M. Sinopoli, Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Asian Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology, and Director of Museum Studies, University of Michigan: The Politics of Protection (and Destruction) of Archaeological Sites in Contemporary India

The program will include a coffee break, brief responses from two discussants, and time for general questions and discussion.

Wednesday, November 13, 8 pm:  Bernard Avishai Avishai“Is the Two-State Solution Really Dead?”

A Guggenheim fellow, Professor Bernard Avishai is the author of The Tragedy of Zionism, A New Israel, and The Hebrew Republic, as well as dozens of articles on politics, business, and the Middle East conflict, and blogs at The Daily Beast and BernardAvishai.com. He is a former editor of Harvard Business Review and international director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG. His new book, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, was just published. 

 The lecture will take place in PAC 002

Contemporary Israeli Voices Series Presents Dror Burstein

Please join us for the third event in the series Contemporary Israeli Voices 2013 on Monday, October 14, at Russell House at 8 pm. Dror Burstein, an award winning writer, will speak on  Why Aren’t There any Dinosaurs in Israeli literature?

Dror Burstein-Kin
Dror Burstein’s book “Kin”

 

Dror Burstein is the recipient of several major Israeli prizes. In 1997, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for Poetry and in 2002 the Ministry of Science and Culture Prize. His first novel, Avner Brenner (2003), was awarded the Bernstein Prize in 2005, and was followed by a short prose book, Twin Cities (2004). His second novel Murderers was published in 2006 and a year later he published a documentary book Without a Single Case of Death about the Ghetto Fighter’s Kibbutz. This book was translated into English in 2007. His latest books Kin and Netanya were also translated into English as well as other language. Since 2011 he  has been editor of the poetry journal Helikon.

 

The Present and Future of European Jews–A Conversation with Jared Gimbel ’11

Why is European Jewry important in both Europe and the world at large?

Jared Gimbel in Cracow
Jared Gimbel in Cracow

Often Jews throughout the world are given a one-sided perspective about Jewish life in Europe, usually focused on anti-Semitism, unsustainable numbers, or the ideas that the communities will die out. The realities are vastly different throughout the continent, varying from country to country. Often Jews in America and Israel are unaware that the new Jewish Europe is filled with energies that have been channeled into a Renaissance that should not be ignored.

 

Jared Gimbel-2
Jared Gimbel ’11 in Amsterdam

Jared Gimbel is the founder of “Present Presence,” an initiative devoted to fostering positive images of communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora to North American and Israeli Audiences. He is currently a Masters’ Degree Candidate at Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg, and has been a Jewish community activist while living in the United States, Israel, Poland, Sweden and Germany. Jared has served as a tour guide, editor and translator at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Cracow, and was also a fellow at the Paideia Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. In 2011 he wrote his COL thesis on non-human species in European mythologies, and his upcoming Masters’ Thesis focuses on perspectives and portrayals of Jewish Life in Finland and in Greece. When he’s not working, he enjoys collecting pop music from many different countries, and is always in the process of learning a new language.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, NOON, PAC 421. Vegan lunch will be available.

Welcome Back!

The semester is starting. New students have arrived and the rest of the students will return in a couple of days.

Jewish and Israel Studies welcomes all of the students and offers an exciting line-up of courses and events.

Fall 2013 Courses in Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan:

Gateway courses:

HIST247 Jewish History: From Biblical Israel to Diaspora Jews by  Magda Teter

RELI201 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible by Elisha Russ-Fishbane

RELI233 The People of the Book: Jewish Cultures and Jewish Canons by Elisha Russ-Fishbane

Hebrew Language and Literature:

HEBR101: Elementary Hebrew I  by Dalit Katz

HEBR201: Intermediate Hebrew I Dalit Katz

HEBR211: Hebrew Literature by Dalit Katz

Elective Courses:

ENGL351 Jews and Christians in Medieval England: Debate, Dialogue, and Destruction by Ruth Nisse

GOVT270 Comparative Politics of the Middle East by  Marcie Patton

GOVT344 Religion and Politics by Nancy Schwartz

HIST263 Inside Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 by Erik Grimmer-Solem

 

Events in the Fall to look forward to:

September 24, Lawrence Baron, Jewish-non-Jewish Romances about Israel: From Ari to Zohan, 8 p.m Russell House

October 1, Maya Arad, A View From Abroad: Writing Hebrew literature in California,

8 pm, Russell House

October 13, Dror Burstein Why Aren’t There Any Dinosaurs in Israeli Literature?

                  8 pm at Russell House.

November 7, Ron Leshem, Israel as number One Exporter of TV Shows to Hollywood, 8 pm, Russell House.

 

SPECIAL EVENT: Conference:  “Exercising Judgment in Ethics, Politics, and the Law: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Fifty Years Later” September 26-28, 2013  http://arendt.conference.wesleyan.edu/

 

Welcome back!

Another summer is gone and a new academic year has begun. As always, it will be an exciting year, with classes, and events to look forward to.

First some news. Professor Dalit Katz has agreed to serve as the interim director of JIS this year, while Professor Magda Teter on sabbatical working on her next book.

Professor Dalit Katz
Dalit Katz will serve as the interim Director of JIS at Wesleyan

Dalit Katz has been a vital member of the faculty in the Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate, devoting time and energy to the JIS Certificate and the University. She has single-handedly created a highly respected Israeli Film Festival, which is now a mainstay on CT cultural calendar, making Wesleyan a go-to-place for Israeli culture, attracting audiences far beyond Wesleyan, and students to Wesleyan.  The Program is thus in excellent hands this year!

We are also excited to welcome to Wesleyan Professor Elisha Russ-Fishbane, who is joining us from Princeton.  Professor Elisha Russ-Fishbane teaches courses in Judaism, Hebrew Bible, and Jewish Studies, focusing on questions of Jews in Islamic lands.  In the Fall 2012, he will teach the gateway course for the JIS Certificate, RELI233: The People of the Book: Jewish Cultures and Jewish Canons, and and RELI227: The Jews of the Islamic World from Muhammad to Modernity.  In the Spring, Professor Russ-Fishbane will teach RELI201: Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, and RELI294: Judaism and the Philosophic Path: An Introduction to Maimonides.

In the Spring 2013, Professor Vivian Mann will teach a course in the Art History Department “Jewish Art and Rituals in Context”.  This course covers the history of Judaica. The goal of the course is to give students an understanding of the range of ceremonial art used in the practice of Judaism and how individual works were fashioned out of a creative tension between the minimal demands of Jewish law and models in the art of surrounding cultures.
The course will result in an exhibition of Judaica curated at the Congregation Adath Israel, deepening further our collaboration with Adath Israel and its outstanding collection.

Finally, a quick preview of events that we can look forward to:

October 30, Lawrence Baron, Jewish-non-Jewish Romances about Israel: From Ari to Zohan, 8 p.m Russell House

 December 3, Ronit Matalon, Reading Memory autobiography, 8 p.m , 108 Usdan.

 Also the week of December 3, André Aciman will speak at Wesleyan. Time, topic and venue TBA.

Spring Semester:

Our annual Ring Family Wesleyan University Israeli Film Festival will take place in February and March.

A series of talks and lectures on Jewish Music linked to Mark Slobin’s class, MUSC297: Yiddish Cultural Expression: Music, Theater, Literature, Film.

Steven Hochstadt from the University of Shanghai will speak on the Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, time and venue TBA. The lecture will be linked to Vera Schwarcz’s class, HIST308: The Jewish Experience in China: From Kaifeng in the Song Dynasty to Shanghai During the Holocaust.

 

Final Event: Showcase of Students’ Work in Jewish and Israel Studies

Another academic year is about to end. Just a few classes are left. A crunch time for our students and faculty, but also a time to celebrate students’ achievements. Since 2010 students and faculty have celebrated students’ projects in Jewish and Israel Studies. And while some students will indeed graduate with the Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate this year, others are still working on their courses, and still some are engaged in research and creative projects contributing to Jewish and Israel Studies without getting the certificate.

Herzl Forest Poster for the 50th Anniversary of the Jewish National Fund, 1954
Herzl Forest Poster for the 50th Anniversary of the Jewish National Fund, 1954

 

Come and join us! 

Learn about politics of trees in Israel/Palestine; folklore among Jews from Europe and Arab countries; Holocaust memory and family story; women and Jewish liturgical practices; rhetoric of otherness against Jews and Muslims in Europe; bioethics and Jewish law! And much more.

Come and get inspired to do creative work in Jewish and Israel Studies.

Reception will follow.

Monday, May 7, Allbritton 103, 4:30 PM

Jewish and Israel Studies Events after Spring Break

Join us for some exciting upcoming events:

Thursday, March 29: Last film of the Ring Family Film Festival “Je t’aime terminal/I love you terminal,” Goldsmith Family Cinema, 8pm

Je T’aime Terminal  ( I Love You Terminal) is a romantic comedy about a young Israeli man on his way to join his American fiancé. During twenty four hour connection delay, he meets an eccentric and charming girl with whom he contemplates love, relationships and life.Speaker: Dani Menkin, the film director.

Joseph Siry "Beth Shalom Synagogue" (Chicago, 2011)
Joseph Siry “Beth Shalom Synagogue” (Chicago, 2011)

 

Thursday, April 5, Professor Joseph Siry will deliver a talk about the Beth Sholom Synagogue near Philadelphia, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Steel Cathedral Project and Beth Sholom Synagogue” PAC 004, 4:30 pm

In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces. The talk is based on Professor Siry’s recently published book “The Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture.”

 

Thursday, April 19, Professor Elisha Russ-Fishbane  will give a talk  “Judaism and Islam: Between History and Polemics” in PAC 004 at 4:30 pm

Please join us and bring friends and family!