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Due to the pandemic, The 18^th Annual Fall Series Contemporary Israeli Voices, 2020  (curated by Dalit Katz) has moved online with two live multi-media presentations with Q/A sessions with the audience. The theme for the series this year was the success of Israeli artists in Hollywood. The series was inaugurated with renowned actress Ayelet Zurer who talked about Acting and the Brain’s Plasticity. Zurer spoke about her acting in American movies such as Angels & Demons and Man of Steel as well as acting in Israeli movies and the successful TV show Shtisel. The presentation included screenings of video trailers from her work. In the second presentation, which coincided with the official release of the trailer of the much anticipated TV show Valley of Tears, writer and scriptwriter, Ron Leshem, talked about Why Hollywood Loves Israeli TV Shows. Each presentation was followed by a Lunch and Learn meeting in which Hebrew students conversed with the speakers in Hebrew.  All presentations were opened to the public and were well attended. The Wesleyan community eagerly anticipates welcoming Ayelet Zurer and Ron Leshem again in the near future, hoping for in person  visits to our campus.

On April 15, Sarah Imhoff, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, delivered the Fifth Annual Jeremy Zwelling lecture. The presentation was entitled Manliness and Its Opposites: A Brief History of American Jewish Gender. The animated presentation was delivered to a full house with a diverse audience consisting of students across the curriculum, Wesleyan faculty, people from the community and prospective students, all were intrigued by the subject matter.

The Center for Jewish Studies hosted last night the Annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture. Professor Devin Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, where he directs the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, the largest repository of digital Ladino texts in the world, delivered a fascinating and animated presentation entitled The Rise and Fall of Salonica, the Jerusalem of the Balkans. Following the presentation there was an extensive Q/A session. To learn more about the subject check out Professor Naar’s book , Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, which won a National Jewish Book Award and the grand prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association.

Mazal Tov to Ruth Nisse, a faculty member in the Center for Jewish Studies, who was promoted to Professor of English. Professor Nisse is a scholar of medieval literature. Her recent book, Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora and Translation in Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2017), introduces a new approach to ideas of Jewish Diaspora in medieval Western Europe based on an examination of the transmission and reception of Hebrew and Latin post-biblical literature.

Sarah Wildman ’88, an award-winning writer and regular contributor to the New York Times, presented the 36th Annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture on April 5, in the Daniel Family Common at Usdan University Center. The event was sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and organized by Dalit Katz, director of the center.

Wildman spoke on what she’d learned about the Holocaust in writing Paper Love: Searching for the Girl my Grandfather Left Behind (Riverhead Penguin, 2014).

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