Showcase of Student Projects in Jewish and Israel Studies

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The semester–nay the year–is almost over.  Just one more week of classes is left.  It is a crunch time, but also a time to celebrate students’ achievements.  Since 2010 we have showcased students’ projects in Jewish and Israel Studies.  Some students will indeed graduate with the Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate, but some of our students are engaged in research and creative projects contributing to Jewish and Israel Studies without the certificate.

On Tuesday, May 3, 2011, at 4:30 pm I hope you will join me for a celebratory reception of our students’ achievements.

Rachel Tecott (GOVT) will share her findings on “Israeli Counterterrorism Decision-Making: The Causes and Costs of A-Strategic Incoherence.”  This presentation is based on Rachel’s honors thesis in Government, in which she demonstrates a fallacy of the two conventional wisdoms that Israeli counterterrorism is effective, and that Israeli counterterrorism is the product of rational, unitary action.  Her evidence includes interviews with key Israeli counterterrorism decision-makers (including several Major Generals, National Security Advisors, and senior-ranking Israeli Intelligence officers).

Daniel Hymanson (FILM) will present his short film “Slothman” – Daniel’s honors thesis project for the film studies department.  It tells the story of a boy named David and his encounters with sloths, the Chicago Bulls, a newt, and his mother. The film’s opening scene was shot at Adath Israel in Middletown.

A screen shot of "Judah" from Seth Alter's computer game "Divided Monarchy"
A screen shot of “Judah” from Seth Alter’s computer game “Divided Monarchy”

 

Seth Alter (HIST and JIS) will demonstrate his new educational video game “Divided Monarchy” that simulates ancient Israel in the Iron Age. The game comes with serious academic research historical and archaeological material. Every in-game component to “Divided Monarchy” has been included in accordance to modern scholars’ understanding of biblical society and culture.

 

All this on Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 4:30 pm in Allbritton 103.

 

On Tuesday evening, our student Ross Shenker (THEA and JIS) will share his capstone project in a very special event Inside The Playwright’s Studio: An Evening With Donald Margulies

Donald Margulies
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Donald Margulies

 

Join Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Donald Margulies and Ross Shenker ’11 for a look inside the playwright’s studio. Professor Margulies is the acclaimed author of the plays “Time Stands Still,” “Brooklyn Boy,” “Dinner With Friends,” Sight Unseen,” “Collected Stories,” and others. He has received a Lucille Lortel Award, an Outer Critics’ Circle Award, two American Dramatists’ Guild Hull-Warriner Awards, one Tony Award nomination, five Drama Desk Award nominations, two Pulitzer Prize nominations, and one Pultizer Prize. His works have been performed on and off Broadway and at major theaters across the United States, in Europe, and around the world.

Presented by the Jewish and Israel Studies Department. This event is in partial fulfillment of Ross Shenker’s Senior Project entitled “Embedding The Self In One’s Art: How Donald Margulies Draws Upon Contemporary Jewish-American Identity In His Playwriting.”

Usdan Center, Taylor Room, 8pm

Reception to follow next door in Andersen Meeting Room-110

 

Screening of “Farewell to My Country” at the Frankel Memorial Lecture

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On April 28, the long-awaited Frankel Memorial Lecture will include a screening of  “Farewell to My Country” a documentary by director Andrzej Krakowski about the 1968 exodus of the Jews from Poland.

"Farewell to my country" a documentary by Andrzej Krakowski about the 1968 exodus of the Jews from Poland 1968 was a turbulent year across the world. But in Poland, it became the last chapter of the centuries-old history of the Jewish community there.  That year, following student demonstrations, the Polish communist government incited anti-Zionist sentiments that led to the expulsion of Poland’s last remaining Jews, effectively ending the history of what was once the largest Jewish settlement in the world. FAREWELL TO MY COUNTRY tells the story of the silent elimination of the remaining Jewish community by the communist regime.  Using rare and never-before-seen footage, the film intimately reveals the experience  of emigrants by way of the communists’ state-sponsored persecution.

Joining us for the evening will be the director of the film Andrzej Krakowski, a filmmaker and a professor of film studies at City College, NY. Andrzej Krakowski is a producer, director, and screenwriters of many films, film series, and documentaries.  Among films with which he was involved in his many capacities are “The Triumph of the Spirit” with William Defoe, and “Eminent Domain” with Donald Sutherland.  He is also a producer of a TV Series “We are New York.”
April 28, The Goldsmith Family Cinema, 8pm

Books for the Season

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Spring brings new flowers, new leaves, warmth, and in May the end of the semester.  But it is also a season of Passover and Easter, a season of celebration and devotion, at times, even of commemoration of sometimes painful events marring centuries of Jewish-Christian relations.

There are books that could enrich this season, bringing history closer–some of them taken from syllabi of courses in Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan.

Yosef Yerushalmi, Haggadah and HistoryYosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Haggadah and History (JPS, 1997).  Through the history of the printed Haggada, Yosef Yerushalmi, the late distinguished professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, takes the reader — and the viewer, since the book is splendidly illustrated — through recent centuries of Jewish history.  For the haggadot were adapted to new tastes, cultures, and places.  The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1975.

But how did the Haggadah develop? There are different interpretations.Israel Yuval, "Two Nations in Your Womb"

 

In his provocative book Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (U of California Press, pbk, 2008), Israel Yuval, a historian from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, traces the development of the Haggadah to a dialogue between early Christianity and Judaism in late antiquity and the medieval period, arguing that Christian Easter rituals were crucial in shaping the Haggadah.

Miri Rubin "Gentile Tales"

The Passover and Easter seasons sometimes ushered violence.  Jews were accused of seeking the consecrated communion wafers Christians received during the Easter season. The so-called “host desecration” accusation became a means for creating sacred spaces and affirming Catholic dogmas.  Miri Rubin’s lavishly illustrated Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Penn Press, pbk 2004) sketches the spread of this anti-Jewish tale across Christian Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, revealing the mental world of medieval Europeans.

Although some have argued that the host desecration accusations ended with the Reformation, Magda Teter’s book Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2011) demonstrates that in Poland this Passover/Easter-time accusation became wide-spread precisely after the Reformation.

And although these accusations ended before the modern era, Passover and Easter were times pregnant with tension and potential for violence.  Edward Judge’s Easter in Kishinev: An Anatomy of a Pogrom (NYU Press, pbk 1995) documents the dynamics surrounding the notorious pogrom in Kishinev in 1903.  The pogrom led Hayim Nahman Bialik, the renowned Hebrew poet, to pen his moving poem “In the City of Slaughter.”

Samuel Kassow, "Who Will Write Our History?"Spring is also the season of commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Samuel Kassow’s Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage, 2009, first published in 2007 by Indiana University Press).  The book tells the story of Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Polish Jewish historian from Warsaw, who established a secret organization with a code name Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw Ghetto charged with documenting Jewish history and Jewish war experience for posterity.  Preserved in tin boxes and milk cans, thousands of documents afford us a better understanding of Jewish experience during WWII as experienced at the time.  The New Republic called Kassow’s book one that “may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read.”

New Book by Professor Magda Teter

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A new book by Professor Magda Teter has just been released by Harvard University Press: Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation.

Magda Teter, Sinners on Trial

From Harvard’s website:

“In post-Reformation Poland—the largest state in Europe and home to the largest Jewish population in the world—the Catholic Church suffered profound anxiety about its power after the Protestant threat. Magda Teter reveals how criminal law became a key tool in the manipulation of the meaning of the sacred and in the effort to legitimize Church authority. The mishandling of sacred symbols was transformed from a sin that could be absolved into a crime that resulted in harsh sentences of mutilation, hanging, decapitation, and, principally, burning at the stake.

Teter casts new light on the most infamous type of sacrilege, the accusation against Jews for desecrating the eucharistic wafer….Recounting dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment, this is the first book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the early modern period within the broader context of politics and common crime. Teter draws on previously unexamined trial records to bring out the real-life relationships among Catholics, Jews, and Protestants and challenges the commonly held view that following the Reformation, Poland was a “state without stakes”—uniquely a country without religious persecution.”

The book has been praised as “innovative,” “magnificent,” “with meticulous attention to new archival sources and graceful narrative style.”

Upcoming Events in Jewish Studies This Semester

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Spring 2011 (remaining events):

March 29, Yiddish Cultural Expressions Series: Professor Samuel Kassow, “Jewish Cultural Expression under Nazi Occupation – The Case of the Warsaw Ghetto,” CFA Hall, 7pm

March 31, The Ring Family Israeli Film Festival: a screening of two Israeli TV shows: Serugim (the dating saga of young Religious Israelis) and Arab Labor (An Arab journalist’s hilarious attempts to fit into Israeli society). Speaker: Isaac Zablozki, director of Film Programs at the JCC Manhattan. 8 pm, Goldsmith Family Cinema

April 5, Yiddish Cultural Expressions Series: Professor Olga Litvak, “Getting Tevye Wrong – Sholem-Aleichem’s Astonishing Farce of Misperception,” CFA Hall, 7pm

April 7, The Ring Family Israeli Film Festival: Wrist cutters: A Love Story. This is an adaptation of the internationally renowned writer, Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers (interesting translation….). Featured guest speaker, Etgar Keret. 8 pm, Goldsmith Family Cinema

April 13, Professor Shalom Sabar “The Sabbath in Jewish Art and Folklore,” Russell House, 8pm

April 28, The Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture: Director Andrzej Krakowski will present his 2002 documentary “Farewell to My Country” about Jews forced to leave Poland in 1968, Goldsmith Family Cinema, Film Studies, 8 pm

May 3, Jewish and Israel Studies Student Achievements Showcase, Allbritton 103 at 4:30 PM

Upcoming Events in Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan

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The Spring semester has started and it will be busy not only with classes but also with events. Two thematic series: The Ring Family Israel Film Festival and a series of talks and concerts on East European Jewish Culture.

The event that will inaugurate the semester will be the annual Frankel Memorial Lecture. February 1 Director Andrzej Krakowski will present his film Farewell My Country about the 1968 exodus of Jews from Poland. Powell Family Cinema at the Film Studies, 8pm.

The Frankel Lecture will also inaugurate a series on the East European Jewish Culture.

Ring Family Israeli Film Festival at Wesleyan at the Goldstein Family Cinema:

February 10: Five Hours From Paris: the story of a dream, an obstacle and unique friendships between an Israeli taxi driver and a Russian music teacher. Speaker: Haim Tabakman, a film director and Jewish and Israel Visiting scholar in Residence.

February 17, Eyes Wide Open: a forbidden love story between a married Orthodox man and a mysterious young man. Speaker Haim Tabakman, director of the film and Jewish and Israel Visiting scholar in Residence.

February 24, Ajami: Israel Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film combines five stories which take place in Ajami, a religious and ethnically diverse neighborhood of Jaffa. Speaker: Laura Blum, film critic.

March 3, The Beetle. A man’s obsession with his Beetle car brings him to Jordan in a desperate attempt to fix it. Speaker: Anne Peters, Wesleyan Assistant Professor in the Government Department.

March 31, a screening of two Israeli TV shows: Serugim (the dating saga of young Religious Israelis) and Arab Labor (An Arab journalist’s hilarious attempts to fit into Israeli society). Speaker: Isaac Zablozki, director of Film Programs at the JCC Manhattan.

April 7, Wrist cutters: A Love Story. This is an adaptation of the internationally renowned writer, Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers (interesting translation….). Featured guest speaker, Etgar Keret.

This film festival is sponsored by the Ring family and the Jewish and Israel Studies.

Eastern European Jewish Culture Series:

February 15, Hankus Netsky will speak on American klezmer, CFA Hall, 7pm

February 22, Michael Winograd’s klezmer performance, CFA Hall, 7pm

March 29, Sam Kassow will speak on Yiddish poetry in the Holocaust era, CFA Hall, 7pm

April 5, Olga Litvak will speak on Sholem Aleichem, CFA Hall, 7pm

And a special event, related to our Service-Learning Class:

April 13, Professor Shalom Sabar from Hebrew University will give a talk “The Sabbath in Jewish Art and Folklore.”

More events will be announced, including our annual showcase of students’ research in Jewish and Israel Studies. Please check back for updates, and become a friend of Wesleyan’s Jewish and Israel Studies Program on Facebook, where you can get the latest updates about the Program: www.facebook.com/WesleyanJIS

Looking back and looking forward

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The fall semester is well behind us, grades have been submitted and now we are preparing for the Spring semester.

The fall was full of events and exciting courses.  Jewish and Israel Studies Program offered eleven courses, enrolling a total of 192 students, 107 of whom were taught by our core faculty.  In the Spring we will offer eight courses in History, Music, Art History, Religion, Film Studies, and of course Hebrew language and literature.  JIS sponsored seven events, among them were two in our New Israeli Voices series, which brought to campus Joshua Sobol, the acclaimed Israel playwright and director, and Michal Govrin, a noted Israeli writer.  The series is tightly integrated into our Hebrew curriculum. We also hosted JJ. Goldberg from the Forward who spoke on “The Next American Judaism: Israel, Intermarriage and the Seinfeld Effect” and Professor Susan Einbinder who spoke on “Medieval Jewish Martyrdom, Poetry, and Hysterical Blindness.”  These events were also linked to our curriculum, the American Jewish History class, Medieval Jewish History class, and a class on Medieval Literature.

In November, Professor Magda Teter met with alumni and parents in San Francisco to talk about Jewish and Israel Studies at Wesleyan and brainstorm about what we can do for those who are not on campus. We had some terrific ideas that we plan to work on! Stay tuned.

Spring looks like an exciting semester. Jewish an Israel Studies Program will offer eight courses, including for the first time, a small cluster of courses on East European Jewish History and Culture. Professor Mark Slobin will teach a course a course “Yiddish Cultural Expression: Music, Theater, Literature, Film.” The course “will ground modern Yiddish expressive culture in its 19th-century Eastern European homeland, then follow its dispersion to North America, through the present.” Professor Magda Teter will teach a course on East European Jewish History, from the beginning of Jewish settlement in medieval Poland through the modern day efforts to create vibrant, if small, Jewish communities in Cracow and Warsaw.  This is also our first service learning course.  Students will work with the Congregation Adath Israel in Middletown and study its Judaica collection.  Aside from learning about Jewish history in Eastern Europe, students will be engaged in learning through material culture and curating a small exhibition. Finally, in our small cluster, Professor Annalise Glauz-Todrank will teach a course on “Hasidism: European Origins and American Identities.”

Among other highlights is our Mervin and Gittel Silverberg Distinguished Visiting Scholar. This year the position will be held by the Israeli director and producer, Haim Tabakman, whose most recent film “Eyes Wide Open” has received wide acclaim.  Haim Tabakman will teach a course on “Revival of the Israeli Cinema” and he will also play an active role in our Ring Family Israeli Film Festival organized by Professor Dalit Katz.

Our cultural programming also looks exciting–a more detailed schedule will be announced shortly, so here is just a taste:

On February 1, 2011, as our annual Frankel Lecture Series, Director Andrzej Krakowski will screen his film “Farewell to My Country” about the 1968 exodus of Jews from Poland.

Our Ring Family Israeli Film Festival will include six films screened on Thursdays, beginning on February 10, 2011.

There will be a series of events related to our East European Cluster–talks, concerts, and performances.

On April 13, 2011, Professor Shalom Sabar from Hebrew University will give a talk “The Sabbath in Jewish Art and Folklore.”

There is much to look forward to in the Spring 2011 and we hope you will join us.

Last Event in the Fall

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On December 6, Jewish and Israel Studies Program will host its last event in the Fall semester:  J. J. Goldberg will lecture on “The Next American Judaism: Israel, Intermarriage and the Seinfeld Effect.”

J. J. Goldberg is a senior columnist at the Forward, where he had served as the editor-in-chief from 2000-2007, transforming the paper into one of the leading and most respected voices of contemporary Jewish press.  His weekly column “Good Fences” appears on the editorial pages of the The Forward.  He also blogs at http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg/.

The event will be at 108 Usdan (Taylor Meeting room) at 8pm.