News and Events

  Please join us weekely stay as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  In Fall 2024, we will introduce a language class in Yiddish! But what is Yiddish?
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yiddish has no clear boundaries of either space or time. Some speak of the beginning of Yiddish at the end of the 19th Century, with the novels of Mendele Mokher Sforim. Some go back a further century to the stories of Rabbi Nakhman of Braslev. And some go back to the 13th and 15th centuries. Some people say that it’s a dead language, and some people would be quite upset by such an assertion. Some contradictory images of Yiddish are that it is the language of poor ignorant people, but that Yiddish has reached impressive cultural feats in literature and criticism, poetry, the theater, and even in the cinema. Some people think that Yiddish is a sad language, and others think that it is actually funny.

Insight to Yiddish language, history, and culture (and the forthcoming Yiddish courses in 2024–25) will be provided in an information session on Thursday, April 18, at 2 pm, in Weis Cinema.


Download: What-is-Yiddish-Information-Session.pdf

Professor Yitzhak Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Bard Graduate Center Lecture Hall, NYC  4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism, and on an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy. His research has been featured in BBC (The World Tonight), LeMond, Ha’aretz, Kan Tarbut (Israeli Cultural Radio).

This paper argues that the most significant Jewish contribution to modern Western philosophy - the notion of acosmism, according to which only God truly and fully exists - originated in early Hassidism. I will show that through the mediation of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) this bold notion was adopted from the school of the Maggid of Mezhrich and introduced into the systems of German Idealism.

The Bard Graduate Center is located at 38 West 86 street, New York, NY, 10024.

Professor Yitzhak Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University
Olin 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism, Medieval Philosophy, and some issues in contemporary metaphysics, and is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford 2013), and Spinoza’s Labyrinths (Oxford, forthcoming). Currently, he is working on the completion of a book on Spinoza and German Idealism, and on an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy. His research has been featured in BBC (The World Tonight), LeMond, Ha’aretz, Kan Tarbut (Israeli Cultural Radio).

This talk traces the influence of Spinoza’s early Rabbinic schooling on his writing from the period after he left the Jewish community. It argues that Spinoza is frequently unaware of the formative role of his early Rabbinic education, and that he commonly reads the Bible through Rabbinic eyes without the least being conscious of this fact. If this argument is cogent, it would seem that much more attention should be paid to Spinoza’s early education.

 Acosmism: Hassidism’s Gift to the Jews… and the World
Sunday, April 7th, 2024 | 4:00 pm
Bard Graduate Center Lecture Hall, 38 West 86 street, New York, NY, 10024
This paper argues that the most significant Jewish contribution to modern Western philosophy - the notion of acosmism, according to which only God truly and fully exists - originated in early Hassidism. I will show that through the mediation of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) this bold notion was adopted from the school of the Maggid of Mezhrich and introduced into the systems of German Idealism.
Free and open to the public.

Register for event here: https://forms.gle/P2qJ6vkciD74e8du6

Arie M. Dubnov, George Washington University
Hegeman 106  4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Three pivotal terms— "refugee," "return," and "repatriation" — played an exceptionally significant role in shaping international planning and discourse after World War II.  Exploring the interconnections of international history and the history of political and religious concepts, the talk examines how these terms acquired distinct meanings within the framework of international policies and how they echo to this day in the context of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. He was a G.L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a participant in the National History Center’s International Decolonization Seminar, and recipient of the Dorset Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a was Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.

  Hegeman 204A  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Hamas’ attack on October 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza have had a profound impact on Israel, Palestine, and far beyond. How might we consider these events in the context of the history of Zionism, of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and of antisemitism?  

We hope that an important part of the discussion will be questions from those attending about current events and the long, complex evolution that produced them. We will respond as best we can from our various perspectives.

Cecile E. Kuznitz, Patricia Ross Weis '52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture
Joel Perlmann, Professor, Bard College and Senior Scholar, Levy Institute
Shai Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor of Judaism, moderator

With English Subtitles
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Hebrew Program announces the screening of 
Zero Motivation (2014)
Weis Cinema – Monday, November 13, 2023
5:00–7:00 pm
(with English subtitles)
The story of Israeli female soldiers on a distant military base. Funny; sad; suspenseful; and not even a little sentimental.

For more information: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3576084/
 

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Federica Francesconi (University at Albany, SUNY)
Olin 201  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture will explore Jewish women’s cultural survival in the early modern Italian ghettos through two case studies. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, many Jewish women produced textiles in their own homes. They created an informal community of female artisans that challenged the anonymity of their underpaid work and even their invisibility in the religious domain. Additionally, in 1735 twenty-two well-to-do Jewish women in Modena established a confraternity for mutual aid to “all sick women, rich and poor, in the ghetto.” This body involved women of all classes as administrators, workers, and caregivers and offered “invisible” Jewish women a degree of agency without subverting existing Jewish social and legal structures. Both these “communities” created female spaces that were economic, social, and devotional resources and reconfigured women’s presence in ghettoized societies.

Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her book Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (UPenn Press, 2021), won the 2022 Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association and was a 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist. She is the co-editor of Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State UP 2021), which was also a 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

Silent film screening with live original music
Ottaway Film Center  7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The Man Without a World is set in a Polish shetl at the turn of the 20th century, where two star-crossed lovers seek happiness as the villagers struggle with antisemitism and political infighting. The film is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director Yevgeny Antinov. But in fact it is the creation of contemporary filmmaker Eleanor Antin, who made the film in 1991.

The film will be accompanied by live original music composed and performed by world-renowned klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and celebrated silent film pianist Donald Sosin.

Following the screening Svigals and Sosin will discuss their work with Professors Joshua Glick, Cecile Kuznitz, Masha Shpolberg, and Richard Suchenski.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening we gather for a Shabbat prayer service and a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome!

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Arendt Center  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:30 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Rabbi Joshua Boettiger.

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

Listen or even perform literature in different languages.
Olin Language Center, Room 203 (Tutoring Seminar)  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
If you're interested in poetry and languages this is your event! Come and listen to your peers.

If you want to participate write to [email protected]. Please send the original text and an English translation. Any type of written art is accepted. Original works and translations are welcome too!

Food and drinks are provided.

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Professor Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:15 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Starting in the 1830s, Jews in Europe became prominent scholars of the Qur'an and early Islam. Emphasizing parallels between the Qur’an and rabbinic writings, they developed affirmations of Islam that differed considerably from their more negative views of Christianity. Their scholarship continued, albeit with some changes in tone, until the 1930s, and then migrated to other parts of the world. Theirs was a unique Orientalism that is recognized until today with having established the field of Islamic Studies and viewed Islam as a treasury of profound and helpful insights and as a signal of Judaism’s centrality in the construction of the West.
  “White Jesus, Black Jesus, Christian Jesus, Jewish Jesus”
Sunday, October 30, 2022 at 4:00pm
Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 E. 6th Street, New York, New York
 Was Jesus a Jew or a Christian? Theologians on both sides have depicted Jesus either as a pious Jew seeking to reform Judaism or as the first Christian who introduced unique ideas and a new way of being a religious person. The debate between Jewish and Christian theologians over the religious identity of Jesus grew in intensity throughout the course of the nineteenth century and played an important role in the Nazi period. My lecture will review both sides of the debate and ask where we stand in our contemporary debates, including over Jesus as a person of color. Does Christology change if Jesus was Jewish, Black, or Asian?
Free and open to the public.

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Arendt Center  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 1:00 pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new translation. Snacks will be provided! With Joshua Boettiger.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Friday evening, we gather for a short Shabbat prayer service with singing and discussion, followed by a vegetarian Shabbat dinner. All Bardians are welcome to join us for any part of the evening.

  Center For Spiritual Life, Resnick Commons A  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Every Thursday evening, all are invited to bake challah and prepare Shabbat dinner for our Friday evening community gathering. Although these evenings serve a practical purpose (preparing food for Shabbat), they are also a wonderful opportunity for students to chat, relax, and engage with one another in the kitchen. All are welcome. 

Professor Robert Alter
Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of
Hebrew and Comparative Literature
at the University of California at Berkeley
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
and
How to Read Biblical Narrative
2:30pm, May 1, 2022
Sixth Street Community Synagogue, New York CityProfessor Robert Alter has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on  American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.   He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible.  His twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. Among his publications over the past thirty years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991),  Canon and Creativity (2000), The Five Book of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004), Imagined Cities  (2005),  The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007), Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary (2010), The Art of Bible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021).  His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.   He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. Professor Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.

  Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially, students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new (and exquisite) translation. Snacks will be provided! With Shai Secunda and Joshua Boettiger

 

  Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially, students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new (and exquisite) translation. Snacks will be provided! With Shai Secunda and Joshua Boettiger

 

  Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially, students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new (and exquisite) translation. Snacks will be provided! With Shai Secunda and Joshua Boettiger

 

  Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially, students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new (and exquisite) translation. Snacks will be provided! With Shai Secunda and Joshua Boettiger

 

  Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
There is an ancient Jewish practice of studying a specific Biblical portion, known as the parsha, each week. We're re-inaugurating the Bard parsha circle, open to everyone (though especially, students) of all religious backgrounds, and meeting weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm in the HAC seminar room. As a group, we’ll wrestle with the familiar-foreign biblical text, using Robert Alter’s new (and exquisite) translation. Snacks will be provided! With Shai Secunda and Joshua Boettiger

 

Magda Teter
Fordham University
 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The twentieth century, as scholar George M. Fredrickson has noted, brought both the “climax and retreat” of racism and antisemitism. The murder of six million Jews during World War II forced a reckoning with ideas that made this unprecedented crime possible and contributed to broader reconsideration of social and religious values dominating western society. It also forced, as the editor of Ebony would later write in the introduction to the special issue on “The White Problem in America” “a re-examination of the Christian faith which brought forth the idea that skin color was not a true measure of a man’s humanity.” This talk will seek to explain the modern rejection of equality of both Jews and Black people in the West by tracing Christianity’s claim to superiority that emerged in a theological context in antiquity but came to be implemented in a legal and political context when Christianity became a political power. I will argue that the Christian sense of superiority developed first in relation to Jews and then transformed to a racialized superiority when Europeans expanded their political reach beyond Europe, establishing slaveholding empires in the early modern period, culminating in the Holocaust and forcing an ongoing reckoning in the post-WWII era. 

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006); Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize; and Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), which won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award; and the forthcoming Enduring Marks of Servitude: Christianity’s Stamp on Antisemitism and Racism in Law and Culture. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2020-2021, Teter was the NEH Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History.

NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Peace is the goal for every country, community, and, hey, family. (See, we're funny here at BGIA.) In general, peace is the absence of war and violence. Through its work on the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Framework, the Institute for Economics and Peace takes peace and peace building further. It focuses on strengths not deficits and individual action on creating and sustaining positive societies.

Join us on Thursday, November 18 at 12pm for an hour long Positive Peace Workshop. In this workshop, participants will learn how to better think about actions and approaches to creating peaceful societies. It will focus on policy, strategy, and implementation. If you're interested in conflict resolution, policymaking, and peace building, don't miss this virtual event. RSVP required. 

Katherine Sorrels
University of Cincinnati 
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This talk will discuss the Camphill movement, an international network of intentional communities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities that was founded in Scotland during World War II by Austrian Jewish refugees. It will focus on the antisemitism and ableism that forced Camphill’s founders to flee Nazi Central Europe, the antisemitic and ableist immigration policies that they confronted in the US and Britain, and the way their response to these overlapping forms of prejudice informed the mission and identity of the movement they founded. Drawing on her forthcoming book On the Spectrum: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability in the Britain and North America, Sorrels will use Camphill to reconstruct the larger story of how Jewish refugees transformed British and North American approaches to disability and, in the process, reshaped the tradition of Viennese curative education. 

Katherine Sorrels is Associate Professor of History, Affiliate Faculty in Judaic Studies, and Chair of the Taft Health Humanities Research Group at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, and Culture (Camden House, 2022) and Ohio under COVID: Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis (under review with the University of Michigan Press). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

Jonathan Judaken
Rhodes College
Preston  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture series, held throughout the 2021-2022 academic year, will explore the ongoing phenomenon of antisemitism by examining its myriad historical contexts and relationships to other forms of prejudice and hatred.
This presentation will first consider the recent debate whether anti-Semitism should be considered a form of racism or a unique form of hatred. Framing this discussion within a historical overview, we will consider how Judeophobia was entangled with Islamophobia and what Fanon called Negrophobia. We will unpack the origins of the terms “anti-Semitism” and “racism” and consider how many theorists in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during anti-colonial struggles understood the linkages between these terms. These theorists were opposed by scholars and writers who insist upon the singularity of anti-Semitism. I will suggest that the root of these claims stem from notions of Jewish choseness, Zionist understandings of anti-Semitism, and claims about the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I will argue that the assertions of uniqueness do not hold up to scrutiny, make a case for why exceptionalist arguments lead to a dead-end in efforts to fight anti-Semitism, and conclude that the struggle today demands that we be clear that anti-Semitism is racism and must be combatted as part of the broader anti-racist struggle. 

Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge 2009). He recently edited a round table in the American Historical Review titled, “Rethinking Anti-Semitism” (October 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Jewish History (with Ethan Katz) on “Jews and Muslims in France Before and After Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher” (September 2018). He has just finished co-editing The Albert Memmi Reader (with Michael Lejman), a compendium of the Tunisian Franco-Jewish writer’s work (Nebraska, 2020). 
NOTE: These lectures are open to the public but all visitors to the Bard campus must register in advance and provide proof of vaccination by completing this form.
 Co-sponsored by The Hannah Arendt Center and The Center for the Study of Hate

A Virtual Panel and Discussion with Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Although white supremacist movements have received renewed public attention since the 2017 violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, they need to be placed in deeper historical context if they are to be understood and combated. In particular, the rise of these movements must be linked to the global war on terror after 9/11, which blinded counterextremism authorities to the increasing threat they posed. In this panel, two prominent sociologists, Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Kathleen Blee, trace the growth of white supremacist extremism and its expanding reach into cultural and commercial spaces in the U.S. and beyond. They also examine these movements from the perspective of their members’ lived experience. How are people recruited into white supremacist extremism? How do they make sense of their active involvement? And how, in some instances, do they seek to leave? The answers to these questions, Miller-Idriss and Blee suggest, are shaped in part by the gendered and generational relationships that define these movements.
 Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).  
Kathleen Blee is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.  If you would like to attend, please register here.  Zoom link and code will be emailed the day of the event. 

 

A Conversation with Israeli Filmmaker Yehonatan Indursky
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A young filmmaker who already has international successes and local cult hits to his name, Yehonatan Indursky (Shtisel, Autonomies, Zman Ponevezh) is a prominent member of a new generation of Israeli artists who have brought artistic sensibilities and sensitivities to exploring the riches and paradoxes of the Orthodox Jewish community in which they were raised. This conversation, moderated by Shai Secunda, will consider Yehonatan’s personal story from Talmudic academy to filmmaking, the aesthetic potentialities of ultra-Orthodox life, his collaboration with Sayed Kashua (“Arab Labor”), the politics of Haredi society during a time of COVID, and more. Join via Zoom:https://bard.zoom.us/j/84309541838

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
While Israeli TV established its international reputation based on terrorist thrillers, it also has developed a rich cadre of programs examining Jewish identity and belonging, many of these shows focus on Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. I propose a three-part typology. The first type of show establishes likeness, calling for the Haredi Jew to be understood as the same as any secular viewer. Series in the second category argue that Haredim are inherently better and more interesting than any secular subject. The third grouping rejects the claims of the first, and instead argues for a more nuanced look into the darker aspects of Haredi life today. We will explore these three types, and what they say about the relationship between Haredim and the State of Israel today. 

Dr. Shayna Weiss is the Associate Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Previously, she was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Israel Studies at the United States Naval Academy. Her research interests converge at the intersection of religion and gender in the Israeli public sphere, as well as the politics of Israeli popular culture. Currently, she is completing a book on gender segregation in the Israeli public sphere and researching the rise of Israeli television in the global market. Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/84309541838
Meeting ID: 843 0954 1838

Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5

In 2018 Jan Grabowksi and Barbara Engelking published Dalej jest noc: losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski [Night Without End: The Fate of the Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland], which documents the range of Polish behavior towards Jews during the Holocaust in a series of local case studies.  The Polish League against Defamation, which has close ties to the right-wing ruling Law and Justice Party, brought a lawsuit against Grabowski and Engelking on behalf of the niece of a figure discussed in the book. This action is widely viewed as a continuation of the government’s campaign to stifle free inquiry into Poland’s wartime history and to punish those who question the narrative of Poles as exclusively the victims of Nazi atrocities who rescued Jews on a massive scale. On February 9, 2021 a Warsaw court found Grabowski and Engelking guilty, declining to fine the scholars but demanding that they issue an apology. In his first public remarks since the trial Prof. Grabowski, in conversation with journalist Masha Gessen, will discuss his response to the verdict as well as its political and scholarly implications. 

Jan Grabowski is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. His books include Polacy, nic się nie stało! Polemiki z Zagładą w tle [Poles, Nothing Happened! Polemics with the Holocaust in the Background] (2021); Na posterunku: Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów [On Duty: Participation of Blue and Criminal Police in the Destruction of the Jews], (2020); Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize; and "Ja Tego Żyda Znam!": Szantażowanie Żydów w Warszawie, 1939-1943 [“I Know that Jew!”: The Blackmailing of Jews in Warsaw, 1939-1943] (2004). He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and has held fellowships and guest professorships at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich), the University of Haifa, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem.

Masha Gessen is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of 11 books of nonfiction, most recently Surviving Autocracy (2020); as well as The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). The Moscow-born Gessen is the recipient of Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, and Nieman Fellowships, Hitchens Prize, Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary, and an honorary doctorate from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
Join via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/95175584762?pwd=V3ZmbnZrN2JraFFzS2Z4U2I3NDB1dz09
Webinar ID: 951 7558 4762
Passcode: 308810

Moderated by Alys Moody and Stephen Ross
Online Event  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
To receive the Zoom invitation for this event, please email [email protected]. Invitations will be sent out on the morning of the event.

Global modernism exists only in translation. Its condition of possibility is the circulation of texts through time and space, across languages and in languages that are not the texts’ own. Historically speaking, the texts we think of as modernist are, almost without exception, the products of lively eras of translation in an expanded sense that reaches beyond the strict remit of textual translation between languages. In order to have global modernism, then, there must be translation and, necessarily, its distortions. Global modernism, by foregrounding this established problematic of translation in the context of an awareness of the unevenness of global exchange, highlights the centrality of language politics to modernist literary creation. 

The study of global modernism, too, relies on active and continuous translation efforts. Contemporary translators, many of them themselves practicing poets or writers, are increasingly making available modernisms from around the world. In doing so, they underscore the extent to which modernists so often regarded translation as a primary creative act rather than secondary or derivative one. 

This roundtable and reading features the work of four scholars and translators of modernist poetry who contributed original translations to the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and whose efforts shine illuminating cross-lights on the modernist labour of translation. As several of our participants are also practicing multilingual poets, the event will offer an occasion to listen to and reflect on the contemporary legacies of modernist poetics.

This conversation, held under the shared auspices of the Literature Program at Bard College and Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, is the second in a three-part series exploring global modernism, in celebration of the anthology. It was preceded by a roundtable on “Editing Global Modernism,” held on October 23, and will be followed by a workshop on pedagogy and global modernism on Friday, December 4, 1:30–4:30pm EST.

Speakers
Emily Drumsta is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University, where she works on modern Arabic and Francophone literatures. Her translation, Revolt Against the Sun: A Bilingual Reader of Nazik al-Mala'ika's Poetry was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant in 2018 and is forthcoming with Saqi Books in January 2021. She is a cofounder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. Her translations have been published in McSweeney's, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Circumference, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Emily contributed translations of Nazik al-Mala’ika’s critical writing to the anthology’s section on Modernism in the Arab World.

Klara Du Plessis is a second-year, FRQSC-funded PhD student in English literature at Concordia University, focusing on contemporary, Canadian poetry and the curation of literary events. As part of her dissertation preparation, she is pursuing a practical, experimental research creation component called Deep Curation, which approaches the organization of literary events as directed by the curator and places poets’ work in deliberate dialogue with each another, heightening the curator’s agency toward the poetic product; to date, she has curated eight such poetry readings, most recently with Sawako Nakayasu, Lee Ann Brown, and Fanny Howe at Boston University, in January 2020. Klara is also deeply involved with SpokenWeb, acting both as a researcher and as the student representative of its governing board; SpokenWeb is a SSHRC-funded, multi-institutional research project, founded at Concordia, that digitizes and archives poetry readings from the past seventy years in North America. Parallel to her scholarly activities, Klara is a poet and critic, active in both the Canadian and South African literary scenes. Her writing is informed by a multilingual poetics grounded in a fluently bilingual identity in English and Afrikaans, and a curiosity about languages generally. Her debut multilingual collection of essay-like long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for a book of poetry published by a woman in Canada, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for a debut collection. Her second English collection, Hell Light Flesh, was published by Palimpsest Press in September 2020, and her first Afrikaans book, ver taal, is currently under consideration for publication in South Africa. Her chapbook, Wax Lyrical, was shortlisted for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award, and she has appeared at festivals, readings, residencies, and conferences in Canada, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere.
 
Ariel Resnikoff is the author of Unnatural Bird Migrator (Operating System, 2020) and the chapbooks Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations (Operating System, 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and Between Shades (Materialist Press, 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish, German, and Hebrew, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Protocols, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry, Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur and Boundary2. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, Processions, and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, copublished by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House, and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and and he is currently a Fulbright Postdoctoral US Scholar. Ariel lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with his partner, the artist and designer Riv Weinstock, and their baby, Zamir Shalom.

Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. His translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) is the first book of Japanese Futurist poetry to appear in English. He is currently working on translating Japanese Dada/anarchist poetry by Hagiwara Kyojiro.

Moderators
Alys Moody is assistant professor of literature at Bard College. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (OUP, 2018) and is currently working on a second book, provisionally entitled The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System. She is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Japan, and the South Pacific.

Stephen J. Ross is assistant professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP, 2017). He is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), and was section editor or coeditor of the sections on modernism in the Caribbean, the Arab world, and greater China.
 

with Alys Moody, Harsha Ram, Stephen J. Ross,
Kaitlin Staudt, and Camilla Sutherland
Online Event  1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Modernist studies has been transformed in recent years by the claim that modernism is a global phenomenon. Alongside work linking British, Irish, North American, and European modernists to the rest of the world, we have seen controversial claims for modernism’s flourishing in non-Western locations, from Japan to Africa, from Turkey to the Caucasus, and from South-East Asia to Latin America. This uncoupling of modernism from a strictly Western teleology remains under-theorised, and under-sourced. How do we study modernism on a global scale? What implications for modernist scholarship does this disciplinary transformation bring, especially in relation to collaborative work? And what new ways of seeing and understanding modernism arise from adopting a global perspective?

This roundtable showcases the methods and findings of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), a new anthology of source texts for global modernism. The book gathers texts by practitioners (writers, artists, critics, etc.) that reflect on the theory and practice of modernism around the world. In addition to celebrating (belatedly!) the publication of this volume last January, we will be discussing the collaborative nature of global modernist research and our “inductive” method of assembling and theorizing the anthology’s texts.

The roundtable brings together five editors of the anthology: experts in Russian and Georgian modernism (Harsha Ram), Turkish modernism (Kaitlin Staudt), and Latin American modernism (Camilla Sutherland) with the volume’s general editors, who will speak to modernism in sub-Saharan Africa (Alys Moody), and the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora (Stephen Ross). We will discuss how global modernism troubles existing assumptions of modernist studies, and what the project of translating, editing, and circulating primary sources can contribute to this conversation. Following short position statements by each speaker, the roundtable will focus on discussion among presenters and with audience members.

This conversation, held under the shared auspices of the Literature Program at Bard College and Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, is the first of a three-part series exploring global modernism, in celebration of the anthology. It will be followed by a discussion with poet-translators associated with the anthology on Thursday, 12 November, 6-7:30pm EST; and a workshop on pedagogy and global modernism on Friday, 4 December, 1:30-4:30pm EST.

To receive the Zoom invitation for this event, please email [email protected]. Invitations will be sent out on the morning of the event.

Speakers Alys Moody is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (OUP, 2018) and is currently working on a second book, provisionally entitled, The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System. She is one of the general editors of Global Modernists on Modernism, and section editor or co-editor of the sections on modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Japan, and the South Pacific. Harsha Ram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire, and is currently completing his second book, The Scale of Culture: City, Nation, Empire and the Russian-Georgian Encounter. Harsha edited the section on modernism in the Caucasus. Stephen J. Ross is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University. He is the author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP, 2017). He is one of the general editors of the anthology, and was section editor or co-editor of the sections on modernism in the Caribbean, the Arab world, and greater China. Kaitlin Staudt is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Auburn. She has published article in venues such as Feminist Modernist Studies and Middle Eastern Literatures, and is currently completing her first monograph, Move Forward and Ascend!: Temporality and The Politics of Form in the Turkish Modernist Novel and editing a cluster of essays on “Global Modernism’s Other Empires.” She edited the Turkish modernism section of this anthology. Camilla Sutherland is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Space of Latin American Women Modernists. Camilla edited the Latin American section of this anthology.

A Streaming Lecture-Workshop with Victoria Hanna
Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Jerusalem-based, international voice artist Victoria Hanna will discuss the physical and sensual explorations that she has been pursuing in her art. This is a living exploration, anchored in the human voice, its location in the body, and its relation to speech. Building on ancient Kabbalistic traditions that see language, the voice, and the mouth as tools of creating worlds, Victoria will reveal the Hebrew alphabet as an instrument for playing with the mouth. By thinking with foundational Kabbalistic texts, such as the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah) and the writings of Abraham Abulafia, we will come to understand how the letters have been, and can be, used for daily work with speech and the body.

Join Zoom Meeting: Meeting ID: 890 3136 4380  / Passcode: 531991
 

  Yinon Cohen, Columbia University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk, Yinon Cohen demonstrates that the strategies Israel has deployed to dispossess Palestinian land and settle Jews in the West Bank have been uncannily similar to those used in Israel proper. After briefly analyzing the Judaization of space from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, he focuses on territorial and demographic processes in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) since 1967.  He Shows how the settler population has flourished demographically and socioeconomically, thereby enhancing Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank.

Yinon Cohen is Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israeli and Jewish Studies in the department of sociology at Columbia University.  Before moving to Columbia in 2007, he was a professor of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on labor markets, social demography, ethnic inequality, and immigration. His most recent publications are on Israel’s territorial and demographic politics (Public Culture, 2018), Ashkenazi-Mizrahi education gap among third-generation Israelis (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018), and rising inequality in fringe benefits in the US (Sociological Science 2018).
 

6:00pm Reception
6:30pm Screening and Discussion
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
THE PRESENCE OF THEIR ABSENCE is the amazing story of a Los Angeles man seeking his roots in the ashes of the Holocaust. 
The film encourages discussion on the new oral tradition that belongs uniquely to adult children of Shoah survivors.  Few of their stories have ever been told.  
 
We follow Fred Zaidman on his journey to trace his inherited trauma.  Armed with only scant clues from his late parents who had survived concentration camps in Poland and Germany, Fred ventures into the unknown to tell his story for this first time. 
 
With helpers in Poland, at Yad Vashem in Israel, at Bergen-Belsen, Germany - and with an unlikely source – a Baptist minister in Atlanta who guides us through a cemetery in Poland - Fred finds his roots, unshackles his pain and reconstructs his future.

We feature a Death March survivor from Fred’s ancestral town, Fred’s brother Martin – one of 1000 children born in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp – and discover living relatives in Israel among findings of those who perished in Poland.

Yad Vashem has called The Presence of Their Absence “a film for the ages."  We are honored to be at the forefront of this groundbreaking tradition and look forward to sharing Fred’s courageous story.

Professor Moshe Halbertal
NYU & Hebrew University
at 4:45pm in Olin 102 & Sunday, October 27th at 7PM at The Sixth Street Community Synagogue  Thursday, October 24th at 4:45pm in Olin 102

"The Biblical Book of Samuel and the Birth of Politics: Two Faces of Political Violence"
The Book of Samuel is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of biblical literature. Yet the book's anonymous author was more than an inspired storyteller. The author was also an uncannily astute observer of political life and the moral compromises and contradictions that the struggle for power inevitably entails. The lecture will explore the ways in which the book of Samuel understands political violence political violence unleashed by the sovereign on his own subjects as it is rooted in the paranoia of the isolated ruler and the deniability fostered by hierarchical action through proxies.


Sunday, October 27th at 7PM
The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
325 E. Sixth Street
New York, NY

"Confronting Loss: The Meaning and Experience of Mourning form the Talmud to Maimonides"
The experience of loss and mourning is a painful and ultimately inescapable feature of human life. Jewish law established practices of mourning that prescribe a rather detailed structure of the mourner’s conduct as well as the response of the community to the mourner and its obligation to provide consolation. Maimonides codified this body of regulations in his great code of Jewish Law, the Mishneh Torah, in the section titled “The Laws of Mourning.” This lecture will focus on the attempt to understand the meaning and practice of mourning in the Talmudic tradition and in Maimonides’ thought. It will explore the relationship of the concept of mourning in the Jewish tradition to other understandings of the dynamics of mourning such as Freud’s seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Featuring the voices of three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen and Academy Award winner Adrien Brody
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage, and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon—the truth—and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Rebecca L. Stein
Duke University Department of Anthropology
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This paper studies the impact of new photographic technologies and image-sharing
platforms on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Taking its cue
from Trumpian political discourse, I focus on the right-wing Jewish Israeli reckoning with
the growing visual archive of Palestinian injury at Israeli state or settler hands – a
reckoning that occurs through the discourse of “fake news,” or the charge that such images
are fraudulent or manipulated in some regard to produce the damning portrait of Israel. I
will trace the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context, its modification in
the digital age, and consider the ways it has become an increasingly standard right-wing
response to images of state violence believed to damage Israel’s global standing. I will
argue that the fraudulence charge is marshalled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli
state violence -- a charge that works to bring these damning images back in line with
dominant Israeli ideology by shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli
victimhood. The story of the “fake” image of Palestinian injury endeavors to strip the visual
field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or
such is the fantasy.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Multiple Locations, See Poster  11:45 am – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Judaism is often thought of as a religion of the book, and the most influential book in the Jewish canon is the Talmud—a famously complex, genre-defying text that has been at the center of Jewish life and learning since the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the Talmud is most often encountered in book form, typically in large tomes whose pages are imprinted with an iconic, typeset design. And yet the Talmud is considered to be the culmination of Judaism’s Oral Torah, and it was produced and originally transmitted orally by rabbis living in late antique Iraq. This workshop will gather scholars, artists, a printer, a digitalist, and a performer to consider the many manifestations of this classical work and related Jewish textualities, from late antique graffiti and lament; to contemporary fiction, illustration, and printing; to the virtual universes of digitization and the internet, and experimental voice art. These explorations bear relevance not only for Jewish Studies, but also for broader matters such as the study of writing and orality, and the future of the book in the digital age.
 
Participants
Zachary Braiterman is professor of religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University.

Jessica Tamar Deutsch is a New York based artist. In 2017, she published The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics.

Victoria Hanna is a Jerusalem based composer, creator, performer, researcher, and teacher of voice and language.

Galit Hasan-Rokem is a poet, translator, and Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Professor of Hebrew Literature (emerita) at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky is an award-winning printer, book designer, and typography expert based in Rhinebeck.

Ruby Namdar is an Israeli novelist based in New York City. His novel The Ruined House (Harper, 2018) won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious prize in Hebrew literature.

Jonathan Rosen is a writer and essayist, and wrote The Talmud and the Internet (Picador, 2000). He is the editorial director of Nextbook Press.

Karen B. Stern is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. 

Shai Secunda holds the Jacob Neusner chair in Jewish Studies at Bard College.

Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld is the director of education at Sefaria.org.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Ken Frieden, B. G. Rudolph Professor of Judaic Studies, Syracuse University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk follows Jewish humor from Sholem Aleichem’s monologues to American Jewish fiction and standup comedy. At the core of this story is an oral-style voice that began in Yiddish and moved to American writing in works by authors like Yezierska, Rosten, Paley, and Roth. Echoes of Yiddish continue as a prominent part of Jewish humor in performances by Lenny Bruce and in current television series. The evening will feature film clips and live performance.

Ken Frieden, the B. G. Rudolph Professor of Judaic Studies at Syracuse University, published Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction in 2016. Prior books include Classic Yiddish Fiction (1995) and anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation, such as Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler (1996) and Classic Yiddish Stories (2004). At Syracuse University Press, Frieden edits the series Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Arendt Center  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The killing of 11 people worshipping at the Tree of Life Synagogue last month brought the fact of rising antisemitism to popular attention. At the same time, numerous ads and campaign rallies made widespread use of antisemitic tropes and dog whistles during the recent elections. And the number of antisemitic incidents in the United States and around the world is rising.

Bard faculty Cecile Kuznitz, Samantha Hill, and Roger Berkowitz will offer their thoughts on what to make of the rise in antisemitic acts and then lead a conversation on antisemitism in the United States. 

Date: November 28th, 2018
Time: 12 noon
Location: Hannah Arendt Center

Rsvp Required: [email protected]

Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program 

Dr. Nathaniel Berman
Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture, Brown University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
In the face of our current “Age of Anger,” Nathaniel Berman turns to the poetic mythology of the Jewish esoteric tradition – replete with tales of the crucial role of fury in the formation of divine, demonic, and human subjectivity.  The Zohar, kabbalah’s central text, declares, “there is anger – and – there is anger”:  foregrounding anger’s often ambivalent role, both igniting destructive hatred and impelling demands for social justice.  Examining Zoharic mythology from rhetorical and psychoanalytic perspectives, Berman shows how it provides a productive language for perennial features of the human condition. 
Dr. Samantha Hill (Political Studies, Hannah Arendt Center) will be responding to the paper.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Richard A. Freund, University of Hartford
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Richard Freund leads an international team using noninvasive archeological and geoscience techniques to explore Jewish sites in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), including the remains of the Great Synagogue and the locale of mass killings during the Holocaust. In this talk he will describe his work and future plans for the sites, as well as show film clips from episodes of Nova featuring his discoveries. Prof. Cecile Kuznitz will also provide historical background on the Jewish landscape of Vilna.

Richard Freund is the director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and Greenberg Professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford. He has directed six archeological projects in Israel and three projects in Europe. Prof. Freund is the author of six books on archeology, two books on Jewish ethics, and more than one hundred scholarly articles, and has appeared in 15 television documentaries.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Marcin Wodziński, University of Wrocław, Poland
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Hasidism began as a radical mystical movement whose rapid growth has puzzled scholars until this day. Recent research has used new tools including GIS to explore questions about the origins, spread, and post-Holocaust resurgence of this most important socioreligious movement in modern Judaism. Is it true that Hasidism dominated most of East European Jewry by the end of the 18th century? What were the borders of Hasidic influence and how did they change? Which Hasidic dynasties were strongest and why? How did Hasidism resurrect in the post-Holocaust world and how strong is it today?

Marcin Wodziński is professor of Jewish history and literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. His books include Hebrew Inscriptions in Silesia, 13th–18th Century (1996), Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland (2005), and Hasidism and Politics: The Kingdom of Poland, 1815–1864 (2013). He is the author of three new works on Hasidism: Hasidism: A New History (contributor; 2018), Historical Atlas of Hasidism (2018), and Hasidism: Key Questions (2018).

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, President's Room  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

A lecture by Scott-Martin Kosofsky, Principal, The Philidor Company
New Annandale House  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The term “hypertext” is defined as a text that references other texts in such a way as the reader can immediately access all of them through a computer display. It is often said that the inspiration for this idea came from Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” but Jews have been thinking and working along these lines for over two thousand years, as a way of keeping alive the work of sage commentators on its major scriptural and legal texts. With the invention of moveable type and the printing press, Jews seized on the opportunity to present these commentaries and conversations all at once on the page, in a way that was far more elaborate than was practicable in the era of manuscripts.

The highly elaborate hypertext pages of the printed Talmud and codes of law have been a fixture of rabbinical and scholarly life since the 15th century. But in the last 10 years, this style of presenting text and commentary along with alternate readings on a single page or spread has been adapted to some of the most popular prayer books that are in the pews of progressive American synagogues. The person responsible for the execution of this work is the American book designer, typographer, and editor Scott-Martin Kosofsky, who now lives in Rhinebeck, and who will present his extraordinary work to us, explaining how it’s done and showing dozens of examples from the amazing history of these books, which contain as-yet untapped ideas that have much to offer our digital present and future.

About Scott Kosofsky: 
After living in the Boston area for 40 years, Scott-Martin Kosofsky settled in Rhinebeck in 2015. There he continues his work developing, producing, designing, composing, editing, writing, and making types for books on subjects as far-flung as abandoned state mental hospitals and the relationship of the typeface Helvetica with the New York City subway system. His main work, however, is in Judaica, and since 2008 he has developed and designed the new prayer books for both the Conservative Movement (Mahzor Lev Shalem and Siddur Lev Shalem) and the Reform Movement (the new machzor Mishkan HaNefesh), all of which feature his own Hebrew typefaces. His book about the Jewish year, The Book of Customs, was winner of a National Jewish Book Award in 2005. In an earlier life he was a musician, and a founder of the Boston Early Music Festival.

  Film Screening
Weis Cinema  7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

a lecture by
Prof. Anna Maria Mariani (University of Chicago)

respondent
Prof. Francine Prose (Bard College)
 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk asks what became of Primo Levi’s testimonial function after his death. The first part investigates the literary objects (novels and comic books) produced in the wake of Levi’s death, when fictionalized representations of him multiplied through different media. As a means of comparison, the question will be explored by taking into account a series of fictional works that feature another quintessential emblem of the Shoah: Anne Frank. The second part will instead examine Literature or Life by Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, who rewrote and rearticulated Levi’s words on the very day of the latter’s suicide. Can testimonial function migrate between mortal bodies, like the royal dignitas, thus preserving itself beyond the ephemeral lives of individuals? 
 

Dr. Eddy Portnoy in conversation with Prof. Luc Sante
 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm EST/GMT-5

An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Eddy Portnoy's new book Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press mines century-old Yiddish newspapers to expose the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was. 

Eddy Portnoy received his Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary. A specialist in Jewish popular culture, he has taught at Rutgers University and currently serves as academic adviser for the Max Weinreich Center and exhibition curator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Luc Sante, the author of several award-wining books, is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College.
 

  Marc Silverman
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
Janusz Korczak (1878, Warsaw; 1942, Treblinka) is known for the heroic stand of non-violent opposition he took in response to the Nazis’ decision to liquidate the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw (July-August, 1942) and to deport everybody there, including all children, to the death camp of Treblinka. Korczak refused numerous offers to escape into safety from the ghetto. He stayed with the children (over a hundred) and staff of the Jewish orphanage he had long headed, accompanying them through to death.

However, the exclusive focus on Korczak’s dramatic end is a disservice. He was one of the twentieth century's outstanding moral educators. This talk focuses on his child-centered humanism as well as his identification with Poles and Jews in the expression of this humanism.
 
American born and raised,  Marc Silverman received his BA, MA and doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served for over 30 years as Senior Lecturer in the Hebrew University School of Education.  He has published in the fields of educational philosophy and Jewish culture and education.   He is the author of A Pedagogy of Humanist Moral Education: The Educational Thought of Janusz Korczak (2017), published by Palgrave Macmillan Press.    

  Yehoshua November & Michael Ives
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  9:00 am – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
A symposium commemorating the centennial of the Russian Revolution which will examine a wide range of topics related to the history, politics, and culture of this seminal event in modern Russian history. Bard President Leon Botstein will deliver the keynote address, and speakers include scholars from Bard, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University (Smolny College). The scholars will discuss, among other topics, the history and politics of the Revolution, literature in early Soviet Russia, visual culture of the two 1917 revolutions and the Russian Civil War, music of the Revolution, and the Russian Revolution and Eastern European ethnic cultures. The symposium is free and open to the public.

Adina Hoffman 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Award-winning essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman will discuss her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which is a gripping and intimate journey into the lives of three very different architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.  A powerfully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, the book uncovers multiple layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, in Jerusalem and everywhere, to be foreign and to belong. 
             
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
 
 
Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem
“A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate
 
“Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick
 
“Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra

For more info please contact [email protected]

A reading by poet and translator Peter Cole (Yale University)
 
Weis Cinema  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
MacArthur winner Peter Cole reads from his new book, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (American Poets), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work. His poetry, writes Ben Lerner, “is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless.”
 
“Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.”
—Harold Bloom
 
 
 
 
 
For more info please contact [email protected]
 

Kline, Faculty Dining Room  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come celebrate the end of the year with fellow MESers. Meet faculty, hear about exciting new courses, study abroad programs, senior projects, and a number of incredible iniatives MES students are working on. Snacks will be served. All are welcome.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Yellow Room in the campus center and RKC 103  1:15 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
I. New Connections: The Talmud and the Contemporary Humanities - a Workshop
Location: The Yellow Room in the Campus Center (1:15-4:45pm)

Featuring leading scholars of Jewish studies in dialogue with Bard students and faculty.

II. "Make it New": Classical Jewish Texts and Artistic Imagination
Location: RKC 103 (4:45-6:15pm)

Nicole Krass: Novelist, author of The History of Love (2005) and Great House (2010)
Adam Kirsh: Poet and critic
Galit-Hasan-Rokem: Scholar, poet, and translator.

III. Jewish Studies and the Liberal Arts: Institutional Possibilities
Location: RKC 103 (6:30-7:30pm)

Featuring President Leon Botstein, Bruce Chilton, and Alan Avery-Peck.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Reading from Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan, a novel based around the history of the Jewish community in Ireland
RKC 103  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Ruth Gilligan is an Irish-born novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her fourth novel, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan is based around the history of the Jewish community in Ireland, and was recently published by Atlantic Books and Tin House to much acclaim.

At the start of the twentieth century, a young girl and her family emigrate from Europe in search of a better life in America, only to pitch up in Ireland by mistake. In 1958, a mute boy locked away in a mental institution outside Dublin forms an unlikely friendship with a man consumed by the story of the love he lost nearly two decades earlier. And in present-day London, an Irish journalist is forced to confront her conflicting notions of identity and family when her Jewish boyfriend asks her to make a true leap of faith. Spanning generations and braiding together three unforgettable voices, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan shows us what it means to belong, and how storytelling can redeem us all.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Olin Language Center, Room 115  7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  A conversation with Israeli-American Author, Ruby Namdar ("The Ruined House" - Winner of 2015 Sapir Prize, English translation due out in 2017) and Professor of Hebrew Literature Haim Weiss (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Olin LC 115  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This conversation, with a prize-winning Israeli-American novelist and a scholar of Hebrew literature, moderated by Shai Secunda (Bard, Religion and Jewish Studies) will consider universal literary themes of canon and breach, and reflect on the experience of trying to write a contemporary novel in a top-heavy literary tradition like Hebrew literature.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline Commons  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Discussion & Snacks
Olin Humanities, Room 102  7:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come watch Shtisel, an Israeli television drama series that follows the intersecting story-lines of a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish family living in the present-day Jerusalem, followed by comments from Yuval Elmelech (Sociology), Cecile Kuznitz (History), and Shai Secunda (Religion). Meet other Jewish Studies faculty and students, hear about spring courses, and enjoy a snack.  

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Derek Penslar
Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Israel-Palestine conflict is highly visible and contentious in student politics. Academic teaching and research on Israel/Palestine is less visible but is a vital component of university life. This talk will illuminate the potential of what scholars do in the classroom and library to not merely replicate the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus but rather to build bridges between students with diverse disciplinary and political orientations.

  Derek Penslar
Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Toronto
Kline, College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
During this brown bag lunch Prof. Penslar will discuss his current research on journalistic writings by Theodor Herzl that flesh out ideas about colonialism, race, and empire. His work juxtaposes Herzl's diaries, written in private but intended for a public audience, with his journalism, which was produced for the public yet at times expressed deeply private feelings. The textual interplay reveals that Herzl was deeply embedded in fin de siècle racial and colonial discourse, thought of colonized peoples with a complex mixture of sympathy and antipathy, and held starkly divergent views about Africa and the Orient.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Olin Hall  8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
World premiere of Noach Lundgren's Misah Ivrit. An unprecedented approach to the Mass, yet one deeply rooted in it's origins, Misah Ivrit presents a full setting of the Mass text in Biblical and Modern Hebrew, along with supplemental texts taken from Jewish liturgy.

Conducted by
Noach Lundgren

Performed by
Students of Bard College and Conservatory, Bard alumni, and members of the area community

Preceded by new solo music performed by the composer and a guest appearance by local trio Waterdove.

 

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Shai Secunda
The Martin Buber Society of Fellows
Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Rebekah Klein-Pejšová '94
Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Purdue University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
It is not difficult for us to imagine the sight of Budapest’s railway stations crowded with refugees after the summer of 2015. One hundred and one years earlier, in the early days of the First World War, Budapest’s train stations served as sites from which Galician Jewish refugees were sent to Vienna in transports arranged and financed by the Budapest Jewish Community. This talk probes why the Budapest Jewish community cooperated with the Hungarian wartime administration in clearing Austrian – that is, Galician Jewish – refugees from Hungarian territory, against a backdrop of the wider Hungarian Jewish response to the Jewish refugee crisis in Austria-Hungary. It offers insight into the often hasty and improvisational nature of wartime refugee assistance during the first mass civilian displacement crisis of the twentieth century.

Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, a 1994 graduate of Bard College, is the author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Indiana University Press, 2015).

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Please join us weekly.  Stay for as long as you would like.
Kline, President's Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

  Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Featuring a new documentary called Oriented. The film is about the sexual and political identity struggle of three homosexual Palestinians living in Tel Aviv.

The film will be followed by a discussion led by Robert Weston of Gender and Sexuality Studies.

A conversation with award-winning translators Ann Goldstein (New Yorker) Michael F. Moore (PEN/Heim Translation Fund)
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Moderated by Prof. Franco Baldasso
Introduction by Prof. Cecile Kuznitz
 
Toni Morrison described Primo Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” Levi is the distinguished author of decisive books such as If This Is a Man, and The Periodic Table. For the first time the entire oeuvre of the most acclaimed Holocaust survivor is available in English, after a seven-year collective endeavor led by Ann Goldstein, New Yorker editor and celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri. Together with Goldstein, the event will feature Michael F. Moore, a most accomplished translator from Italian and UN interpreter.

For more information on Goldstein and the Complete Works of Primo Levi, view interview: HERE

Primo Levi,  (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy—

died April 11, 1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps. Levi was brought up in the small Jewish community in Turin, studied at theUniversity of Turin, and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in 1941. Two years later he joined friends in northern Italy in an attempt to connect with a resistance movement, but he was captured and sent to Auschwitz. While there, Levi worked as a slave labourer for an I.G. Farbenindustrie synthetic-rubber factory. Upon the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in 1945, Levi returned to Turin, where in 1961 he became the general manager of a factory producing paints, enamels, and synthetic resins; the association was to last some 30 years.
Levi’s first book, If This Is a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz), demonstrated extraordinary qualities of humanity and detachment in its analysis of the atrocities he had witnessed. His later autobiographical works, La tregua (1963; The Truce, or The Reawakening) and I sommersi e i salvati (1986; The Drowned and the Saved), are further reflections on his wartime experiences. Il sistema periodico (1975; The Periodic Table) is a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element, on the analogies between the physical, chemical, and moral spheres; of all of Levi’s works, it is probably his greatest critical and popular success. He also wrote poetry, novels, and short stories. His 1987 death was apparently a suicide.

Sponsors: Italian Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Hannah Arendt Center

March 8, 6:00pm
RKC 103 - Laszlo Z. Bito ‘60 Auditorium
Free & Open to the Public!