News and Events

  Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The concept of pogroms permanently changed the fate of Europe, not only when acts of violence took place, but also afterwards when they were contemplated, processed, and painfully relived in survivors’ memories. Today “pogrom” has become a part of a vocabulary describing violence, but also an emblem of bitter, devastating defeat. The political and ideological disputes that the word has caused from the beginning of the 20th century until today, especially in the context of Jewish history, are an important part of building social sensitivity in different parts of the world. Where did the term come from? How has its meaning changed? What accounts for its popularity? And why is it problematic when used in academic discourse? These are questions that should be asked not only by academic historians but by all who struggle to find the language to rationally describe the world around us.

Artur Markowski is a historian at the University of Warsaw and he is currently affiliated with Georgetown University. His scholarship addresses the social history of the Russian Empire, Jewish history, and the history of violence. An author of several monographs in Polish, he will be presenting from his  book Anti-Jewish Violence and Social Imagery: The Bialystok Pogrom of 1906, which will be released in English in 2025.


Download: PogromPoster.pdf

  Bard Hall  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this reading and discussion, poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer will speak about the relationship between silence and words. What are words, what do they mean, and how much can we rely on them? Do words dissolve into silence, does silence pervade (poetic) words? Fischer will present poems from his new serial poem "Through a Window", just out from Roof Books.

Co-sponsored by Written Arts, Interdisciplinary Study of Religions, Jewish Life, and the Bard Sangha.

Center for Human Rights and the Arts Talks Series
RKC 103  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites the audience to stay at the threshold of the museum in order to recognize the impossibility of decolonizing museums without decolonizing the world. Refusing to study what was plundered as mere objects as museums command us to do, but rather as evidence of a destroyed world, Azoulay decenters the category of “restitution,” and proposes to understand plunder as communal remains. Azoulay weaves the plunder of objects stolen from Jews in Europe—and their partial restitution within the broader picture of European plunder from other places, among them from the world of her ancestors in the Maghreb, from Palestine, and West Africa, in an attempt to undo the exceptionalization of “the Jews” which continues to serve Euro-American imperial interests on a global scale.

Keith Kahn Harris, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and Senior Lecturer at Leo Baeck College
Olin Humanities, Room 202  4:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The period since October 7, 2023 has seen the emergence of a "complicity discourse" manifested in injunctions to speak publicly about Israel-Palestine. While this is particularly prevalent in pro-Palestinian activism, pro-Israel groups also associate silence with complicity. This lecture explores the profound implications for Jewish life of competing demands that Jews be public. It is becoming necessary for Jews across the political spectrum to re-consider the value of the private, mundane realms of Jewish existence.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a British sociologist and writer. He is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College. The author of eight books, his next book Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are will be published in March 2025.

Victoria Hanna
Chapel of the Holy Innocents  5:45 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Building on ancient Kabbalistic traditions that see language, the voice, and the mouth as tools of cosmic creation, 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, Victoria will demonstrate how the letters have been, and can be, used for daily work with speech and the body. She will also perform works inspired by the biblical Songs of Solomon, as well as late antique Jewish amulets. 

Victoria grew up in Jerusalem in an Orthodox Jewish family with roots in Egypt and Iran. She has performed and taught at universities around the world including Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan University, Virginia Tech, Monash University, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University. Her work combines Jewish mysticism, Dada, surrealism, and feminism.

  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.