How did the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigate the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century? In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class...
Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story and analyze their films, from inception to reception. What triggered this sudden development? Why did Israeli filmmakers turn to horror? How do their...
Until recently, very few people knew about Rokhl Auerbach, a remarkable woman who survived the Holocaust and then dedicated her life to preserving the memories of its victims. Professor Samuel D. Kassow will discuss Auerbach’s memoir Warsaw Testament, which paints a vivid portrait of that city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community atruction at the...
In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, Black writers and visual artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works...
Through decades of research and powerful interviews, the Mitchell family—a team of disability studies scholars and filmmakers—investigates the Nazi Aktion T4 program, the first Nazi mass killing initiative and precursor to the Holocaust. Featuring conversations with memorial directors, disabled people, and descendants of victims, Disposable Humanity brings to light the forgotten truth that disabled people...
The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust recovers a range of compelling voices that had been scarcely known or translated. Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, some writing in Yiddish and others in Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust...
Meat is one of the most visible markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. In his most recent book, John Efron argues that meat has played an especially important role in the formation of Jewish and Christian identities in Germany from the Middle Ages until today. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, the...
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, one of the most celebrated Hasidic masters of the twentieth century, is known not only for founding the world’s largest Hasidic dynasty, but also for his strongly held anti-Zionist views. His work articulates a Jewish political theology against Zionism built on the foundations of traditional Jewish sources, and its influence...
This lecture will examine the discussion of pluralism in the field of comparative theology in light of a core question in the history of Israelite religion. It will create a dialogue between the work of historians of religion such as Yehezkel Kaufmann and theologians such as John Hick, with some reference to the Egyptologist Jan...
In this talk, historian Julia Phillips Cohen discusses the unknown role that Jews from the eastern and southern Mediterranean played in the shaping of modern couture. Following two fashion houses run by an interconnected network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in fin-de-siècle Paris, the talk reveals the participation of these firms in a...