The Yiddish language is often treated as humorous or nostalgic in television and in movies. As an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Yiddish on screen additionally reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience. The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen examines how Yiddish is used to reimagine Jewish lore and tells new stories...
This lecture explores domestic life in the Venetian ghetto as both a site of physical segregation, housing scarcity, and oppression, and a space of cultural negotiation and transformation. Drawing on unpublished archival sources, surviving material culture, and the built environment, it traces how Venetian Jews actively shaped their living spaces through engagement with objects, furnishings,...
Drawing on previously unexamined archives and postwar cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors explores how American Jews constructed meaning out of devastation—and how humanitarian aid became intertwined with public memory. The book uncovers how American Jewish communities first came to learn about and respond to the Holocaust through communal campaigns, radio broadcasts, speeches, short films, and...
The event, Black Lives under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art with Sarah Phillips Casteel (Carleton University), has been postponed. A new date will be announced once it is finalized. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding. Please stay tuned for further updates. In a little-known chapter of World War II,...
Jewish people have always wandered. From the time of the Babylonian Exile in the early 6th century BCE, diaspora became the Jews' normal condition, and though they may have hoped for a return to their "Promised Land" at the "End of Days," they made sense of their many homes, defending diaspora as the realm where...
During its nearly thirty years in business, J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States. It thrived in the glow of the Jewish ethnic pride movements of the sixties and seventies but was unable...
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
This lecture examines a particularly brutal wave a violence that occurred across hundreds of predominantly Polish and Ukrainian communities in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The dominant explanations for pogrom violence center around three most frequently cited causes: endemic antisemitism in Eastern European societies, a desire for revenge for alleged...
The deaths and deportations that accompanied the destruction of the Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE mark the turning point in the arc of biblical narrative. The book of Ezra-Nehemiah describes the reconstruction of life in Judah in the aftermath that catastrophe. It is the only book in the Hebrew Bible to depict this...