U P C O M I N G E V E N T S
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P A S T E V E N T S
Genocide, Diaspora and Homeland: Comparing Jewish and Armenian Survivor Communities in 20th Century France
Monday, March 17, 2008 , 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Olin, Room 102
Professor Maud Mandel
Brown University
During World War I and World War II respectively, Turkish attacks against Armenians and Nazi persecution of European Jewry seemed to underscore the impossibility of modern nation-states tolerating ethnic minorities in their midsts. Yet in the aftermath of genocide Armenian and Jewish survivor communities often remained just that, minorities within nation-states. This talk will focus on France, where survivors of both groups had to come to terms with the recent onslaught against their fundamental human rights while fashioning a place for themselves within the French state. In what ways--if at all--did genocide influence survivors' religious, ethnic, and national affiliations? How did they assess the feasibility of living as national minorities after an attack on their status as such? And how did their conceptions of homeland and Diaspora shift as a result?
Maud Mandel is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Brown University. Her monograph In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth Century France, was published by Duke University Press. Her current book project is entitled Beyond Antisemitism: Muslims and Jews in Contemporary France.
Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and the Human Rights Project
Michal Govrin in conversation with Norman Manea
Thursday, November 8, 2007 , 7:00 pm
Olin, Room 102
Michal Govrin
in conversation with Norman Manea
on her latest novel SNAPSHOTS
Michal Govrin, a novelist, poet, and theater director, chairs the theater department of Emunah College, Jerusalem. Among her works in English are her novel, The Name (Penguin-Riverhead, 1998) and Body of Prayer (Cooper Union, 2001), a dialogue with poet and architect David
Shapiro and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Snapshots received Israel's 2003 AKUM Prize, and has just been published in English by Penguin-Riverhead
One recent review described Snapshots as "an acclaimed and controversial novel about love, war, the devastation of loss, and trying to find oneself when the world is in chaos. After her death in a car accident, a childhood friend is asked to translate the notes and journals of feminist architect Ilana Tzuriel. In the process, the friend uncovers a secret life of deep passions and conflicts. A lyrical and poetic look at the impact of one woman against the torrents of history, Snapshots is also a novel about Israel that asks, where is the nation heading and what is it becoming? Who are its people becoming and how will they be defined -- not only by the world at large, but by themselves?"
"Soundtrack of a Zeitgeist: Weimar-Era Songs of the Stage and Screen"
Sunday, November 4, 2007 , 3:00 pm
Olin Hall
Libby Shapiro, vocals, with Jed Distler, piano
Featuring selections by:
Bertolt Brecht
Franz Doelle
Roger Fernay
Robert Gilbert
Friedrich Hollaender
Marcellus Schiffer
Kurt Weill
Open to the Public & Free of Charge!
Singer and actress Libby Shapiro attended Bard College from 1980-82. "[Her] voice is a gift from heaven,” wrote the Suddeutsche Zeitung of Munich, Germany. A connoisseur of popular song in English, German, and French—spanning many decades and even centuries with a special interest in the 1920s and ‘30s—she is known for her wit, warmth, and rapport with the audience, whether in intimate clubs, large concert halls, or theaters. She has performed in and/or given voice to a wide range of projects in the United States and Europe, embracing dramatic theater and musical theater, documentary film and radio commercials, installation art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and comedy on German TV. Her repertoire includes songs from film, the stage, and dance orchestras to chanson, pop, country, swing/Big Band, and folk. Shapiro’s New York appearances include venues such as the Jewish Museum, La Mama, Fez under Time Café, and the Cornelia Street Café; in Germany and France, she has performed with the Mickey Katz Orchestra with special guest Giora Feidman, the New Classic Jazz Quartet, and Hatshepsut, among others. She is fondly remembered in Germany from her two years as Zelda with the nationally acclaimed music comedy trio die Blauen Engel, which performed on countless stages from Berlin’s legendary Bar Jeder Vernunft to the Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Hamburger Kammerspielen.
Israel/ Palestine: The Demographic Context
Tuesday, March 27, 2007 , 7:30 pm
Hegeman Science Hall
Jews in Israel.... Israeli Arab citizens.... Palestinians in the occupied
territories.... Jewish settlers in the occupied territories....
majorities/minorities/citizens/...occupiers and occupied...
Sergio Della Pergola is Israel's leading demographer. For years, he has been a leader
in discussions of all issues concerning the current and projected populations of Jews
and Arabs in Israel and in the occupied territories. He is the Argov Professor at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem and chairs the Division of Jewish Demography and
Statistics at the University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry.
Adrienne Cooper and Jenny Romaine
Monday, December 4, 2006 , 3:30 pm
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
LEADING ARTISTS OF THE NEW YIDDISH CULTURE MOVEMENT
ADRIENNE COOPER & JENNY ROMAINE
WILL PRESENT A TALK & WORKSHOP
MONDAY DECEMBER 4 - 3:30
RESNICK STUDIO - FISCHER PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
ADRIENNE COOPER, one of the most influential performers of Yiddish vocal music today, appears on concert, theater, and club stages around the world. Her singing has been featured on film, radio, television, and some 20 recordings including Partisans of Vilna, the only Yiddish recording ever nominated for a Grammy Award. She has mentored and inspired a generation of singers and bands in the burgeoning klezmer revival scene. Cooper has performed and recorded with, among others, The Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, Kapelye, and Frank London's Shekhine Big Band. New productions include€ an international tour of Ghetto Tango (also on CD), her groundbreaking collaboration with Zalmen Mlotek on unknown music theater of World War II. As assistant director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, she cofounded the Yiddish Folk Arts Program, popularly known as KlezKamp, an internationally recognized model for multigenerational folk art education now in its 14th year. Cooper cowrote and starred in The Memoirs of Gluckl of Hameln, presented to acclaim in New York at the legendary La Mama Annex. She received her musical training at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, and holds B.A and M.A. degrees in history from Hebrew University and the University of Chicago. She is currently director of program development for the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring.
JENNY ROMAINE has worked extensively as a stilt dancer, puppeteer, and performer with the Bread and Puppet Theater, Janie Geiser and Co., Ninth Street Theater,and Amy Trompetter. She is a founding member of Great Small Works. Romaine is also the music director of the OBIE/Bessie Award winning free outdoor traveling circus, Circus Amok. Romaine recently conceived, directed, and performed The Memoirs of Glickel of Hamelin, a music theater adaptation with puppets of the only pre-modern text by a woman in Yiddish, A collaborative project with composer Frank London of the Klezmatics, and Yiddish song-diva Adrienne Cooper. Romaine was featured in the sound opera Do Chinese Postmen Ring Twice Too? with Hans-Peter Litcher and Christian Marclay (Sarah Mandlblutt composer), and choreographed / performed the musical numbers in Gregg Bordowitz's film adaptation of The Suicide. Romaine has directed community based spectacles with Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, the Lesbian Avengers, Klezkanada (Montreal), Ashkenaz: A festival of New Yiddish Culture (Toronto), and has taught
at Island Academy on Riker's Island (youth prison). Romaine was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Puppetry and Emergent Forms in 1997, and was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. She has an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.
SPONSORED BY THE JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM
Yiddish Film Series: The Dybbuk
Monday, November 13, 2006 , 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
The Expressionist masterpiece . . . it's The Exorcist meets Romeo & Juliet
Yiddish Film Series: Undzere kinder (Our Children)
Monday, November 6, 2006 , 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
One of the first films made about the Holocaust (1948), featuring child survivors
Yiddish Film Series: A brivele der mamen (A Letter to Mother)
Monday, October 30, 2006 , 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
A weepie about a family torn apart by immigration . . . bring tissues!
The Professionalization of The Yiddish Theater: Goldfaden to Gordin
Monday, October 30, 2006 , 3:20 pm
Fisher Center, Resnick Theater Studio
The Program in Jewish Studies Presents:
Joel Berkowitz of SUNY Albany
“The Professionalization of The Yiddish Theater: Goldfaden to Gordin”
Monday October 30 at 3:20
Fischer Center for the Performing Arts
Resnick Studio
Joel Berkowitz is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and Director of the Department of Judaic Studies at SUNY Albany. He previously taught in the CUNY system and at Oxford University. He is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, and editor and translator (with Jeremy
Dauber) of Landmark Yiddish Plays.
The American-Jewish Periphery: A Levy Economics Institute mini-conference
Thursday, October 26, 2006 - Friday, October 27, 2006 , 6:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blithewood, Levy Institute
THE AMERICAN-JEWISH PERIPHERY
A Levy Economics Institute mini-conference, Thursday, October 26 and Friday,October 27
Thursday
7:30–9:00 pm Session 1.
The Periphery: Social and Cultural Characteristics
Chair: Bethamie Horowitz
Joel Perlmann, “The American Jewish Periphery: An Overview”
Bruce Phillips, “Periphery and Core: Connections”
Friday
8:30–9:00 am Continental Breakfast
9:00–11:00 am Session 2.
The Periphery in the Perspective of American Ethnicity and
Religion
Chair: Alice Goldstein
Calvin Goldscheider, “Boundary Maintenance and Stratification: Jews in
Comparative and Historical Perspective”
Richard Alba, “The Sociological Significance of the American Jewish Experience: Boundary Blurring, Assimilation and Pluralism”
Nathan Glazer, "The American Jewish Periphery—Another Case of Jewish
Exceptionalism?”
11:20–12:50 am Session 3.
The Periphery in Jewish Perspectives
Chair: Sidney Goldstein
Todd Endelman, “"The American Jewish Periphery in Historical Perspective."
Jack Wertheimer, “The Nature of Community in the Light of this Phenomenon”
1:00–2:00 pm Lunch
2:00–3:30 pm Session 4.
Understanding the Periphery: Current Data/Future Needs
Chair: Nancy Foner
Barry Kosmin, “Community Surveys and Government Censuses”
Mary Waters: “Reflections: Issues to Address, Evidence to Gather”
3:30 pm Reception
Other participants (from beyond the Bard College community): Myrna Baron, Lynn Davidman, David Gordis, Ben Phillips, and Werner Sollers.
The Institute gratefully acknowledges supplemental support drawn from a grant provided by the Center for Cultural Judaism to the Jewish Studies program at Bard College.
The term "the American Jewish Periphery" is meant to refer to individuals who identify with Jewishness only marginally, or who do
not identify at all — but who nevertheless have Jewish origins in the recent past. While there have always been such people, and by no means do they come only from among the offsping of the intermarried, the size of this peripheral group has increased greatly in numbers since (roughly) 1970, during which time the rate of American-Jewish intermarriage has been high. Survey results confirm that among the adult offspring of the intermarried, there is an especially high
concentration of people who identify marginally or not at all as Jews, whether in religious or secular/cultural terms. At the same time, of course, the range of identities that now typify the adult offspring of
the intermarried is very diverse; many identify strongly with their Jewishness, many others do not. Thus the periphery is meant to denote those with some recent Jewish origins but with very weak or non-existent ties to things Jewish. This group now constitutes a
large and growing fraction of all those with Jewish origins.
Our interest is not to consider the familiar question raised by intermarriage concerning the nature of American Jewish survival over
the long term. Rather, the existence of a very marginal group among those with Jewish origins, some of whom call themselves Jews and others do not, raises questions about American Jewish life in the near-term future. Among these are the social characteristics of this American Jewish periphery compared to more mainstream American Jews
(education, income, place of residence, etc.) and their political outlook; questions of identity and views of their Jewish origin and of Jewish issues; how this periphery interacts with the Jewish mainstream, including intermarriage patterns. Also important will be how American Jewish institutions define themselves in terms of these people-are these people potential members? Under what conditions? And finally, how can these people best be studied in the near future?
Participants (other than those from Bard) will include by affiliation(or emeritus affiliation) sociologists Richard Alba (SUNY Albany),Myrna Baron (Center for Cultural Judaism), Lynn Davidman (Brown),Nancy Foner (CUNY), Nathan Glazer (Harvard), Calvin Goldscheider(Brown) Alice Goldstein (Brown), Sidney Goldstein (Brown), Bethamie Horowitz (Mandel Foundation), Barry Kosmin (Trinity), Ben Phillips(Brandeis), Bruce Phillips (HUC-JIR, LA), Mary Waters (Harvard),
historian of Jewish assimilation Todd Endleman (Ann Arbor), American Studies expert Werner Sollers (Harvard) as well as David Gordis(President, Hebrew College, Boston and founder of the center for Jewish policy studies) and Jack Wertheimer (Provost, Jewish
Theological Seminary, NYC).