Prof. Olga Gershenson Joins IIJS for a Virtual Book Talk, "New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre"

Olga Gershenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst) joined IIJS on Monday, November 25, via Zoom to discuss her latest book, New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre, with IIJS Film Programmer, Stuart Weinstock.

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 films portray Israel? What kind of horror scenarios do they depict and how? These questions are particularly poignant now, in light of the attack on October 7, which pitted the real-life horrors against the fictional ones. This talk will include clips from relevant films. No advance viewing is required.

Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A multi-disciplinary scholar, her interests lie at the intersection of culture, history, and film. She is the author of New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre (2023), The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (2013), Gesher: Russian Theater in Israel (2005), as well as editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). She is currently working on a volume titled The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film.

The lecture is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Prof. Magda Teter joined the IIJS for the 2024 Yosef Yerushalmi Annual Memorial Lectur

The Institute welcomed Prof. Magda Teter on Wednesday, November 20, at 6:00 PM for the 2025 Yosef Yerushalmi Annual Memorial Lecture, “On Jewish Suffering, Jewish History, and the Need to Rethink Antisemitism."

In 2022, graffiti was found in Bethesda, MD., saying, “No Mercy for Jews.” Since October 7th, outbreaks of virulent antisemitism, contempt, and lack of empathy for Jewish suffering have been manifest widely. In this talk, Magda Teter will explore the deep habits of thinking about Jews and traditional scholarly approaches to antisemitism, and seek to reframe our understanding of anti-Jewish animus and antisemitism.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2005), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton, 2023), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Teter is the recipient of prestigious fellowships, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the NEH. She has served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and as the Vice-President for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies. Teter is currently the President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

The lecture is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Knapp and Kaye families.

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Dr. Benjamin Berman-Gladstone Delivers the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellowship Lecture

The Institute was proud to host the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Lecture, “Zionist Thought and the Jewish World: Identity, Gender, and Power Across and Beyond Southwest Asia” with Dr. Benjamin Berman-Gladstone on Thursday, November 14, at 12:00 PM.

“Zionism” is often defined in a vacuum, sometimes (especially by its advocates) as a national liberation movement, and sometimes (especially by its opponents) as a colonial plot. In this lecture, Dr. Gladstone will argue for a history of Zionism not as an abstraction but as a social and intellectual movement embedded in myriad cultural and political contexts across Southwest Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Zionist thought has rarely been reducible to a concrete/static set of principles. Rather, it has operated as a network of overlapping institutions and initiatives or as a space of contestation over issues like labor, gender, culture, and colonialism. By understanding the fragmented and complex development of Zionism across the Jewish world before and since 1948, we can better understand not only its roles in Jewish history but also its manifestations inside and outside Israeli society today.

Benjamin Berman-Gladstone (B.A. Brown University; Ph.D. New York University) is the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Columbia University. He was previously a Fulbright Research Fellow in Israel and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. He specializes in Middle Eastern Zionist thought, Middle Eastern Jewish migration history, and Adeni history. His dissertation, completed in 2024, focused on colonialism and resistance in the Aden protectorates, Adeni Jewish political activism and migration from Aden and Yemen to Israel, and enslavement and the slave trade in the Eastern Aden Protectorate (in its Red Sea and Indian Ocean contexts) in the 1930s and 1940s.

The lecture is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Stern and Kaye families.

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Yosefa Raz launches her new book, "The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition"

The Institute hosted Yosefa Raz (University of Haifa) on Tuesday, October 29th, for the launch of her new book, The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition.

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, The Poetics of Prophecy reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship’s development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a countertradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire. Ultimately, she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself.

Yosefa Raz is a senior lecturer in the department of English Literature at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in the study of the Bible and its reception, poetry and poetics, and Romantic and contemporary poetry. She is also a poet and translator, with work recently published in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

The book talk is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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"Women on the Yiddish Stage": A Book Talk with Co-Editor Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel and Contributor Caraid O'Brien

On Monday, October 28, at 6:00 PM, IIJS hosted a book talk and discussion on Women on the Yiddish Stage with Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel, co-editor, and Caraid O’Brien, contributing author.

The integration of women into public Jewish performance (Yiddish-language theater by 1877 and Hebrew-language theater by about 1918) was a revolution in modern Jewish culture. While a great deal of seasoned Yiddish-speaking male talent preexisted theater in the form of cantors, choristers, and tavern singers, East European Jewish women had no experience participating in public Jewish performance. From the theater’s first days, women assumed positions of authority, security, and visibility in great numbers. Rapidly, by the 1890s, when the center of the Yiddish theater shifted from cities throughout Romania and the Russian Empire where it first launched in the late 1870s to cities across the globe — including London, Buenos Aires, and New York City by the turn of the century — substantial numbers of female Yiddish actors enjoyed celebrity on par with their male counterparts. Women on the Yiddish Stage presents an array of scholarly essays that challenge the existing historical accounting of the modern Yiddish theater; highlight pioneering artists, creators, and impresarios; and map sources and methodologies of this rich area of forgotten history.

Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist and scholar in Yiddish music and culture who “exemplifies the attempt to bring a centuries-old language and culture into the contemporary world” (New York Times). She has performed internationally and released a CD of original and adapted Yiddish songs called "Toyznt tamen=A thousand flavors" in 2015. Miryem-Khaye is co-editor (with Alyssa Quint) of Women on the Yiddish Stage (Legenda, 2023) and a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. Visit http://www.memkhes.com for more information.

Caraid O'Brien has been translating and performing the plays of Sholem Asch since her debut production of God of Vengeance "set Show World aflame" according to the Village Voice in 1999.  She has received three new play commissions from the Foundation for Jewish Culture and was commissioned by Theater J and Solas Nua in DC to write The Rabbi's House, her adaptation of Sholem Asch's Ibsen inspired drama Rabbi Doctor Silver.  She was a 2019 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and Sholem Asch Underworld Trilogy, her translation of three Asch plays was published by White Goat Press. Caraid co-curated the theater section of Yiddish: A Global Culture, the permanent exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center and studied Yiddish theater history and performance with legendary Yiddish actors Luba Kadison and Seymour Rexite.   caraidobrien.com.

The lecture is available to view in full below.
*Please note that the audio of Miriam Kressyn’s rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s “Maria,” played during Caraid O’Brien’s lecture, is not currently available.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Jewish Studies Professors discuss "Framing October 7: A Date of Inflection for Jewish History"

The Institute hosted a panel discussion led by IIJS Co-Director Rebecca Kobrin and featuring Professor Arnie Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Professor David Feldman of Birkbeck, University of London, Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, and Professor Derek Penslar of Harvard University on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and perpetrated the most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust.  This attack upended many assumptions both scholars and the public held about Jewish sovereignty, security, and politics.  The activism and protests that exploded throughout the world in the aftermath of this attack raised questions about antisemitism and Israel's place in the world.

Now that a year has passed, scholars must begin to frame and analyze all that took place on and since October 7 within the broader scope of Jewish history.  What are the best frameworks through which to think about, conceptualize, and narrate the events of the past year?  What will this date signify for Jewish history in the future?  Should October 7 be considered a turning point in Jewish history? 

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, specializing in modern Jewish migration, immigration history, urban studies, and business history. She earned her B.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and NYU. Kobrin is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, and has edited several volumes, including Chosen Capital and Salo Baron. Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), explores the world of East European immigrant bankers in America. She has received Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her exceptional teaching and mentoring and is a principal investigator of the award-winning Historical NYC Project, a digital humanities initiative mapping New York City’s demographic shifts from 1850 to 1940.

Arnie Eisen is Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a leading authority on American Judaism, and has made significant contributions to Jewish thought and education. Serving as JTS chancellor from 2007 to 2020, he transformed the training of Jewish leaders, emphasizing innovation and authenticity in Jewish life during times of rapid change. Eisen spearheaded the development of JTS’s 21st Century Campus and launched initiatives to expand access to Jewish learning through online resources, public courses, and digitization of JTS’s library. His scholarship includes Galut and Rethinking Modern Judaism, and he has taught at Stanford, Tel Aviv, and Columbia universities. Eisen also serves on advisory boards for the Tanenbaum Center, Covenant Foundation, and Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

David Feldman is Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and a Professor of History, specializing in the history of antisemitism, Jewish history, racialization, and migration in modern Britain. Since joining Birkbeck in 1994, he has been actively engaged in research which addresses public policy, leading a pan-European project on contemporary antisemitism in Western Europe. Feldman has advised institutions such as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Human Rights Watch, as well as UK bodies like the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. His writings on antisemitism have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, and Haaretz. His latest book, co-edited with Marc Volovici, is Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition (2023).

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Program and is a faculty member in the Religion Department. Her scholarship focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish and Protestant thought, the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of antisemitism. Among her many publications are Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. She has a forthcoming book, co-written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies with Princeton University Press. Heschel has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt, Cape Town, and Princeton. Heschel has been honored with five honorary doctorates and the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute. Currently, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on European Jewish scholarship on Islam and serves on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin and the Board of Trustees of Trinity College.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He is the director of undergraduate studies within the history department and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is also affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology, economic history, military history, biography, and the history of emotions. Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.

Click on the panelists’ names to read their full remarks.

Arnie Eisen
David Feldman
Susannah Heschel
Derek Penslar
Rebecca Kobrin

The panel is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Professor Robin Judd discusses her book, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After The Holocaust"

The Institute was joined by Robin Judd, on Monday, September 23, to discuss her latest book, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust.

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.

In Between Two Worlds, Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.

Robin E. Judd is a specialist in Jewish, transnational, and gender history, with particular interests in Holocaust studies, the history of antisemitism, the history of religion, the history of leadership, and the history of migration. She is the author of the award winning Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 (Cornell University Press). Between Two Worlds won two National Jewish book awards and was named by the Jewish Women's Archive as one of its Summer 2024 Book Club picks.  

Professor Judd teaches courses on Holocaust studies, modern Jewish history, German history, gender history, and history of migration. Judd recently served as the President of the Association for Jewish Studies; she also serves as the Vice Chair of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Advisory Board, and is on the Hadassah Brandeis Institute’s Academic Review committee, and the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook’s Editorial Board. Judd has received several fellowships and grants, including an ACLS, Hadassah Brandeis Institute Senior Fellowship Award, an NEH summer stipend, the College of Humanities' Virginia Hull Research Award, and the Coca-Cola Grant for Critical Difference.

The book talk is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

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Fabio Fantuzzi Joins IIJS to Discuss "Norman Raeben: The Wandering Art, A cultural and artistic itinerary from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan" with Prof. Jeremy Dauber

Fabio Fantuzzi, the Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University, delivered a lecture titled “Norman Raeben: The Wandering Art, A Cultural and Artistic Itinerary from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan” on Thursday, September 12, 2024. The lecture was followed by a discussion with Jeremy Dauber, Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, and IIJS Director Emeritus.

Many scholars have underscored the great relevance of artist Norman Raeben’s figure, particularly for his influence on Stella Adler and Bob Dylan’s careers. Yet, due to the scarcity of studies about his oeuvre, his profound impact on prominent Jewish artists and cultural circles in the United States remains largely unknown. Even forty-six years after his death, most of the works and writings of Sholem Aleichem’s last son have yet to be unveiled to the public. The EU-funded POYESIS project, a joint postdoctoral research fellowship between Ca’ Foscari University and Columbia University, is set to illuminate his art, ideas, and legacy, creating a retrospective exhibition of his works, which will open at the Jewish Museum in Venice on November 10, 2024, and providing the first comprehensive catalog of his works. 

In this seminar, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow Fabio Fantuzzi discusses the project’s findings with Professor Jeremy Dauber, commenting on various never-before-seen materials. They delve into how Raeben’s art and teaching activity impacted first-, second-, and third-generation Jewish American artists like Stella Adler, Bob Dylan, and Roz Jacobs, offering a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the careers of these leading artists and intellectuals.

Fabio Fantuzzi is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University, working on the EU-funded MSC project POYESIS (Perspectives on Yiddish Cultural Evolution and Its Legacy: Visual Arts, Theatre, and Songwriting Between Assimilation and Identity. A Case Study).

He holds a Ph.D. in Anglo-American Literature, Culture, and Language, and his primary research interests are the intersections between poetry, music, and visual arts in the American Jewish and Italian American literary and artistic traditions. He has published articles and essays in several academic journals, edited the volume Tales of Unfulfilled Times (Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2017), and co-edited the book Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020). His current research studies the work and teachings of artist Norman Raeben and his influence on various leading artists as a case to examine the evolution of Yiddish culture and art in New York in the 20th century. As part of this research, he is curating a retrospective exhibition of Norman Raeben’s works, which will open at the Jewish Museum in Venice on November 10, 2024, and is editing the catalog of his works.

As a multi-instrumentalist and a songwriter, together with the band Le Ombre di Rosso, he has published the albums “Momenti di lucidità” (2016) and “Da Sponda a Sponda” (2021), which puts to music Luciano Cecchinel’s homonymous collection of poems, which was awarded the 2020 Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Poetry.

The lecture is available to view in full below.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Jonathan Dekel of “Checkout” Joins for Q&A to Conclude IIJS Summer Film Series

The IIJS Summer Film Series concluded with Checkout, the Israeli “psychedelic spy comedy” from director and co-writer Jonathan Dekel. Dekel joined us online on Monday, July 15, at 12:00 PM for a virtual Q&A with IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock.

In this spy comedy, Dov, an aging and feckless Mossad operative, has just been given notice of his mandatory retirement. About to leave his Istanbul hotel on a wave of self-pity, he decides to stay when he identifies an Arabic-speaking traveler as "Gilgamesh," a notorious terrorist. No spoilers: Dov's pursuit of Gilgamesh plays out more like Curb Your Enthusiasm than Fauda. (97 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles)

Jonathan Dekel’s Q&A is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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2024 IIJS Summer Film Series Begins with Erez Tadmor and "Matchmaking"

The IIJS Summer Film Series began this year with “Matchmaking,” the Israeli hit from director and co-writer Erez Tadmor. On Monday, June 17, at 12:00 PM, the Institute hosted a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker and IIJS Film Series Coordinator Stuart Weinstock.

A box office hit in Israel and on the Jewish film festival circuit, Matchmaking tells the comic story of Moti Bernstein, the ideal yeshiva bucher and the perfect match for any Haredi Orthodox bride-to-be. While Moti seems to be on a path towards marriage with an exceptional match, his Ashkenazi world is thrown into turmoil when he falls in love with Nechama, a Mizrahi girl. When the matchmakers of his Haredi community refuse to pair him with Nechama, Moti seeks an unconventional solution to bridge the social gap between them.  (98 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Erez Tadmor is an Israeli-born filmmaker working across genre lines with diverse short and feature-length films. His internationally-acclaimed films include: A Matter of Size (2009), Magic Men (2014), the Ophir-Award-winning Wounded Land (2015), The Art of Waiting (2019), and Children of Nobody (2022). His 2004 short film, Strangers, won the Audience Award for Short Films at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Q&A with Erez Tadmor is available to view in full below.

This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

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