Avi Shilon Discusses Attack on Israel and War in Gaza

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is devastated by the horrific attacks on Israel. We extend our deepest sympathies and support to the families of those who lost their lives and condemn the abhorrent slaughter and kidnapping of civilians. As it has since its inception in 1950, the Institute stands in solidarity with the people of Israel.

On Sunday, October 15, Avi Shilon—a journalist, historian, and political scientist who has taught at Columbia, NYU, Tsinghua University, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev—joined us for a webinar, “Israel at War: Live Discussion from Tel Aviv.” This talk was moderated by Rebecca Kobrin, IIJS Co-Director and Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History. Dr. Shilon discussed the terrorist attacks that took place in Israel on October 7th, as well as Israel’s response and impending military campaign, before answering audience questions.

This discussion is available to view in full below.

Avi Shilon has taught with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University and the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University. He also has been a postdoctoral fellow at The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and at Tsinghua University, China. He has published the books The Decline of the Left-Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process (2020), Ben-Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (2016) and Menachem Begin: A Life (2012) as well as articles in Middle Eastern Studies, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Middle East Journal. Dr. Shilon also writes for the Ha’aretz newspaper. He received his Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 2015.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She is also the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Historical NYC Project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.


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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

The Institute Hosts Allison Schachter of Vanderbilt University for Book Talk

The IIJS and the Department of Germanic Languages hosted Allison Schachter, author of Women Writing Jewish Modernity: 1919-1939, on Thursday, October 12 for a Book Talk.

What role did women play in the making of Jewish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. The standard accounts of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary history exclude women’s writing and experience. When women appear they do so as poets, but not prose writers. This talk offers a counter history of modern Jewish literature from the perspective of women, focusing on the life and work of the modernist writer, Fradl Shtok. Shtok was a well-regarded poet, who published a short story collection in 1919 and then mysteriously withdrew from Yiddish public life. Tracing her life story through archival records, and closely reading her literary work, Dr. Allison Schachter pieces together a story of women’s artistic and literary lives in the first half of the twentieth century and offer a new account of Yiddish modernism.

Dr. Schachter’s talk is available to view in full below.

Allison Schachter is Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Russian and East European Studies, as well as Chair of Jewish Studies, at Vanderbilt University. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century modern Jewish culture in comparative perspectives. Her research interests include diaspora, transnational and world literary cultures, gender studies, and minority cultures. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2012) traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern 2022), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern 2021), which was awarded the 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies.

She received her B.A. with honors in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1996. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2007 to pursue research on Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U. C. Berkeley in 2006. She has received grants in support of her work from the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Foundation of Jewish culture, Vanderbilt University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Yiddish Book Center, and the Simon Dubnow Institute.

She has published widely in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including PMLA, Jewish Quarterly Review, Prooftexts, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature, and Mekhere yerushalayim be-sifrut ivrit.


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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

"The Road to Eilat" Begins 2023 Fall Film Series

The IIJS Fall 2023 Film Series began this week with The Road to Eilat, a new film from writer-director Yona Rozenkier.

In The Road to Eilat, Albert, an aging war veteran, makes a drunken bet: he will drive his beat up tractor (top speed: 35km/hour... downhill) the length of Israel to Eilat, in one week. Ben, his grumpy, unemployed son, is obligated to join him. Their funny and bittersweet journey towards forgiveness and understanding takes them on a road trip from their kibbutz through Israel's neglected backyard, meeting others along the way who also strive for a better life. The Road to Eilat premiered at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival, where it won prizes for Best Israeli Feature, Best Actor (Shmuel Vilozni), and Best Cinematography. It was later nominated for 8 Israeli Film Academy Awards, including Best Picture. (105 minutes)

On October 9, the Institute hosted a virtual Q&A with Yona Rozenkier, the writer and director of The Road to Eilat.

Yona Rozenkier is an actor, writer, and director. Born and raised on Kibbutz Yehiam, Rozenkier's short films and two features examine kibbutz culture, IDF culture, masculinity, and their impact on family relationships (often casting his brothers and himself). His prior feature, The Dive, was screened by Columbia IIJS in March, 2020.

Yona Rozenkier’s October 9 Q&A is available to view in full below.

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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

Roni Cohen Speaks about "the Myth of Jewish Humor"

On October 4, 2023, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program welcomed an in-person crowd for a lecture with Columbia University Fulbright fellow Dr. Roni Cohen, titled “The Myth of Jewish Humor: A Medieval Take.”

The existence of a distinctive Jewish sense of humor is a widely recognized phenomenon, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. This unique ethos is often associated with early 20th-century Yiddish literature, theater culture, as well as Jewish-American comedians and entertainers. However, it is important to note that humoristic pieces also existed in the early modern and medieval times within Jewish communities. In this talk, Dr. Roni Cohen explores a specific genre of humorous literature that gained popularity in Europe during the late Middle Ages: parodies of the Talmud and the Hebrew Bible. By delving into the historical background of this literary phenomenon, Dr. Cohen suggests new insights into its place within the broader history of Jewish humor.

Dr. Roni Cohen is a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Carnival and Canon: Medieval Parodies for Purim," was written in the Jewish History department at Tel Aviv University. Roni's research focuses on European Jewish popular culture in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, as well as the relationships between textual pieces and communities. In his current project, "In Search of the Early Modern Earworm," Roni maps and analyzes short textual pieces that were added by scribes and book owners in the margins of late medieval and early modern Jewish manuscripts.

Dr. Cohen’s talk is available to view in full below.

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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

IIJS Hosts Golan Moskowitz for First Book Talk of Fall Semester

On Tuesday, September 19, the IIJS and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender welcomed Golan Moskowitz, author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, in-person at the Institute’s temporary home in Uris Hall.

In Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020), Golan Moskowitz investigates the evolution of Sendak’s artistic vision and its appeal for American, Jewish, and queer audiences. Dr. Moskowitz's talk examines how Sendak’s multiple perspectives as a gay, Holocaust-conscious, American-born son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Poland informed his life and work. It also explorse how his creative output interacted dynamically with his cultural surroundings, offering insights into experiences of marginality and emotional resilience that remain relevant and visionary to this day. 

Golan Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Catherine and Henry J. Gaisman Faculty Fellow at Tulane University, where he teaches courses on Jewish gender and sexuality, American pop culture, Holocaust studies, and comics and graphic novels. He is the author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context (Stanford University Press, 2020) and of several publications on intergenerational memory in post-Holocaust family narratives. Golan’s work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.

Dr. Moskowitz’s lecture, and the Q&A session that followed, are available to view in full below.

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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

Summer Film Series Continues with "Nelson's Last Stand"

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies continued its 2023 Summer Film Series with Nelson’s Last Stand, a new documentary written and directed by Avi Maor Marzuk.

Nelson’s Last Stand, a “Best Israeli Film” nominee at the 2021 DocAviv Film Festival, is a fascinating exploration of a little-known piece of Israeli history, with abundant archival footage to bring us back to the freewheeling 1970s. When Israel gained control of the Sinai in the 1967 Six-Day War, vacationers and adventurers came in droves. Few were as committed as Rafi Nelson, an eccentric, bearded bohemian who set up a beach resort village in Taba that flourished in the 1970s as an anything-goes getaway for average Israelis, international celebrities, and quite a few Members of the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament). The 1978 Camp David Accords signaled a new era of peace between Israel and Egypt, but for Rafi Nelson, they marked the beginning of a decades-long campaign to keep his beach village and the surrounding area inside Israel’s borders. (81 minutes)

On Monday, August 7th, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg joined the Institute for a virtual Q&A discussing Nelson’s Last Stand and its historical, political, and social contexts.

Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and coauthor of Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin that won the National Jewish Book Award.

Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other leading publications in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Most recently, Gorenberg published a guest opinion in the New York Times discussing Israel’s ongoing “judicial reform.”

You can view Gershom Gorenberg’s virtual Q&A with Stuart Weinstock, the IIJS Film Series Coordinator, in full below.

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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!

2023 Summer Film Series Kicks Off with "Karaoke"

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies kicked off its 2023 Summer Film Series with Karaoke, the feature-film debut from writer-director Moshe Rosenthal.

In Karaoke, winner of “Best First Film” honors at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival, Sasson Gabay (The Band’s Visit, Shtisel) and Rita Shukrun (When Heroes Fly) star as a middle-class couple in their 60s, whose life of quiet disappointment and regret is upended when they meet their new neighbor, Itsik, a modeling agent and international bon vivant (Lior Ashkenazi: Walk on Water, Footnote, IIJS guest speaker in October 2022). The couple is fascinated and transformed by their new friend, who forces them to decide what they really want from their life together. This late-coming-of-age story is equal parts comic and dramatic, anchored by a trio of engaging, unpredictable performances. Gabay and Shukrun won Israeli Film Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively.

Moshe Rosenthal is a graduate of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. He worked in music videos, commercials, short films, and web series for about a decade before writing and directing Karaoke, his first feature. Karaoke had its international premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, and won Best First Film at the 2022 Jerusalem Film Festival.

On July 17, 2023, Moshe Rosenthal joined the Institute for a virtual Q&A with Stuart Weinstock, the IIJS Film Series Coordinator. You can view their conversation in full below.

If you'd like to see more of Moshe's work, you can view two of his short films using the following information:

Leave of Absence (2017)

https://vimeo.com/208324784

Password: shabaton

Our Way Back (2018)

https://vimeo.com/252525491

Password: ourwayback

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

Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!