News
Friday, June 10 we welcomed alumni back to campus to explore the treasures of the Norman E. Alexander Jewish Studies Library with Michelle Margolis Chesner. Participants explored manuscripts, books, and Judaica that span Jewish history. Highlights also included recent graduate, Dani Rabner, explaining new discoveries found in the archives which included children’s drawings from France in 1933.
Read our 2022 Magazine. Highlights include:
An exploration of the Norman E. Alexander Jewish Studies Library collection of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam.
An interview with our newest faculty member Prof. Ofer Dynes.
Faculty and alumni updates and more!
Much has been written about the academic legacy of Salo Baron as a result of his scholarship and research. A recent book from Columbia University Press broadens our perspective of his legacy, by reflecting on the role he played in reshaping Jewish studies in the United States from his perch in Morningside Heights. Collecting articles from numerous scholars to mark the 90th anniversary of Baron’s arrival at Columbia University, this book features analysis of his impact as a public intellectual, the creator of the first academic center to study Israel, and champion of libraries. Rebecca Kobrin and Michelle Chesner discussed the recent book and how it informs Baron’s important impact on Columbia University and the world.
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, where she is also co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize. She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (2012) and is coeditor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (2015). Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870–1930, will be published by Harvard University Press.
Rebecca Kobrin (Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History; Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies) and historian Mae Ngai’s “Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas” won two prizes as part of the Cartographic and Geographic Information Society of the Smithsonian Institution’s annual competition. They won Best in Digital/Interactive Map and Best in Show.
Dr. Tamar Menashe (Ph.D. ‘21) is the recipient of the 2022 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize. Tamar’s dissertation reconstructs Ashkenazi and Sephardi German Jews' intensive pursuit of civil and religious rights before Germany's Imperial Supreme Court (Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Chamber Court) in the context of the wide-ranging religious and legal reforms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The dissertation reveals that the study of Jews' surprising strategies of interconnecting law and religion in defense of themselves and their religious laws promoted Jews' civil rights in radical ways, and attained a de facto status of imperial citizenship for Ashkenazi and Sephardi-Portugese Jews.
On April 5, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for Humanities celebrated the publication of Prof. Jeremy Dauber’s latest book, American Comics: A History.
Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prize–winning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial, and deeply profound.
In American Comics, Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history, starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting and iconic images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus; the golden age of newspaper comic strips and the first great superhero boom; the moral panic of the Eisenhower era, the Marvel Comics revolution, and the underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s; and finally into the twenty-first century, taking in the grim and gritty Dark Knights and Watchmen alongside the brilliant rise of the graphic novel by acclaimed practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel.
Dauber’s story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them. Throughout, he describes the origins of beloved comics, champions neglected masterpieces, and argues that we can understand how America sees itself through whose stories comics tell. Striking and revelatory, American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.
About the Author:
Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and director of Columbia's Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (2013); and Jewish Comedy (2017). His research interests include Yiddish literature; comparative Jewish literature; the Yiddish theater; American Jewish literature and popular culture; and American literature and popular culture.
About the Speakers:
Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photograpahy (2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (2019).
Rachel Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, disability studies and health humanities, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, and food studies. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery, published by Yale University Press in 2013 and winner of the 2014 Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award.
Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. Her interests revolve around comics and visual narrative, contemporary feminist literature, and memoir studies as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish American literature and culture. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016).
Victor Lavalle is Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. His most recent novel, The Changeling, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by Time Magazine and USA Today, and was a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and more. He is also the author is Slapboxing with Jesus, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the writer/creator of a comic book, Destroyer. His awards include the Whiting Writers Award, a USA Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award and a British World Fantasy Award, among others.
On May 3, we welcomed the director of The Raft, Oded Raz. When the championship match of their beloved Haifa soccer team is relocated to Cyprus, three Israeli teens decide to build a raft and sail to it. Their journey on the open sea will test their friendships and push them to their physical limits.
On March 30, the Institute welcomed Prof. Robert Alter for the Miron Lecture on Jewish Literature with Prof. Robert Alter.
Shaul Tchernikhovsky, one of the two major Hebrew poets of the earlier twentieth century, over the years wrote a series of poems celebrating the power and beauty of paganism, much to the consternation of many of his readers. The lecture will try to show how these poems were not simply an ideological gesture but the expression of an authentically felt experience of pantheistic vitalism in the natural world articulated through the ancient gods. Special attention will be devoted to the sonnet cycle To the Sun, one of this poet's most original achievements.
Supported by the generosity of the Knapp Family Foundation.
Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into ten different languages. Among his publications over the past thirty years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), Imagined Cities (2005), Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010),The Art of Bible Translation (2019), and Nabokov and the Real World 2021). His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set. In 2009 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters and in 2013 the Charles Homer Haskins Prize for career achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 the American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred on him an award for literature. He has been given honorary degrees by Yale, Northwestern, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and three other institutions.
On Thursday, March 24, the Institute welcomed a panel to discuss “the Jewish vote” and the 2022 elections. Jewish voters could determine the outcome in key elections this year. They also present a case study in the challenges of reporting on a minority: Which issues really matter to them, who speaks for the community, is polling accurate, and what assumptions about how Jews vote are obsolete? The same questions apply to other minorities: Can anyone forecast how Hispanics will vote? Do Asian-Americans vote as a bloc, and in what way? Is there an LGBTQ vote? Join us for to hear top journalists discuss covering the intersection of electoral and identity politics at a critical moment.
Moderator: Jane Eisner, Director of Academic Affairs at Columbia University's School of Journalism
Jim Gerstein, Principal, GBAO Research and Strategy
Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency Washington bureau chief
Sabrina Siddiqui, White House Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Joel Siegel, Managing Editor, Spectrum News, Washington
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye Family.
On March 22, the Institute welcomed Orit Fouks Rotem, writer/director of Cinema Sabaya.
In the film, Dana Ivgy ("Zero Motivation") leads a cast of professionals and untrained actors in this documentary-style feature. Nine women, Arab and Jewish, take part in a video workshop to learn how to document their lives, hosted by a young film director named Rona. As the women begin to film their lives and share their raw footage with the rest of the group, the group dynamic shifts, forcing each of them to challenge their views and beliefs as they get to know one another and themselves better.
On March 9, the Institute, along with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies, welcomed Dr. Daniella Farah for the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture titled Creating Jewish Identity In Twentieth-Century Iran: National Belonging, Education, And Integration.
Jews have lived in Iran for over 2,500 years, with a population of 100,000 at the community’s height in 1945. During the twentieth century, Iranian Jews experienced rapid upward mobility, migrated within the country and abroad, participated in significant political and social movements, and integrated into several layers of Iranian society. This talk explored the landscape of Jewish identity in Iran during the 20th century, with a special focus on Jewish-Muslim interactions, political engagement and aspirations, and the intersection of education and integration. As we examine how Iranian Jews navigated between their Iranian and Jewish identities in an era of new nationalisms, we gain insight into what Jewish emancipation and assimilation looked like in a Muslim-majority country.
Dr. Daniella Farah is a 2021-2023 Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University. She received her PhD in Jewish History from Stanford University in July 2021. Dr. Farah’s scholarship, which lies at the intersection of Jewish history, Middle Eastern history, education history, and transnational studies, examines interreligious encounters, national belonging, and Jewish identity formation in modern Iran and Turkey. As an Iranian-American Jewish woman, her work aims to give voice to Middle Eastern Jews’ experiences. Her article, “‘The school is the link between the Jewish community and the surrounding milieu’: Education and the Jews of Iran from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s,” was published in 2021 in the journal of Middle Eastern Studies. In addition to her research efforts, Dr. Farah is a passionate, award-winning educator with significant teaching experience.
The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.
Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
On Tuesday, March 1, the Institute was joined by filmmaker Avi Nesher for a conversation about his film career that spans over the past six decades. He is one of Israel's most influential and most honored filmmakers. His debut feature, "The Band," was a generation-defining hit in 1978, followed by "Dizengoff 99," "Rage and Glory," "Turn Left at the End of the World," "The Matchmaker," and other seminal films. In 2019, Nesher was the first Israeli filmmaker to be honored with a torch lighting at the national celebration of Yom Haatzmaut, in recognition of his career achievements. His most recent film as writer and director, "Image of Victory," opened in Israel in 2021 with an international release pending. During this Q&A we discussed his past films and explored Israeli filmmaking today.
Below are various links to his work. We encourage you to watch them prior to viewing the screening.
Rage and Glory (1984)
- IMDBTV (free with any Amazon Account; no Prime membership required)
- Tubi (free with sign-up)
The Secrets (2007)
The Matchmaker (2010)
Supported by the generosity of the Radov Family.
On Wednesday, February 23, the Institute was joined by Shaul Magid, where he spoke about his latest book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical published with Princeton University n October 2021. Meir Kahane is well-known for his hijacking the Soviet Jewry Movement in late 1969 and using civil disobedience and violence as a tactic to get Soviet Jewry in the news. But Soviet Jewry is far more complex issue for him and illustrated his long-time stance against communism and his belief in the Russian-Sino-Arab triangle, thus linking Soviet Jewry, Vietnam and Israel. In this talk, Shaul Magid will work though some of these issues in his Kahane’s writings, including his 1967 book The Jewish Stake in Vietnam, and his testimony to Congress on Soviet Jewry in June 1968.
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Author of many books and essays, his two latest books are The Bible, the Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary to the Gospel, and Piety and Rebellion: Essay in Hasidism, both published in 2019. His new book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical was published with Princeton University Press in October, 2021. He is presently working on the political theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar.
On February 16, the Institute welcomed Israeli-Canadian author Ayelet Tsabari to speak about her latest book, The Art of Leaving. This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions.
In The Art of Leaving, Tsabari tells her story, from her early love of writing and words, to her rebellion during her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She travels from Israel to New York, Canada, Thailand, and India, falling in and out of love with countries, men and women, drugs and alcohol, running away from responsibilities and refusing to settle in one place. She recounts her first marriage, her struggle to define herself as a writer in a new language, her decision to become a mother, and finally her rediscovery and embrace of her family history—a history marked by generations of headstrong women who struggled to choose between their hearts and their homes. Eventually, she realizes that she must reconcile the memories of her father and the sadness of her past if she is ever going to come to terms with herself.
With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves.
Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. She is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was long listed to the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, and has been published internationally. She teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph Writing MFA and the University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
On February 10, we welcomed Sonia Gollance to the virtual Institute to speak about her book, It Could Lead To Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing And Jewish Modernity. Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression.
Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
Sonia Gollance is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Yiddish at University College London. She is a scholar of Yiddish and German-Jewish Studies whose work focuses on dance, theatre, and gender. Her first book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, was published by Stanford University Press in May 2021.
To purchase this book please visit the Stanford University Press website. Please use GOLLANCE20 for the coupon code.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye Family.
Pamela Brenner (Barnard College ‘20), a former Yiddish Studies student of Prof. Agnieszka Legutko finds love in the YIVO library. Read more.
Chaya Sara Oppenheim (Barnard College ‘21, IIJS Holocaust Studies Fellow, ‘20) asks Where Are the Yeshivish Writers? in Tablet Magazine. Read more.
On January 24, the Institute began its spring slate of events with the inaugural Yerushalmi Lecture on History and Narrative. Professor Ephraim Shoham-Steiner opened up the unique aspects of a medieval Jewish community and its people based on a variety of archeological as well as literary sources. Over the past century, and particularly in recent years, archeological projects have yielded a treasure trove of material artifacts that yield rich new insights into the Jewish community in the German city of Cologne. By incorporating the material finds of archaeologists into his scholarship, Professor Shoham-Steiner methodologically extends the work of the late Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who grappled with the complexities of the relationship between history, historiography, and memory. In one of his most memorable contributions to this discussion, his brief book Zakhor (1982), Yerushalmi argued that the primary pre-modern Jewish vessels for memory of the past were liturgical and ritual. It was only from the sixteenth century that history writing, he argued, began playing a more significant role in remembering the Jewish past. One of the media that Yerushalmi passed over in his analysis was the role of archeology and the emergence of Jewish material artifacts from the past, especially during the twentieth century. In this lecture Professor Shoham Steiner addresses that lacuna with fascinating examples from medieval Cologne that make its medieval Jews spring to life.
Prof. Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner, is a historian specializing in Medieval Jewish History and an associate professor at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er-Shevah Israel (BGU). From 2018-2021 he served as director of The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC) at BGU. In 2021-2 he is a research fellow at the New-York Public Library and the Center for Jewish Studies at Fordham University.
His research focuses on the social aspects of Jewish history with a special interest in social information that can be extracted from rabbinic source material from medieval Western Europe, the real and imagined “margins of society”.
His first book published originally in Hebrew titled: חריגים בעל כורחם: משוגעים ומצורעים בחברה היהודית באירופה בימי הביניים (מרכז שז"ר: ירושלים 2007) was published in English titled : On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy Madness and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press: Detroit 2014). He edited a collected essays volume titled: Intricate Interfaith Networks: Quotidian Jewish Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages (History of Daily Life 5 :Brepols; Turnhout 2016). His recent book published by Wayne State University Press in November 2020 is titled : Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe. He is currently researching and writing about The Jewish Community of Cologne in the High Middle Ages.
“A glimpse into New York City at the turn of the 20th century can now be viewed at an exceptional level of detail: 6.5 million unique census records from 1850, 1880, and 1910 are pinpointed to residential addresses on the recently launched website Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas. “ Read more here.
Columbia News caught up with Jeremy Dauber to interview him about his latest book, American Comics: A History, as well as which comics he read as a child, what he’s teaching this year, and who he would like to sit next to at a dinner party. Read more here.
On December 6, the Institute welcomed Doron Paz and Yoav Paz, writers/directors of Plan A.
In 1945, a group of Holocaust survivors plans to poison the German water system to kill 6 million Germans in revenge. Led by Vilna partisan (and later, Israeli poet) Abba Kovner, and including soldiers from the British Army's Jewish Brigade and the Haganah, this desperate group of survivors will ultimately be forced to decide between shedding more blood in Europe or pivoting towards a new future in Israel. Based on a true story and new scholarship by Dina Porat, the Chief Historian of Yad Vashem. (109 min)
Please enjoy the Q&A.
On Tuesday, November 30, the Institute partnered with Columbia University’s European Institute and the Department of History, to host a conversation with the editors of Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism, A Global History.
The emancipatory promise of liberalism – and its exclusionary qualities – shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume, edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam, challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
Panelists:
Abigail Greene, Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Brasenose College
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University
Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History and Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University
Simon Levis Sullam, Associate Professor of History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Moderator: Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, Columbia University
On November 15, the Institute welcomed Beth Elise Hawk, writer/director of the documentary Breaking Bread. Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel -- the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's MasterChef -- is on a quest to bring people together through food. She founded the A-sham Arabic Food Festival, where pairs of Arab and Jewish chefs collaborate on dishes like kishek (a Syrian yogurt soup), and qatayef (a dessert typically served during Ramadan). A film about hope, synergy and mouthwatering fare, Breaking Bread illustrates what happens when ethnic, religious, and political boundaries crumble in the kitchen. (85 min) Please enjoy the Q&A below.
The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is dedicated to the academic study and discussion of Israel and Jewish Studies. Committed to blending rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge teaching and intellectual opportunities, the IIJS explores the best that’s been thought and said in the field and examines the length and breadth of Jewish history and culture.
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