Join the Jewish Museum and IIJS for a book talk on Jewish Country Houses, featuring authors Dr. Juliet Carey and Abigail Green in discussion, moderated by IIJS Co-Director, Rebecca Kobrin. This event will take place on Thursday, March 27, at 6:30 PM at the Scheuer Auditorium at the Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street.

Hear Juliet Carey, Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor and Abigail Green, Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford, discuss their new book, Jewish Country Houses, a project that situates the estates of wealthy Jewish families as a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture. Their research spans British historic manors to Modernist villas in Czech cities, exploring the different ways Jewish families used architecture, art, and entertainment as a means of assimilating with broader European society. The conversation will be moderated by Rebecca Kobrin, Professor of American-Jewish History and Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing after the talk. Please find more details, linked here.

Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She is author of the award-winning Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Bellknap, 2010) and has published widely on aspects of international Jewish history and European political culture. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Review of Books.

Dr. Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust / Rothschild Foundation), Before that, she worked at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff and at the Royal Collection. She has curated exhibitions and published on subjects including Nicholas Hilliard, Guercino, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Thomas Gainsborough, Gustave Moreau and Gwen John, as well as French drawings, Sèvres porcelain, contemporary ceramics and the history of collecting.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History and the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies Columbia University. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies, business history, East European history and American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jewish Museum.

Join us for an IIJS presentation with Judith Cohen titled “Entre la mar y la arena–Between the Sea and the Sand–Worlds of Judeo-Spanish Songs” on Tuesday, March 25, at noon in person at 617 Kent Hall.

An old Sephardic wedding song evokes the elusive liminal space “between the sea and the sand.” In the close to half-century Judith Cohen has been working with Judeo-Spanish/Ladino/Haketía songs as both an ethnomusicologist and a singer, they have gone from being very little known outside small circles to being a world – or, now, global – music commodity. In this short presentation, Judith offers a glimpse of the older worlds of the songs and their largely lost life contexts. We’ll explore wedding songs, where the bride is “between the sea and the sand,” narrative ballads whose words bridge centuries and whose tunes bridge continents, songs whose contrafactum tunes bridge the sacred and the profane, and others, in Sephardic cultures from Morocco, former Ottoman lands, and some of their secondary diasporas.

Judith Cohen is a Canadian ethnomusicologist, singer, storyteller, and inveterate traveller. Known internationally for her research on and traditional performances of Sephardic songs, she also works with Crypto-Jewish practices in Portugal and Brazil, medieval music and music traditions of the Sephardic diaspora in Morocco, former Ottoman lands, and their widespread diasporas. Dr. Cohen is also the editor and consultant for the Alan Lomax Spain-1952 collection. She recently returned from several weeks in Brazil, conducting fieldwork and giving concerts and talks. She teaches part-time at York University in Toronto, and, several decades ago was the secretary of Columbia’s East Asian Institute on the same floor and in the same building that IIJS occupies today.  
www.judithcohen.ca

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

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join us on Wednesday, March 12 at noon, for a lecture with Ido Ben Harush, a recipient of the IIJS’ New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Award for 2024-2025. This is a hybrid event, you may attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall or virtually via Zoom. Please register using the appropriate link below.

Modern German Jewish thinkers often addressed the question of the role of mediation in understanding the divine and the world through the lens of the Second Commandment's prohibition on graven images. Philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen approached visual mediation with suspicion, arguing that images could obstruct a true encounter with God and truth, potentially leading to idolatry. This presentation introduces the Prague born media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) as a Jewish philosopher, and examines his contribution to this discussion. Flusser argues that digital images are different from “traditional images” as they do not reflect or distort reality but generate visual entities entirely independent of the physical world. Understood as such, the digital image is not an intermediary and therefore escapes standard theological problems associated with idolatry and mediation. By positioning Flusser within the German Jewish tradition, this presentation brings to the fore a neglected voice in 20th-century Jewish philosophy and explores the applicability of traditional questions to our digital age.

Ido Ben Harush is a PhD candidate in the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is a scholar of modern German Jewish philosophy and literature, with interest in theories of image, gesture and secularization. His dissertation examines the literary variations and afterlives of the prohibition of idolatry and the biblical ban on images (Bilderverbot) in the work of modern German Jewish authors and shows how concerns about idolatry are retrieved and repurposed in philosophical, political, and aesthetic discourses. 

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies & The Naomi Foundation on Monday, March 3, at noon, for the 2024-2025 Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture with Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay, Tel Aviv University; Yale University (2024-2025). This talk, titled “Turning Holocaust Slang into Art: Between K. Tzetnik and Chava Rosenfarb,” will take place virtually via Zoom.

The Yiddish language drastically changed in the ghettos and camps of Nazi Europe. By one estimate, roughly 3,000 new words and phrases were added to the language. Many of these neologisms were of a vulgar nature, relating to topics like theft and sex work. While some people found these new words embarrassing, unseemly and just plain ugly, others attempted to uplift them and transform them into art. Among the writers that incorporated Khurbn Yiddish (Yiddish of the Holocaust), into their postwar poetry and prose, the authors K. Tzetnik and Chava Rosenfarb stand out. Each extracted and presented the aesthetic potential of Khurbn Yiddish words in different ways.  K. Tzetnik emphasized the horrifying, bizarre side of Khurbn Yiddish words, molding them into an expressionistic scream. Rosenfarb, by contrast, shined a light onto the small acts of resilience contained within Khurbn Yiddish words, memories of self-expression and communication against the odds. Her ghetto terms become beautiful in the way they invite readers into scenes of everyday life under Nazi rule, moments from the margins of history that are rarely considered worthy of notice. The two authors also clash on the topic of female sexuality—and the ways that words relate to the body.

Hannah Pollin-Galay is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she is also Head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. Pollin-Galay researches and teaches primarily in the fields of Yiddish literature and Holocaust Studies, and has recently begun to foray into the field of ecocriticism. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony came out with Yale University Press in 2018 and her second, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Penn Press, 2024) asks how the Holocaust changed the Yiddish language. She is currently working on a project exploring the fraught connections between Jews and non-human nature, across time and space. In addition to being a 2024-2025 Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, Pollin-Galay is also a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, where she is translating Yiddish ecopoetry from the Holocaust.

Supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.

The Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity for the public to explore topics of Yiddish language and linguistics, the history of Yiddish, Yiddish children’s literature and education. The lecture is supported by the Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation, Inc., which is dedicated to reimagining education. The Naomi Foundation champions Yiddish, Naomi’s lifelong passion, as a vibrant, rich, and contemporary language. The Naomi Foundation advances the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings.

Join the Institute via Zoom on Wednesday, February 26,
at 1:30 PM for a virtual lecture with Professor Dina Porat,
titled "When does Anti-Zionism turn into Antisemitism?"

This lecture will explore:

• The definition of anti-Zionism and antisemitism 

• Is anti-Zionism any better than antisemitism?

• Should antisemitism and anti-Zionism be dealt with separately?

• When does anti-Zionism turn into antisemitism?

• What did Martin Luther King actually say in this regard?
  
  

Dina Porat is the founding head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry. She served as head of the Department of Jewish History at the Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies and as the incumbent of the Alfred P. Slaner Chair in Antisemitism and Racism, all at Tel Aviv University.

She served as Yad Vashem's chief historian from 2010 to 2021 and is currently its academic advisor. Prof. Porat has mentored 30 M.A. and 20 Ph.D. students, has been awarded prizes for many of her publications, and was named TAU's Faculty of Humanities Best Teacher in 2004. In 2012, she received the Raoul Wallenberg Award and was included in The Marker Magazine's list of the 50 Leading Israeli Scholars in 2013, as well as Forbes' list of the 50 Leading Women in Israel in 2018.

Dina Porat has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, New York University, Venice International University, and the Hebrew University. She has also served as an expert on Israeli Foreign Ministry delegations to UN world conferences and as the academic advisor for the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (now IHRA).

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Appel families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join us virtually via Zoom for the 2025 Professor Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature with award-winning Israeli author Orly Castel-Bloom titled “‘Dolly City’ and ‘Biotape’ - From the Futuristic, Fantastical Dolly City to the Meticulously Realistic Tel Aviv”on Wednesday, February 19, at noon.

In 1992 Orly Castel-Bloom published in Israel her novel Dolly City, about a fantastical, unspecified, bustling city, controlled by the vehicles which were transformed into a goal. The city’s name – Dolly City – is connected to the protagonist’s name – meaning, it is Dolly’s city, the city of her mind, of her story. The borders between her and the city are completely blurred.

In 2022, exactly thirty years later, she wrote an entirely realistic novel, Biotope - meaning a scientific, almost biological exploration of one specific habitat. The story – and the biotope – take place in a specific, central and particularly busy street corner in Tel Aviv, named London Minister. This is the intersection of Shaul Ha’Melech and Iben Gvirol, where the French-Jewish protagonist Joseph happens to live, and he is the one describing the environment, taking into account all of its components: the restaurants, the stores, the district court, the opera, the theater, the museum and the addicts who frequent the clinic in the next street to get their Methadone fix.

In her talk she will discuss the two cities and two protagonists, having understood now that the city she wrote of in her youth and the one she wrote of thirty years later are in fact the same city. The protagonists, however – a woman in one case, a man in the other – couldn’t be more different.

One of the leading voices in contemporary Israeli writing, Orly Castel-Bloom is a celebrated Israeli novelist, feted for her unique post-modern prose. After studying Film at the Beit Zvi Institute and Tel Aviv University, Castel-Bloom published her first collection of stories in 1987 to critical acclaim and has been a leading voice in Hebrew literature ever since.

Castel-Bloom’s work has been translated into 14 languages, her creative output encompassing novels, short story collections, and a children’s book. Her numerous awards and accolades include the Tel Aviv Foundation Prize (1990), the Alterman Prize for Innovation (1993), The Neuman Prize (2003), the French WIZO Prize (2005), the Lea Goldberg Prize (2007), and the Rishon Le Zion Prize for Creativity in the Hebrew Language (2016). Her book, An Egyptian Novel was awarded the Sapir Prize—Israel’s premier prize for fiction—in 2015. The jury’s citation noted that “in this story, [Castel-Bloom] broadens the canvas of Hebrew literature, in a unique manner setting out a decidedly Israeli story, one which has never been told before.” Biotope, her most recent novel, has been shortlisted for the 2024 Sapir Prize.

Castel-Bloom has taught at Harvard, UCLA, UC Berkeley, NYU, Oxford, and Cambridge. Presently, she teaches creative writing at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Supported by the generosity of the Knapp family.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Our Israeli Film Series begins this semester with Torn a new documentary by Nim Shapira. Join us online on Monday, February 17, at noon for a virtual panel discussion with the filmmaker and participants from the film: hostage family members Alana Zeitchik and Julia Simon, creators of the Kidnapped poster Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, and activist Elisha Fine, led by IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock.

Torn, a new documentary by Israeli-born, New York-based filmmaker Nim Shapira, delves into the controversy surrounding the “Kidnapped from Israel” poster campaign, a grassroots effort to raise awareness about the 240 hostages taken by Hamas. With empathy and thoughtfulness, Torn explores the motivations of those who put up and tear down the posters in and around New York City, unraveling the complexities of this intense proxy battle, fought thousands of miles from the actual conflict.
(75 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles)

Viewer discretion advised: this film is not rated and includes footage from street protests and confrontations, and some footage from October 7.

Please register for the event below. You will receive an email with a link allowing you to watch the film at home beginning Friday, February 14th. This link will only be available until Monday, February 17th at 11:59 p.m.

You will receive a separate email with the Zoom link for the Q&A the morning of Monday, February 17, ahead of the panel discussion at noon.

Please email iijs@columbia.edu with any questions.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Wednesday, February 12, at noon for the The New Perspectives in Jewish Studies Lecture, “Can a Musarnik tell a story? Aesthetics, Musar, and the Birth of Literature”, with Tafat HaCohen-Bick. This is a hybrid event, you may attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall or virtually via Zoom. Please register using the appropriate link below.

The birth of modern Hebrew literature was closely tied from the outset to ideas of secularism and was grounded on western literary assumptions regarding the autonomous self, aesthetics, and the prominence of the desiring subject. Within this framework, Jewish Musar literature and the Musar movement were often depicted as antithetical to literature. While other forms of religious expression, such as Hasidism, could be integrated into the literary revival project, Musar—with its perceived rigidity, meticulous focus on Halakha, and obsessive self-examination—was not considered a fitting component of modern literary discourse. In this lecture, Dr. HaCohen-Bick will explore the intersections between Musar and modern Hebrew literature in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, offering a fresh perspective on the tensions between aesthetics and obedience during the formative years of modern Hebrew literature.

Tafat HaCohen-Bick is a scholar of modern Hebrew literature, specializing in the field of secularism and religion. She completed her PhD at the department of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2020). In 2022-2023 she was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2023-2024 she was a visiting scholar in NYU and CUNY.  This year she is a Polonsky Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Van-Leer Jerusalem Institute. 

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

CUIMC’s Jewish Cultural Employee Resource Group (ERG) and IIJS invite you to join us on Thursday, January 30th, 2025 from 4:00 pm to 5:15pm for a virtual event in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day: “Bridges of Solidarity: What We Can Learn about Jewish-Muslim Relations in North Africa During the Holocaust.”

Our special guest will be Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University. Dr. Afridi, a Muslim who believes in focusing on trying to better understand other people’s faith and beliefs, is the author of Shoah through Muslim Eyes.  She teaches courses on both Islam and the Holocaust at Manhattan University. 

This event is open to all, registration is required. 

For more information please email custaffdiversity@cumc.columbia.edu

Join the Institute on Monday, January 27, at 4:00 PM for the inaugural Jack Abel Lecture in Antisemitism, with Claire Zalc titled “Family Separation and Antisemitism: Reconstructing the Migrations of Jewish Siblings from Poland Across the Early 20th Century.” This is a hybrid event, you may attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall or virtually via Zoom. Please register using the appropriate link below.

The lecture presents a collective biography of Jewish Siblings from the Polish town of Lubartów from the early 1920s through the 1950s. The five siblings traverse the globe in an attempt to evade antisemitism. Their journeys take them to various locations, including Germany, England, France, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Auschwitz concentration camp. Some of them survived the Holocaust, while others were murdered. By combining a transnational perspective with a microhistorical methodology, this lecture addresses the relations between migrations and persecution.

It aims to examine the role of kinship, local and transnational ties, and relational resources in the fate of individuals facing antisemitism. Who fled? When and where? With whom? Who survived, and who did not? This also broaches the question of “who knew what” among the victims by studying how information circulated among them. What opportunities do individuals have to circumvent, escape, or survive? The objective is to comprehend the dynamics of a collective that has undergone significant disruption and extreme violence.

Claire Zalc is Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France) and a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, France). She has written on topics such as business and entrepreneurship, immigration in France, and the history of persecution during the Vichy regime. Her research focuses on the relationship between the history of migration and the Holocaust. She received the CNRS Medal Bronze in 2013.

She is the author of several books, such as Microhistories of the Holocaust (ed. with Bruttmann), New York, Berghahn Books, 2016 and Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, Harvard University Press, 2020, for which she was awarded the 2016 Malesherbes History of Justice Book Prize and honorable mention for the 2022 Eugen Weber Book Prize.

She is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC LUBARTWORLD project “Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s)” and the Ina Levine Senior Scholar-in-Residence (2024-2025) of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Supported by the generosity of the Abel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.