Film Screening: El Rey del Once/The Tenth Man, 7:00 PM, Sept 19 2017, Santa Fe College, E-Auditorium, Bldg. E, Free Admission, Discussion with Jack Kugelmass.
“How American Jews Fell in Love with the Secular State”, a talk by Kenneth Wald, Professor Emeritus, Tuesday, April 4, 2017 at 6 pm in Pugh Hall Ocora.
Kenneth D. Wald was the first Samuel R. Shorstein Professor of American Jewish Culture and Society at UF from 2012-2016.
American Jews remain the most pro-Democratic white ethnic group in the United States, a puzzling phenomenon because they exhibit social traits usually associated with conservative and Republican loyalties. In trying to account for this pattern, Wald explores how concerns about the relationship between church and state became a central political priority of the American Jewish community.
- Co-sponsored by the Bob Graham Center.
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“Jews and their Neighbors in German-Occupied Poland”, a talk by Jan T. Gross on Sunday, April 2, 2017 at 5 pm, the Smathers Library Room 100.
Norman B. Tomlinson 16 and 48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton University. His books include Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001); Fear: Antisemitism in Poland After Auschwitz (2006); and Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (2012).
- Co-sponsored by the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica.
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7th Annual Jewish Film Festival, March 19 – April 1, 2017 at the Hippodrome State Theatre.
Sunday, March 19 at 7:30 pm: Harmonia
Tuesday, March 21 at 7 pm: Mr. Gaga
Wednesday, March 22 at 7 pm: The People vs. Fritz Bauer
Thursday, March 23 at 7 pm: Dimona Twist
Saturday, March 25 at 8:30 pm Moos
Sunday, March 26 at 3 pm: Forever Pure
Monday, March 27 at 7 pm: A Grain Of Truth
Wednesday, March 29 at 7 pm: One Week and a Day
Thursday, March 30 at 7 pm: AKA Nadia
Saturday, April 1 at 8:30 pm: Bogdan’s Journey
- The Gainesville Jewish Film Festival is organized by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Jewish Council of North Central Florida, and made possible, in part, by: Anonymous, Friends of Jewish Studies Tree of Life Fund, Gary R. Gerson Annual Lecture Series, Harry Rich Endowment for Holocaust Studies, Jewish Council of North Central Florida, Jewish Student Union, Mikki and Morris Futernick Visiting Professorship, Norman and Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies.
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“Reflections on Post-Oslo Israeli and Palestinian History and Memory of 1948” a talk by Avraham Sela on Tuesday, February 28 at 4:30 pm in the Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Professor Emeritus of International Relations and a senior research fellow at the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interest focuses on contemporary Middle East politics, society and international relations. He wrote extensively on the history and historiography of the Palestine conflict since the British Mandate, especially on the 1948 War. The Palestine War of 1948 remains a formative event in the Middle East and especially for the immediately concerned Israelis and Palestinians, shaping the contours of their ensued political conflict and perceptions of self and other which, in turn, kept renovating memory and historiography of that event. Drawing on theoretical approaches to the role of collective memory in conflict resolution, the talk examines how Israeli and Palestinian memories/historical narratives of 1948 surfaced and affected the Oslo process.
- Co-sponsored by the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica.
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“Playing for Peace” a concert of Jewish and Arab music Wednesday, February 22, 7:30 pm in the University Auditorium.
MIRA AWAD: Singer, songwriter, actress and cultural activist. Awad was born in Rameh, a village in the Galilee, to a Palestinian father and Bulgarian mother. She studied at the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and currently lives in Tel-Aviv. Awad released two solo albums and collaborated with various international artists including Noa, Idan Raichel, Andrea Boccelli, and Bobby McFerrin.Awad’s music is a unique fusion of sounds, weaving Arabic and its oriental ornaments with Western harmonies.
YAIR DALAL: Composer, violinist, oud player and singer, Dalal plays an important role in the global world music scene. His family came to Israel from Baghdad and his Iraqi roots are embedded in much of his music. Over the last decade, he has released 12 albums representing a fusion of Israeli, Jewish and Middle Eastern music. Dalal also devotes his time to teaching promising young musicians at the Rimon School and preserving the musical heritage of the Jews of Iraq and the Bedouins of the Sinai.
- Admission is free of charge and open to all. For more information: (352) 392-9247
- Made possible through Anonymous, Kenneth D. Colen, the Gary R. Gerson Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies, the Tree of Life Fund, the Jewish Council of North Central Florida, the Jewish Students Union, and the Arthur and Violette Kahn Visiting Scholar Endowment.
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“A Jewish Gangster as the Russian Superman: The Trickster in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales“, a talk by Mark Leiderman Tuesday, February 21, 2017, at 4 pm, 210 Pugh Hall.
Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of eight books and more than a hundred articles published in the US, Russia, and Europe. He also edited and co-edited ten volumes of articles on Russian literature and culture. Among his monographs and books are Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), Jolly Little Characters: Cult Heroes of the Soviet Childhood(2008), Non-Canonical Classic: Dmitri A. Prigov (2010), and a two-volume critical reader on late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian literature (2014, 2015). He is the 2014 recipient of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for the outstanding contribution to scholarship.
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“Performing Holocaust Memory in Germany”, a talk by Irit Dekel Monday, February 13, 2017, at 4 pm in 005 Keene-Flint Hall, University of Florida campus.
Irit Dekel teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She has published on memory politics in Germany and Israel, media, and memory tourism. Her book Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial (2013) is a novel approach to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, examining the experience of visitors as they engage with the act of remembrance.
- Made possible by the Norman & Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies.
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“The Mysterious Mr. Šlomović?” a documentary film screening Sunday, February 12, 2017, at 2 pm at the Harn Museum Auditorium.
Join us for the screening of a documentary film called “The Mysterious Mr. Šlomović?” by two Los Angeles based documentary filmmakers Miodrag and Mia ?erti?. The film was made in 2016 and is narrated by Elliot Gould. The film tells the story of Erich Šlomović?, a young Jewish art collector in Paris in the 1930s. A prot�g� of the great modernist art collector Ambroise Vollard, Erich Šlomović? was a Jew from Yugoslavia who, in the 1930s, when he was only in his mid-twenties, managed to amass a collection of 600 modern artworks by masters such as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Klee, and many other masterpieces only to be killed by the Nazis, and his collection stolen by the Communists. Alongside the fascinating issues the film raises about where the art comes from, and where and to whom it belongs, the film provides a springboard for debate about the intertwined history of Jews and modern art, the fate of cultural property looted in wartime, anti-Semitism and post-Cold War identity in the Balkans.
- Made possible by the Norman & Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies and sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, Center for European Studies, Department of Political Science and the Harn Museum.
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“Why Jews Became Christians in the Modern Era” the annual Alexander Grass Endowed Lecture by Todd M. Endelmanon on Tuesday, Februry 7, 2017 at 5:30 pm in the Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe and America became Christians. Endelman argues that religious conviction was rarely their motive. Those who left the Jewish fold were driven above all by pragmatic concerns, especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Todd M. Endelman is professor emeritus of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. His numerous books include The Jews of Britain (2002), Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews (2002), and most recently, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation (2015).
- Made possible by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica.
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“From Papua New Guinea to Nicaragua: The Unprecedented Spread of Judaism in the Globalized World of the Twenty-First” a talk by Tudor Parfitt on Thursday, February 2, 2017, at 3 pm in the Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Professor Parfitt was appointed Parkes Fellow at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations in the University of Southampton in 1974 and shortly afterwards took up the lectureship in Modern Hebrew at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 1976 he was appointed associate member of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and in 1992 became a senior associate member. He was successively lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor (Professor of Modern Jewish Studies) at SOAS. He founded the Centre of Jewish Studies at SOAS and was its director from 1993 to 2006 and from 2010-11. He was also Chair of the Middle East Centre at SOAS for 4 years and Chair of the SOAS Senior Common Room for 15 years. In 2012 he was appointed President Navon Professor of Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies and SIPA Research Professor at FIU. Parfitt has been featured on PBS and frequently is referred to as the British Indiana Jones.
- Made possible by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica, JCNCF and Judge Karen Miller.
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“The Cairo Geniza and the Lost Arabic Archives”, a talk by Marina Rustow on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 5:30 pm in the Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Among the many unexpected finds, the Cairo Geniza has yielded are hundreds, possibly thousands of medieval documents of state in Arabic script. Among these are decrees, rescripts, petitions, tax receipts and fiscal accounts from period of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt and Syria (969-1171). Most of these Fatimid state documents were reused for Hebrew-script texts, hence their survival in the discarded manuscript chamber of a medieval Egyptian synagogue. In this talk, Professor Rustow will discuss how these documents illustrate techniques for writing and preserving records by one of the most powerful and dynamic medieval Muslim dynasties and their implications for the large and important community of Jews over whom they ruled.
- Made possible by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish History.
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“The Eruv as Metaphor for Jewish Home-making in the Diaspora”, a talk by Leora Auslander on Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 5:30 pm in the Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Abstract: When observant Jews leave their homes on the Sabbath, their hands (and pockets) must be empty. This interpretation of the mandate that the seventh day should be devoted to rest obviously poses challenges; among the most basic are that babies, medicine, and books cannot be carried. One response has been to extend the boundaries of home to include whole neighborhoods through the construction of an Eruv. Most often delimited by a single wire, supported by found objects—street signs, buildings, trees—high above eye level, they are visible only to those who seek to see them. For those who do know that they are there, however, the Eruv domesticates public space, and makes it, for the period of the Sabbath, Jewish. This talk will demonstrate how Jews, secular and religious, created metaphorical Eruvs—Jewish space and time within the secular—in the cities in which they were at home. Using the cases of Germany, I will argue further that conceptualizing Jewish relationships to Germanness and Frenchness through the Eruv enables us to think in a new way about the very old questions, of assimilation and acculturation and what it meant, and means, for Jews to be at home, politically, socially, and materially.
Leora Auslander is Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France; Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Most recently she co-edited an issue of the French gender history journal, Clio, entitled Judaïsme(s). She is currently at work on a book, Home-making: Jewish Parisians and Berliners in the Twentieth Century.
- Made possible by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish History.
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