Month: September 2018

Pride & Prejudice: South Asian LGBTQ Alliance October 24, 2018

Pride and Prejudice

Wed. Oct. 24, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM, UConn Stamford Art Gallery: The UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life will co-sponsor a panel on national coming out month to learn about the Bangladeshi LGBTQ community and celebrate pride with the members of Roopbaan and the voices of the community. 

The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Please register to attend at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pride-prejudice-south-asian-lgbtq-alliance-tickets-48723100104

About the Event

On April 25, 2016, Xulhaz Mannan and K Mahbub Rabbi, activists in Dhaka, Bangladesh were murdered by Islamic extremists for advocating LGBT rights as the founders of Roopbaan, the first LGBT magazine in Bangladesh.

Roopbaan has become a platform that strives to advance LGBT rights to love in a country that proclaims their love as illegal and punishable by law.

It is important to address the questions of violence, safety, and identity in the face of discrimination against the South Asian and Muslim LGBT community.

A creative segment will be included for art, poetry, and photography.

This program is co-sponsored by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Cobs Bread, GLSEN Connecticut, People's United Bank, Sholay Productions, Staples, Stop and Shop, and Triangle Community Center.

Benji Lovitt: At West Hartford and Storrs November 7 & 8

Benji LovittLOL at the JCC with Benji Lovitt!
Mandell JCC
Live at the Gilman Theater
Wednesday, November 7, 
7:00pm

Since moving to Israel in 2006, Benji Lovitt has performed for audiences around the world, sharing his hilarious insights into cultural differences as he translates both the challenges and marvels of life in Israel. His perspective has been featured on Israeli television and radio and in publications such as USA Today, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, the Times of Israel, and more. Benji's observations on Israeli society, combined with his lifelong involvement in Jewish education, create a hilarious narrative that has brought smiles to faces all over the world.

Tickets $10
Box Office: 860-231-6316 or at the Member Services Center
tickets@mandelljcc.org
Or purchase online at the Mandell JCC

Benji Lovitt: What's So funny?
UConn Homer Babbidge Library
Video Theater 2 (second floor)
Thursday, November 8, 12:30 - 
1:45pm

Join Benji for a presentation on Jewish comedy at the UConn Storrs campus! Free and open to the public.

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at 860-486-2271 or pamela.weathers@uconn.edu.

These programs are made possible by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, the Lillian Margulies Singer Jewish Humor Fund, the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and the Mandell JCC.

Avon Theater Film Screening: Call Me by Your Name October 10, 2018

Call Me by Your Name

Co-presented by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), and Triangle Community Center, Academy Award-winning film Call Me by Your Name will be screened at the Avon Theater in Stamford (272 Bedford Street).   A post-film Q&A  moderated by Dr. Frederick Roden with author André Aciman, whose novel was adapted in creating the screenplay for the film, will follow the screening. The program takes place on Wednesday, October 10, at 7PM.

Tickets: Nonmembers  $13; Members  $8; Students/Seniors $10 

About André Aciman

André Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Although his specialty is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French, and Italian literature, he is especially interested in the theory of the psychological novel (roman d’analyse) across boundaries and eras. In addition to the history of literary theory, he teaches the work of Marcel Proust and the literature of memory and exile.

Aciman is a New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Granta, and in many volumes of The Best American Essays. He has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

He is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me by Your Name (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). 

About the Film 

Call Me by Your Name, from Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. In the summer of 1983, in the north of Italy, Elio Perlman, (Timothée Chalamet) a 17-year-old American spends his days in his family's 17th-century villa lazily transcribing music and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). One day Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old graduate student working on his doctorate arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture. Soon, Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.

If you require an accommodation to participate in any of these events, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Fred Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.