Author: Joscha Jelitzki

Celebration and Reflection at UConn Book Launch

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Sarah Willen speaking at panel discussionWith her latest book published just this June, the panel discussion on October 17, 2019, presented and celebrated Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (UPenn, 2019) by Sarah Willen, Associate Professor for Anthropology at UConn. Her study examines the gerush, a deportation campaign by the Israeli government in 2002, and the effects on its subjects, non-Jewish migrant workers from the Philippines, Ghana, Columbia, and Ukraine. The panel discussion took place between the days of the Sukkot holiday, which centers around the very instability and precariousness of human existence and spaces for dwelling, as Willen remarked.

The event was sponsored by the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, the UConn Human Rights Institute, and the Middle East Studies Program. Director Avinoam Patt (Judaic Studies) and Director Kathryn Libal (Human Rights) gave warm and personal notes of welcome and introduction. The three panelists who spoke before Willen included Tally Amir, a PhD sociologist from Harvard, Heide Castañeda, a PhD anthropologist from the University of South Florida, and Jennifer S. Hirsch, a professor for Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia. In her comments, Amir brought a Human Rights legal perspective to the panel, focusing on dignity in Israeli judicial activism. Castañeda reflected on the links between indignity and indignation, pointing to the parts of Willen’s book that feature the perspectives from Jewish Israeli activists, who organized solidarity and protest against the gerush. Hirsch used her position as Willen’s former teacher to laud her work, praising her book as “timely and timeless.” Hirsch further pondered on the freedom of the social sciences to address the pressing questions of our time and named Willen as an outstanding example of scholarly ambition and courage.

Sarah Willen speaking at panel

All the speakers highlighted the somehow surprising timeliness of the publication. Despite the research going back 18 years and the distant geographical context, Willen’s findings bear special relevance to and critical insight into the current American discourse on immigration. The author herself admitted that she could not have imagined the future priority of the matter when starting her research. In her concluding remarks, with support from Hannah Arendt, Willen linked her study to the universalist Jewish values that the different Israeli activists shared and pledged herself to anthropology’s goal to make “the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”

 

 

Johannes Heil (Heidelberg) on pre-Rabbinic Western Jewish Textual Tradition

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Headshot Heil

Talk by Prof. Johannes Heil: Patrologia Judaica? Exploring the pre-Rabbinic Western Jewish Textual Tradition

Wednesday, November 20, 1:15-2:15 pm
Humanitites Institute Conference Room
4th-Floor Babbidge Library

This event is free and open to the public. Kosher lunch will be provided.

About the talk:
Professor Johannes Heil, President of the Hochschule für jüdische Studien Heidelberg (Academy for Jewish Studies), presents a lecture which challenges the assumption of the widespread decline of Jewish diasporic culture after 70 C.E., which is based on limited archaeological and epigraphic evidence. This lecture focuses instead on the textual culture of Western diasporic Judaism during the centuries before the reception of Rabbinic Judaism, roughly from the 4th to the 9th century, and paints a different picture of a vibrant Jewish culture in Western Europe.

An event of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, co-sponsored by the UConn Humanities Institute, the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Medieval Studies Program. If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at 860-486-2271 or pamela.weathers@uconn.edu.

Reflections on the Work of Philip Roth by Dr. Sondra Melzer 11/21

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Image Philip Roth

Sondra Melzer: Reflections on the Work of Philip Roth

November 21
12:30 pm
MPR, UConn Stamford

Philip Roth, 1933-2018, was an American novelist and short story writer. In her talk, Dr. Sondra Melzer will discuss Roth's focus on Jewish life throughout his storied career, the writings of which made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

Dr. Sondra Melzer completed her PhD at NYU. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Rage: Women In Dorothy Parker. She spent 39 years as a public high school teacher, was an instructor at the University of Connecticut, and ran the Sacred Heart University Education Program. In 2017, upon completing 60 years of teaching, she was named Professor Emerita at Sacred Heart University.

The event by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life is free and open to the pubic. If you require an accommodation, please contact Stamford Coordinator for Judaic Studies Professor Fred Roden at frederick.roden@uconn.edu or 203-251-8559.

Director Avinoam Patt invited to Provost’s Distinguished Speaker Series in 2020

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Professor Avinoam Patt

Dr. Avinoam Patt to Lecture on Holocaust Remembrance in the Provost's Distinguished Speaker Series

It is an honor to announce that our Director Avinoam Patt is invited to lecture at the Provost's Distinguished Speaker Series, which "provides an opportunity for our most recently-inducted Board of Trustees Distinguished Professors and Endowed Chairs to share advances in their expertise and engage thought-provoking discussions." [Learn more about this series and its speakers.]

Save the Date: February 26, 2019, 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Dr. Patt's lecture will address the topic of "Trauma, Testimony, and Time: Remembering the Holocaust in the 21st Century."

The event is free and open to the public. It takes place at the Konover Auditorium in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on the Storrs Campus. A reception will follow in the Dodd Lounge with light refreshments. If you require an accommodation to attend, please notify provost@uconn.edu.

About the speaker:

Avinoam J. Patt, Ph.D. is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (2011). Most recently, he is co-editor of a new volume on The Joint Distribution Committee at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (2019), Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020), and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). He is currently completing a new book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Exhibition on Display in the Dodd Research Center – Trailblazer: Connecticut Jewish Women Making History

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Exhibition FlyerThis new exhibition from the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford is on display at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center on the Storrs Campus between October 4 - 30, 2019. The exhibition is accessible Monday through Friday, between 8.30 am and 6 pm.

About the exhibition:

To celebrate the centennial anniversary of women's suffrage, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life present Trailblazer: Connecticut Jewish Women Making History. This exhibition celebrates the successes and contributions of women in history in the United States and around the world. This traveling exhibition - developed and curated by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford - highlights the stories of 12 female pioneers, teaching us what it meant, and what it means to be a Trailblazer.

From women's rights activists to artists, journalists, and health and education reformers, these pioneering women overcame obstacles of gender, social class, and religious identity to make changes that continue to impact our lives today. Some of these women include Beatrice Fox Auerbach, Esther Rome, and Rebecca Affachiner.

This exhibition was partially funded by a grant from the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Fund/Koopman Share at the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford and the generosity of individual donors. It debuted in the Mandell Jewish Community Center on September 3, 2019.

Shelter from the Holocaust: German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India – Atina Grossmann, November 7, Storrs

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Shelter from the Holocaust: German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India

Dr. Atina Grossmann
Thursday, November 7, 2019
12:30 pm
Dodd Center Konover Auditorium, Storrs

About the Talk:

This lecture examines the intensely ambivalent and paradoxical experiences, sensibilities, and emotions of bourgeois Jews who found refuge in the “Orient” of India and Iran after 1933. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, these uprooted Jews navigated complex and unfamiliar terrain; homeless, stateless, having lost their livelihoods and professions, and with only an inchoate anxious sense of their families’ fate or what their future held, they were also oddly privileged as adventurous Europeans in exotic non-western, colonial or semi-colonial societies. On the margins of their collapsing and devastated Jewish European world, they lived as hybrids, themselves on the margins, emigré and refugee, caught uneasily, more or less comfortably, between colonizer and colonized. In flight from homelands that had condemned them as racially inferior, they carried with them a fraught sense of cultural superiority. Expelled from the “West” they never really left it behind, remaining, for variable but sometimes considerable lengths of time, in “global transit.”

Drawing on archival sources, memoirs and letters, fiction, and an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from both Iran and India (1935-1947), the talk probes refugees’ understanding of their own unstable position, the changing geopolitical situation, and their efforts to come to terms with emerging revelations about the destruction of European Jewry.

About the Speaker:

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City. She co-edited Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick). Further publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German 2012), and Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (2012). Prof. Grossmann was a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in the spring semester of 2015 and the Walter Benjamin Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2014. [Read more about her research and biography.]

The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Attendance counts toward honors credit.

This program is held in remembrance of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, and is made possible in part by the Center for Judaic Studies Frances and Irving Seliger Memorial Endowment Fund. In expression of our solidarity with the Jewish community in Halle, Germany, which suffered a terrorist attack on Yom Kippur, it is a partner event of the Jewish Culture Days in Halle.

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

Partner of the 7th Halle Jewish Culture Days 2019

Intermarriage and Antisemitism in the 21st Century – Talk by Bruce Phillips, October 17

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Speaker PhillipsDo Americans Love or Hate the Jews?
Intermarriage and Antisemitism in the 21st Century

Dr. Bruce A. Phillips
Thursday, October 17, 2019
5:30 pm
Class of '47 Room, Babbidge Library

About the talk: A variety of opinion polls show that Jews are widely accepted and even admired, a trend underscored by Jewish intermarriage rates. At the same time, we are seeing unprecedented violence against Jews in the United States. How do we reconcile these two opposing sets of evidence?

About the speaker: Dr. Bruce A. Phillips is Professor of Sociology & Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, California. He is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture where he is conducting research on religion in California. Phillips has been among the leading researchers in the sociology of American Jewry for over three decades. He served on the National Technical Advisory Committees for the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys and advised the recent Pew study. He has conducted local Jewish population surveys in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Houston.

This program is free and open to the public and is made possible by the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Attendance counts toward Honors credit. Light refreshments will be served.

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

Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe – Talk by Rebecca Erbelding, October 29

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"Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe" -  presentation by Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum Historian Rebecca Erbelding

Join us for this talk on October 29, 12:30 - 1:45pm, at the Class of '47 Room, Babbidge Library, Storrs Campus. The program is free and open to the public. Attendance counts toward honors credit. Lunch will be served.

About the Book: America has long been criticized for refusing to give harbor to the Jews during World War II as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In her book Rescue Board, Rebecca Erbelding tells the extraordinary unknown story of the War Refugee Board, a US government effort late in the war to save the remaining Jews. In January 1944, a young Treasury Department lawyer named John Pehle went to a meeting with the president to argue for the relief funds needed to help Jews escape Nazi ter­ri­to­ry. Pehle prevailed, and within days, FDR created the War Refugee Board, empowering it to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution, and put Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. This is the story of how the War Refugee Board saved tens of thousands of lives. [Read more about the book.]

About the Speaker: Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe won the JDC-Herbert Katzki National Jewish Book Award in 2018. Erbelding holds a PhD in American history from George Mason University. She worked as an archivist and curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2003-2015, and since 2015, has been a historian for the Museum's newest exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust, which opened in April 2018. Her work has previously been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and on the History Channel and National Geographic.

The event is sponsored by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. If you require an accommodation, please contact Pamela Weathers at pamela.weathers@uconn.edu or 860-486-2271.

From Generation to Generation – Panel Discussion with Roland Tec, November 5, UConn Stamford

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FROM GENERATION TO GENERATIONSpeaker Roland Tec

Join Dr. Joel Blatt and Dr. Fred Roden in conversation with filmmaker Roland Tec, son of Professor Emerita Nechama Tec, as he discusses her Holocaust memoir, Dry Tears, recounts his work on the film adaptation of her resistance classic Defiance, and reflects on legacies in families of survivors. Read more about her [book].

The event will take place November 5, 5.30-6.30 pm, at the UConn Stamford Campus, A1 Main Auditorium.

 

About the Speaker

Filmmaker and producer Roland Tec is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program in Playwriting at Hollins University and is a Dramatists Guild Institute faculty member. His film producer credits include Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Edward Zwick's Defiance. He wrote, directed, and produced feature films All the Rage and We Pedal Uphill. Professor Tec has taught at Harvard and Brandeis and was a fellow at the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony and at the MacDowell Colony.

This program is part of the UConn Judaic Studies Scholarship and the Arts Series. Attendance counts toward honors credit.

If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Stamford coordinator for Judaic Studies Prof. Frederick Roden: frederick.roden@uconn.edu, or 203-251-8559.

A Commemoration of the Jewish Community in Rhodes, Greece, October 13, at Paideia Center Storrs

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Rhodes Image

The History of the Jewish Community in Rhodes, Greece: A Commemoration

Sunday, October 13, 2019
1:00-4:00 pm
Paideia Center, Storrs

This joint event is hosted by the Paideia Center, UConn Global, and the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. It is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

 

Welcome

  • Daniel Weiner, Vice President for Global Affairs

Remarks

  • Konstantinos Koutras, The Consul General of Greece in New York,
  • Carmen Cohen, Director, Rhodes Jewish Community,
  • Emanouel Cassotis, The History of the Jewish Community in the Dodecanese Islands,
  • Avinoam Patt, Director, Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, and
  • Ilias Tomazos, Director, PAIDEIA Study Abroad Programs in Greece