Public Lecture Announcements

Professor James Loeffler to Present “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century” on Oct. 8, 2018

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James Loeffler

Professor James Loeffler will discuss his recently published book Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press).

The talk will be held on Monday, October 8, from 7:00-9:00 pm at the University of Hartford (200 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford) in the Millie and Irving Bercowetz Research Library at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies located in the Harry Jack Gray Center. Seating is limited and reservations are required. Please contact Susan Gottlieb at mgcjs@hartford.edu or 860-768-5018.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It is made possible by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, the University of Hartford Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and the UConn Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

About the Speaker

James Loeffler is associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia and former Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received his AB from Harvard and his MA and PhD from Columbia University. A specialist in Jewish and European history, and the history of human rights, his publications include The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010) which was recognized for several awards, including the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2011 USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies and the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) 2011 Deems Taylor-Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology Book.

From the Publisher

Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists

The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For more, visit: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217247/rooted-cosmopolitans

Dr. Susannah Heschel to Present “Human Dignity in Judaism” on April 26, 2018

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Susannah HeschelOn April 26, at 7:00 pm, Dr. Susannah Heschel will present "Human Dignity in Judaism." In this talk, Heschel explores the themes of human rights and dignity within Jewish religious texts and how they relate to the modern human experience. The event takes place at Charter Oak Cultural Center (21 Charter Oak Avenue, Hartford) and is free and open to the public. 

Visit Charter Oak's website for information on directions and parking.

The event is made possible by the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life Gene and Georgia Mittelman Lecture in Judaic Studies, Charter Oak Cultural Center, UConn Hartford, the Humanities Institute, and the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

About the Speaker

Susannah Heschel is the chair of the Jewish Studies Program and Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press). She has also taught at Southern Methodist University and Case Western Reserve University.

Heschel has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Frankfurt and Cape Town as well as Princeton, and she is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and a yearlong Rockefeller fellowship at the National Humanities Center. In 2011-12 she held a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She has received four honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, and Germany. Currently she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on the history of European Jewish scholarship on Islam. In 2015 she was elected a member of the American Society for the Study of Religion. 

The author of over one hundred articles, she has also edited several books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (with Robert P. Ericksen); Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky). She serves on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin and on the Board of Trustees of Trinity College.

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

Charles Kaiser to Speak at UConn Stamford for Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture

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Charles Kaiser

On Tuesday, April 17, at 5:30 pm, Charles Kaiser, author and journalist, will present "A Model of Resistance: How one French family chose to fight the Nazis during the occupation of Paris" for the Center for Judaic Studies UConn Stamford Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance Day lecture. The lecture takes place in Multipurpose Room 108 at the UConn Stamford Campus (One University Place, Stamford, CT). It is free and open to the public.

About the Presentation

Charles Kaiser will speak about his book, The Cost of Courage, a biography of the Boulloches, a Catholic bourgeois family who fought against the Nazis and paid a tremendous price for their courage. Kaiser has known his subjects all of his life because his uncle lived with the Boulloche sisters for a year, beginning in the fall of 1944, immediately after the liberation of Paris. Since then, the two families have nurtured seven decades of friendship.

About the Speaker

Charles Kaiser is a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and a former press critic for Newsweek. He reviews books regularly for The Guardian. He is associate director of the LGBT Social Science and Public Policy Center at Hunter College. His other books are 1968 In America, The Gay Metropolis, and What it Means to Be a Homosexual, for which he wrote the afterword. The Cost of Courage was published in the US by Other Press and in France last summer by Seuil.

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

Professor Timothy Snyder to Present “The Holocaust as History and Warning” for Academic Convocation on the Holocaust

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Timothy SnyderOn Monday, April 16, at 4:30 pm, please join us for the annual Academic Convocation on the Holocaust when Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder will present "The Holocaust as History and Warning." The Convocation will be held in the Doris and Simon Konover Auditorium in the Dodd Research Center on the Storrs campus. It is made possible by the I. Martin and Janet M. Fierberg Fund that supports lectures at the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Co-sponsors include the American Studies Program, the History Department, the Human Rights Institute, the Humanities Institute, the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.

A reception will immediately follow.

Professor Snyder's books, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, will be available for purchase after the lecture. 

For additional information, or if you require an accommodation to participate, please call 860-486-2271 or email judaicstudies@uconn.edu.

About the Presentation

Every history of catastrophe contains a warning, since it defines causes that may be present in our own time. Too often, the Holocaust is understood only as "memory," which shields us from some of its most important implications. In this lecture, Professor Snyder will consider new authoritarianisms in light of what we still might learn from the past.

About the Speaker

Timothy Snyder is one of the leading American historians and public intellectuals. He is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He speaks five and reads ten European languages.

Among his publications are eight single-authored books, all of which have been translated: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998, second edition 2016); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1659-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2016); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).

Bloodlands won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into thirty-three languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists and was a bestseller in six countries. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015) has been a bestseller in four countries and has received multiple distinctions including the award of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. 

Snyder was the recipient of an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015 and received the Havel Foundation prize the same year. He has received state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Collection of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and sits on the advisory councils of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and other organizations.

To learn more, visit Professor Snyder’s Yale faculty page.

Parking:

Parking is available in the North and South garages on campus. Garage rates are $1/hr after 5pm and $2/hr before 5pm. 

Getting Here:

View an interactive map of the Storrs campus and even download the app version to your phone: http://maps.uconn.edu/map/

 

Professor Samuel D. Kassow to Present “Time Capsules in the Rubble: The Secret Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto” for the Academic Convocation on the Holocaust

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Sam KassowOn Monday, April 24, at 7:00 pm, please join us for the annual Academic Convocation on the Holocaust when Trinity College Professor Samuel D. Kassow will present "Time Capsules in the Rubble: the Secret Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto." The Convocation will be held in the Doris and Simon Konover Auditorium in the Dodd Research Center on the Storrs campus and is sponsored by the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life Fierberg Lecture in Judaic Studies, the Human Rights Institute, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. A reception will immediately follow. Attending this event counts toward sophomore honors credit.

For additional information, please call 860-486-2271 or email judaicstudies@uconn.edu.

About the Presentation

During World War II, Jews resisted not only with guns but also with pen and paper. Even in the face of death they left "time capsules" full of documents that they buried under the rubble of ghettos and death camps. They were determined that posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not German sources. Thousands of documents were buried in the Ringelblum Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of the 60 people who worked on this national mission, only three survived. This will be their story.

What began as a collection of documents and attestations clandestinely obtained in order to record testimony of Jewish life in Poland under occupying Nazi forces became, when word of mass killings reached Warsaw, the courageous pursuit of Warsaw ghetto prisoners to bear witness to the Holocaust.

Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established the underground group Oyneg Shabes in 1940, its secret mission to archive Jewish life in Poland by conducting interviews and collecting documentation that included photos, letters, diaries, official government notices, flyers, and posters–all of which served to document and describe life in the Jewish ghetto as well as the destruction of Jewish communities in Poland.

Milk can used to store documents in Warsaw Ghetto
Milk can used to hide documents in Warsaw Ghetto

Dr. Ringelblum and all but three members of the Oyneg Shabes group perished in the Holocaust, but their testimony remains an incomparable resource for Holocaust study. Before the Warsaw uprising, the documents were buried in milk cans and tin boxes in three locations in the Ghetto. Unearthed in 1946 and 1950, two-thirds of the archive has been found and preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland, and researchers have cataloged and digitized the archive throughout the last two decades.

Trinity College historian Samuel D. Kassow, expert on the Ringelblum collection, is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archives in which he documents the efforts taken by Dr. Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabes to preserve Jewish history and resist Nazi oppression.

Professor Kassow served as a consultant for the documentary film project Who Will Write Our History, set to release in 2017 and directed by award-winning director Roberta Grossman with Nancy Spielberg as executive producer. The film is based on Professor Kassow's study. For the full story, see Jewish Ledger article "On Location in Poland." 

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He is author of Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, 1884–1917 and editor (with Edith W. Clowes) of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

For more details on the Ringelblum Archive, visit the Jewish Historical Institute. 

We hope you will also join us earlier in the day when the UConn Humanities Institute will be hosting a talk at 4:00 pm with guest speaker Dr. James E. Young entitled "The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between." 

Parking:

Parking is available in the North and South garages on campus. Garage rates are $1/hr after 5pm. Did you know that after 5:00 pm, visitors may park in any on-campus space not designated as reserved, restricted or limited? 

Getting Here:

View an interactive map of the Storrs campus and even download the app version to your phone: http://maps.uconn.edu/map/

Warsaw Ghetto
Warsaw Ghetto

Emanuel Ringelblum
Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum

Harvard Professor Peter E. Gordon to Present “The Disenchantment of the Concept: From Heine to Adorno”

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Peter GordonHarvard Professor Peter E. Gordon will present “The Disenchantment of the Concept: From Heine to Adorno” on February 23 at 5:00 pm in the Class of ’47 Room at the Babbidge Library for the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life’s Konover Special Lecture Series. The event is co-sponsored by UConn’s German Studies program.

Professor Gordon is a renowned expert in the field of German history and philosophy as well as German-Jewish thought. He is the author of numerous books, including: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003), which was the recipient of the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. He is also the author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010), which received the Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society.

Description

Professor Gordon’s lecture will embark on a conceptual adventure through multiple disciplines and themes, between Jewish thought and German literature, between sociology and philosophy, between secularization and religion.  

Fifty years ago the social theorist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno published his late masterpiece of critical philosophy, Negative Dialectics, a work in which he called for a “disenchantment of the concept.” A deeper understanding of the significance of that task might be found if brought into a comparative light in contrast to Max Weber’s celebrated call for a “disenchantment of the world.” But the deeper, historical resonance of Adorno’s phrase is best understood if the much-neglected contributions of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine are recalled. Heine’s early literary efforts helped to form the matrix for left-Hegelian thinking that would inspire the Frankfurt School in the later twentieth century. 

Biography

Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and faculty affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He has been named a finalist twice for the Levinson Award for undergraduate teaching; and, in 2005, he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supêrieure and the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.

Trained in history and philosophy at the University of California, he received his doctorate in 1997 and was then a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Society of Fellows at Princeton University before joining the faculty at Harvard in the fall of 2000. He is the editor of several collections of essays, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, 2013), and several others. He is currently co-editing The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School with Espen Hammer and Axel Honneth. His most recent monography appeared this past fall (2016) with Harvard University Press under the title Adorno and Existence.

Peter E. Gordon works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the late-modern era, with an emphasis on critical theory, western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and existentialism. He has written on Max Weber, Adorno’s music criticism, Weimar intellectuals, Hannah Arendt, political theology, theories of secularization, theories of historical ontology and historical epistemology, social theory after the Holocaust, and modern Jewish thought.

9/27/16 – Bone, Stone, and Text: Professor Einbinder to Speak at Harvard

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Susan EinbinderHebrew and Judaic Studies faculty member Professor Susan Einbinder has been invited to present the 2016 Harvard Center for Jewish Studies-Medieval Studies Lecture on Medieval Jewish History and Culture. 

 

The lecture “Bone, Stone, and Text” is a commemoration of the Black Death among Iberian Jews. It will be held on Tuesday, September 27, from 5:00 – 6:30 pm at Harvard University (Barker Center 110). 

For more information, please contact the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard (cjs@fas.harvard.edu) or
the Committee on Medieval Studies (medieval@fas.harvard.edu) 

11/9 In Remembrance of Kristallnacht: Ariela Keysar Will Speak on Anti-Semitism

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Ariela KeysarYoung American Jewish adults are more than five times as likely to report being targets of anti-Semitism as older American Jews are (Pew 2013). Since the vast majority of young American Jews spend four or more years studying at universities and colleges, anti-Semitism at institutions of higher education is an issue for the entire Jewish community.

The National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students, conducted by Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College in 2014 with 1,157 self-identified Jewish college students from 55 campuses, revealed that more than half of the students personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during the 2013-2014 academic year, and the smallness of variations across the regions of the U.S. suggests that anti-Semitism on campus is a nationwide problem. As one Jewish student commented: “Subtle anti-Semitism — it’s the last socially acceptable form of racism” (Keysar & Kosmin 2014). 

According to Professor Keysar, the reported rates of campus anti-Semitism were almost identical between the U.S. in 2014 and the U.K. in 2011. However, American students report more interpersonal prejudice and harassment while British students were more likely to report anti-Semitism in political contexts.

In remembrance of Kristallnacht, Professor Ariela Keysar will present “International Comparisons of Anti-Semitism on Campus: Why Are Women More Likely to Be Targeted” on Wednesday, November 9, on the Storrs Campus at 5:00pm in the Class of  ’47 Room at Babbidge Library. Attending this event will count towards Sophomore honors.  A reception will follow.  Earlier that day, she will present “Variations of Anti-Semitism in a Global Perspective: Conceptual and Methodological Issues” as part of our Faculty Colloquium Series at 1:00pm in the Dodd Research Center, room 162 (a kosher lunch will be provided). 

Professor Keysar, a demographer, is research professor in public policy and law and the associate director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College.

She was the associate director of the landmark Longitudinal Study of American and Canadian Conservative Youth, 1995-2003, and a principal investigator of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students, 2014; the National College Students Survey 2013; the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2008; and the Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists: India 2007-08. She was the study director of the American Jewish Identity Survey (AJIS) 2001.

Professor Keysar was born in Israel and holds a B.A. in statistics and an M.A. and Ph.D. in demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

10/6 – Center Director, Jeffrey Shoulson, to Present with Live Actors on Forgiveness in Shakespeare

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Professor ShoulsonTimed to coincide with the Jewish High Holidays, Center Director Jeffrey Shoulson will present on the theme of “Forgiveness in Shakespeare” and will be joined by several professional actors who will be performing brief selections from some of Shakespeare’s plays to prompt an interactive discussion on the topic.

The event takes place on October 6 at 7:00pm at Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford and is part of Charter Oak’s 12th Annual Celebration of Jewish Arts and Culture, a yearly exploration of the historical and contemporary expressions of Jewish identity in art.  The event is free and open to the public.

Visit the Charter Oak Facebook event page!

Holocaust Expert Dr. Pnina Rosenberg Comes to Connecticut 

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Pnina RosenbergRenowned art historian, Dr. Pnina Rosenberg from The Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), will present two upcoming lectures this September sponsored by UConn Global Affairs, UConn’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, the Department of Art and Art History, the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and Voices of Hope.  

On September 21, from 7:00-9:00pm, Dr. Rosenberg will present “A Long Day’s Journey into the Dark Past: Artists-Survivors Facing Their Holocaust Memories” at the University of Hartford’s Mortensen Library in the President’s Classroom, 1st floor.

Dr. Rosenberg will also be presenting “Reshaping Haunted Nuremberg: From the City of Nazi Party Rallies to the Street of Human Rights” on September 22 at 5:00pm in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center’s Konover Auditorium. Dr. Rosenberg’s lecture will provide insights about the transformation of the city of Nuremberg, which held special significance in Nazi Germany as the site of monumental Nazi Party rallies.  A set of laws, known as the “Nuremberg Laws” after the place where they were passed at a Nazi Party convention in 1935, became the legal foundation for the persecution of so-called “non-Aryans” and paved the way for the Holocaust.  After Germany’s defeat in 1945, major German political and military functionaries and leaders of the Nazi Party were tried in Nuremberg in several international tribunals collectively known as the Nuremberg Trials.  

In responding to this history, today’s Nuremberg has transformed many of these locations into educational and memorial sites with the intention of promoting human rights culture.  Every other year, the city of Nuremberg bestows “The Nuremberg International Human Rights Award” upon a worthy organization working in the field of human rights.  In 2000, Nuremberg was the first municipality world-wide to receive the UNESCO Award for Human Rights Education.