Calendar
RENEE MUSSAI / OCTOBER 25 / 107 S KEDZIE / 6PM
London-based curator, writer, and art historian, Renée Mussai is Curator and head of Archive at Autograph ABP, an arts charity that works internationally in photography and film, addressing themes of cultural identity, race, representation and human rights.
MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI / FEBRUARY 6 / 326 NATURAL SCIENCE /6PM
Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian artist, activist, educator, and occasional curator. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical tool set to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective struggles. Allahyari is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook.
Film and Discussion
Senior Moments
Tamar Kay will introduce her film Senior Moments and lead a discussion after the screening. Funny, witty, bold and revealing, the creators of “Senior Moments” document intimate meetings with 10 resilient active elderly folks surviving old age with a vengeance. It cohesively samples a cultural variety of personalities in modern-day Israel and provides an inspiring outlook on what it means to be old this day and age.
Directed By: Tamar Kay & Yair Agmon, 2018
Tamar Kay graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem in 2015. “Unchained,” an Israeli TV drama (12 episodes, 40 mins each) Tamar created with Yossi Madmoni & David Ofek, will have its premiere in November 2019, at the Israeli KAAN channel. She is a two-time Israeli Academy Award nominee.
The Mute’s House, which she directed and co-produced was shortlisted for the 2017 Best Short Documentary Academy Award (Oscars) and screened internationally and at MSU, winning numerous awards in prestigious festivals. Tamar edited the TV series, “Arik Einstein: A Standard Love Song”, which won the Israeli Emmy for Best Documentary TV Series (2018).
Dr. Margot B. Valles
Dr. Dov-Ber Kerler, Dr. Jack Kugelmass and Dr. Eli Rosenblatt
Dr. Margot B. Valles (MSU) will chair a panel bringing together three scholars of Yiddish who are 2019-2020 Frankel Institute Fellows exploring the theme of “Yiddish Matters” at the University of Michigan. Dr. Dov-Ber Kerler (Dr. Alice Field Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University) is a contemporary Yiddish poet and ethnographer who is currently exploring the relationship between Yiddish poetry and the status of Yiddish today. Dr. Jack Kugelmass (Professor of Anthropology and the Melton Legislative Professor at the University of Florida) is a cultural anthropologist who studies Jewish identity and ethnography, particularly through travel narratives. Dr. Eli Rosenblatt (Northwestern University) works on racial politics and Ashkenazi identity through Yiddish literature. Together the panelists will explore Yiddish writing and culture in diverse contexts.
Father Patrick Desbois
Meticulous Nazi records of Jews killed in the death camps identify fewer than half of the Holocaust’s victims. When, where and how were the other victims killed? Father Patrick Desbois, Founder and President of Yahad – In Unum and Braman Endowed Professor of the Practice of the Forensic Study of the Holocaust at the Center for Jewish Civilization of Georgetown University, has sought and found the answers to these questions.
In 2004, he founded Yahad – In Unum (“Together in One”) whose original charter was documenting the evidence of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. By studying the archives and interviewing the eyewitnesses to the 75-year-old crime of the Holocaust, Father Desbois and his team were able to shed light on a forgotten mechanism in Hitler’s killing machine – the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads that rounded up Jews by the thousands and shot them dead in towns and villages across Eastern Europe.
Yahad-In Unum’s relentless study and research into the “Holocaust by Bullets” has revealed chilling parallels between the Nazi atrocities and those committed today by ISIS – particularly in its murder and enslavement of Yazidis. For the last several years, Father Desbois and his team have been gathering testimony from the survivors of those crimes in Northern Iraq. They have also established centers for children and women in refugee camps to help former captives’ transition back into society.
The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel presents
Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece: The Fate of Salonica ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’
Dr. Devin E. Naar, University of Wisconsin
From 1492 until the twentieth century, the city of Salonica–once part of the Ottoman Empire and today the second biggest city in Greece– was home to the largest community of Ladinospeaking Sephardic Jews in the world. This talk focuses on how this once-thriving Jewish community grappled with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Greece prior to the devastation of the Holocaust. Dr. Devin E. Naar is Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. His book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, won a National Jewish Book Award and the grand prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association.
Monday, February 17, 8:00-9:30 PM followed by reception
The Kellogg Center Auditorium
Co- sponsors: James Madison College, the College of Arts and Letters, College of Social Science, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Department of History.
Dr. Devin E. Naar event flyer
The College of Arts and Letters Jewish Studies Presents:
Finifter Panel on The Holocaust in Greece
Hear from three international historians, Dr. Andrew Apostolou, Dr. Leon Saltiel, and Dr. Giorgos Antoniou as they cover “The Thirst Perspective on the Holocaust: Non-Jews and the German Murder of their Jewish Neighbors,” “A City Against its Citizens?,” and “Revisiting Bystanders Rescuers and Collaborators: Social Distancing and Social Networks in Thessaloniki before and during the Holocaust.”