Events

auditorium seating

The Jewish Studies program typically sponsors several events each academic year, free and open to the public.

Yiddish Paris on a Global Stage:
Immigrant Jewish Culture at the 1937 World’s Fair

With Dr. Nick Underwood, The College of Idaho

Dr. Nick Underwood

This talk will focus on the Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair; a virtually unknown exhibition of global Yiddish culture to explore the vitality of interwar Parisian Yiddish culture. Constructed specifically for the World’s Fair, the Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion put Yiddish Paris on the world stage and highlighted the community building power that culture had for immigrant Jews in 1920’s and 1930’s Paris.

Nick Underwood is assistant Professor of History and the Berger-Neilsen Chair of Judaic Studies at The College of Idaho. His book, Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France was publish by Indiana University Press in 2022.

Monday, April 24, 2023
Banquet Hall, Hicks Center

Watch the lecture here.

Selected Past Events

  • Dr. Rachel B. Gross, “Feeling Jewish: Nostalgia and American Jewish Religion” (May 4, 2022)
  • Artist Karen Schiff, “Anti-Slavery, Pro-Dreyfus: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as Resistance to Prejudice” (April 16, 2019)
  • Film screening of the documentary “Doing Jewish: a Story from Ghana” hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Haus (October 24, 2017)
  • Filmmaker Lacey Schwartz,  Screening of the acclaimed documentary “Little White Lie“ ( May 2, 2017)
  • Dr. Benny Morris, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: “A New Look at the Arab-Israeli War of 1948” (April 6, 2017)
  • Dr. Yael Aronoff, Associate Professor, James Madison College within Michigan State University: “Israel’s Wars with Hamas: Dilemmas of Asymmetric Conflicts” (February 27, 2017)
  • Dr. Lisa Moses Leff, Associate Professor of History at the American University in Washington, DC: “The Archive Thief: the Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust” (April 13, 2016)
  • Dr. Jonathan Freedman, Professor of English and American Culture at the University of Michigan: “Jews and Other Others: Transparent and the Remaking of Jewish Identities” Sponsored by a Mellon Community of Practice Grant (February 24, 2015 )
  • Cartoonist Liana Finck: “A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York” (May 5, 2015)
  • Mark Lavie, longtime Middle East correspondent and editor: “What is Missing in Middle East Reporting?” A lecture with and a discussion of the challenges of journalistic practice in the Middle East (January 21, 2015)
  • Professor Kenneth Waltzer and Professor Yael Aronoff of Michigan State University, and Professor Amy Elman of Kalamazoo College: “Boycott Divestment Sanctions: Alternative Narratives“, critical panel discussion (October 29, 2014)
  • Dr. Gil Ribak, American Jewish University: “Rarely Do You See a Drunken Jew: the Images of the Gentile Lower Class Among Jewish Intellectuals, 1881-1920”
  • Professor Kenneth Marcus, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights, “The Conundrum of Race: Civil Rights, Law, and Jewish Identity”
  • Professor Jonathan Judaken, Rhodes College, “Should Jews be Alarmed? Rethinking the New Antisemitism”
  • Professor Rochelle Millen, “Becoming and Being a Jewish Woman: Contemporary Reflections”
  • Professor Anthony Polonsky, Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Coming to Terms with the Dark Past: Confronting the Holocaust in Poland and Lithuania”
  • Dr. Rosa Perelmuter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “The Jewish community of Cuba: Then and Now”
  • Professor Lee Shai Weissbach, University of Louisville: “Synagogue Buildings and the Patterns of American and Jewish Life” and “The Jewish History of Small-town America”
  • Esther Dischereit, German author and playwright, “Exercises in Being Jewish.”
  • Screening of The Fighter, followed by Q & A with Arnost Lustig, Czech Writer and Holocaust Survivor
  • Nadim Sheiban, “Life in Jerusalem as a Christian Israeli Arab”
  • Rabbi Michael Ungar, ’85, Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, “An Isolated Community on an Isolated Island: the Jews of Cuba”
  • Rabbi Steven Leder, Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, “Race and Class in America”
  • Noam Weiner, “My Experience in the West Bank”