https://youtu.be/lEkdZ32kNfs Cosponsored by Hillel at UCLA: https://www.uclahillel.org/ Chaim Seidler-Feller (Shalom Hartman Institute of North America) A virtual tour of the Seidler-Feller collection of objects of Jewish material culture from Alsace and Iran, from India and Italy and from the US and Israel. Items include an 18th Century embroidered Italian tallit, a Yemenite wedding headdress, ketubot...
Naftulin Family Lecture on Studies in Jewish Identity Michael and Irene Ross Program in Yiddish Studies RSVP: https://levecenter.ucla.edu/event/between-city-and-shtetl-a-comparative-look-at-contemporary-hasidic-life/ Join us for "Between City and Shtetl: A Comparative Look at Contemporary Hasidic Life," an upcoming joint book talk featuring current and former Leve affiliates. This talk brings together David N. Myers (UCLA) and Nomi M. Stolzenberg...
RSVP: https://levecenter.ucla.edu/event/the-monster-at-the-heart-of-our-galaxy-from-the-possibility-to-the-certainty-of-a-supermassive-black-hole/ Andrea Ghez (UCLA) 2021-22 Alan D. Leve Award Lecture Learn about new developments in the study of supermassive black holes. Through the capture and analysis of twenty years of high-resolution imaging, the UCLA Galactic Center Group has moved the case for a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy from a...
Thursday, October 20, 2022 • 306 Royce • 2 PM Christopher Silver (McGill University) with Aomar Boum (UCLA) Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not...
Sunday, October 23, 2022 • CNSI • 4 PM Reception/5pm Lecture Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University) with Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA) A Sarajevo Story: Jews, Muslims, and the Complexities of Rescue in a formerly Ottoman town Inaugural Al Finci Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies This talk explores the entangled narratives of racial politics and understandings of rescue...
Tuesday, November 1, 2022 • 314 Royce • 4 PM Jessica Marglin (USC) & Matthias Lehmann (UC Irvine), with Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA) Where Do Jews Belong? Two Perspectives from the Jewish Nineteenth Century Sady & Ludwig Kahn Book Talk in German Jewish Studies The Leve Center will host a double book talk featuring the...
Event Postponed: New Date and Time TBA UAW Academic workers representing student employees, academic and student researchers, and postdocs have voted to authorize a strike during the week of 11/14-11/18, calling for increased wages, better working conditions and affordable housing. In light of these efforts, the Leve Center is postponing our events for the coming week. Please stay tuned...
https://youtu.be/Awm32jnHjfw We remain horrified by the deeds of those who perpetrated the Holocaust but perhaps more mystified than ever. The long-held consensus among historians that the perpetrators were “ordinary men” does not satisfy, and not just because we now know more about the role of female auxiliaries. We are not sure what “ordinary” demarcates: Not...
Tuesday, January 24, 2023 • 314 Royce • 2 PM Aomar Boum (UCLA) Moderator: Todd Presner (UCLA) Undesirables A Holocaust Journey to North Africa Kahn Book Talk in German Jewish Studies In this gripping graphic novel, a Jewish journalist encounters an extension of the horrors of the Holocaust in North Africa. In the lead-up to...
Tuesday, January 31, 2022 • 314 Royce • 4 PM Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA) & Aomar Boum (UCLA) Moderator: Michael Rothberg (UCLA) Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934–1950 The 1939 Society Program in Holocaust Studies This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity...
Thursday, February 2, 2023 • Zoom Live • 9 AM PST New Approaches to Italian Fascism and Jewish Histories Viterbi Program in Mediterranean Jewish Studies To mark the 100th anniversary of the Fascist seizure of power, an event known as The March on Rome and which produced the first Fascist government and initiated the 23-year...
Jessie Sampter (1883-1938) embraced Zionism as an adult and moved to Palestine in 1919. Yet Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals: while Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, Sampter spoke of herself as “crippled” from childhood polio and plagued by weakness and sickness her whole life; while Zionism applauded reproductive...
https://youtu.be/fFE5cgkJqwk In this gripping graphic novel, a Jewish journalist encounters an extension of the horrors of the Holocaust in North Africa. In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler’s genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration...
https://youtu.be/VQKLSnryVNg In Hebrew Bible accounts of child-naming, it is a child’s mother (or a mother’s female surrogate or surrogates; e.g., a midwife) who, somewhat more often than not, bestows a name on a newly delivered infant. This same tradition of mothers or their female surrogates conferring infants’ names can also be found in Egypt and...
In the midst of a talmudic debate about the appropriateness of beer for use in Sabbath ritual (instead of the usual beverage of wine), an incident is recounted: one disciple encounters his teacher using beer for a Sabbath meal ritual, and remarks: “Abba has begun to make money from the beer business!” (b. Pesahim 107a)....
Eduardo Halfon’s stories cut across borders of geography, history, culture, and identity. A Guatemalan-Jewish writer with ties to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Halfon writes fiction that weaves together stories of the Holocaust, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic diasporas, and the Guatemalan civil war in provocative and moving ways. In this special event,...
In biblical texts, we find preserved the “mark of contradictions, fragmentations, and adjunctions,” as intellectual historian Michel de Certeau once wrote (The Writing of History 1988: 313). This talk will explore the mark of contradictions in what may seem a peripheral set of texts within the broader biblical narrative, the Samson stories of Judges 13-16....
What role did women play in the making of Jewish literary modernity? We know too little about the women writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in transforming Jewish culture in the twentieth century. This talk will offer a counter history of modern Jewish literature from the perspective of women. The talk will focus on two...
https://youtu.be/KwWi24Y0duY Jessie Sampter (1883-1938) embraced Zionism as an adult and moved to Palestine in 1919. Yet Sampter’s own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals: while Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, Sampter spoke of herself as “crippled” from childhood polio and plagued by weakness and sickness her whole life; while Zionism applauded...
https://youtu.be/cGz4NOL-_fQ This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved—Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly...