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...