Upcoming Events
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10/14
Al-Andalus: A Musical Journey
Al-Andalus: A Musical Journey
Monday, October 14th, 2019
05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Storrs Campus Konover Auditorium
A flamenco guitar concert by Oscar Herrero
with readings from Arab-Andalusian poetry by Nicola Carpentieri -
10/15
The Renaissance of the Renaissance: on the birth of colonialism. A talk by Prof. Giuseppe Gazzola
The Renaissance of the Renaissance: on the birth of colonialism. A talk by Prof. Giuseppe Gazzola
Tuesday, October 15th, 2019
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Storrs Campus Rowe 122
Giuseppe Gazzola is an Associate Professor in the Department of European Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Stony Brook University (NY), where he coordinates the Italian program. After a sabbatical year spent researching and lecturing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Universiteit Utrecht, Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Università di Bologna, Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, Yale-NUS in Singapore, Ashoka University in New Delhi, Gazzola is now working on the next project, “Tourism and Empire: Italians in India, 1860-1945”. The list of his recent publications includes “Un entomologo in India: l’orientalismo consapevole di Guido Gozzano”; “Betting Against Themselves: Conflicting Conceptions of Love in Così fan tutte, o: la scola degli amanti”; “European Man and Writer: Romanticism, the Classics, and Political Action in the Exemplary Life of Ugo Foscolo”; Versi e Prose: Marinetti traduce Mallarmé; and Montale, the Modernist.
The event is organized by the Italian Literary and Cultural Studies, LCL Department -
10/15
Chris Dowd: Irish and Pop Culture
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10/17
Intermarriage and Antisemitism in the 21st Century – Bruce Phillips
Intermarriage and Antisemitism in the 21st Century – Bruce Phillips
Thursday, October 17th, 2019
05:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Storrs Campus Class of '47 Room, Babbidge Library
Talk by Dr. Bruce A. Phillips: "Do Americans Love or Hate the Jews? Intermarriage and Antisemitism in the 21st Century"
About the talk: A variety of opinion polls show that Jews are widely accepted and even admired, a trend underscored by Jewish intermarriage rates. At the same time, we are seeing unprecedented violence against Jews in the United States. How do we reconcile these two opposing sets of evidence?
About the speaker: Dr. Bruce A. Phillips is Professor of Sociology & Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, California. He is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture where he is conducting research on religion in California. Phillips has been among the leading researchers in the sociology of American Jewry for over three decades. He served on the National Technical Advisory Committees for the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys and advised the recent Pew study. He has conducted local Jewish population surveys in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Houston.
This program is free and open to the public and is made possible by the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Light refreshments will be served. -
10/18
The World in Classroom - Project based Learning for Cultural Understanding
The World in Classroom - Project based Learning for Cultural Understanding
Friday, October 18th, 2019
01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Storrs Campus Oak Hall 236
Speaker: Thorsten Wilhelm (Yale). The talk is in English. Refreshments will be served.
What you will learn:
- a cooking project for language learners' real world knowledge acquisition
- a telecollaborative project for mentally disabled learners
- the relationship between cultural and linguistic perceptions -
10/21
Lecture: "De las prolongaciones de lo humano: artefactos culturales y protocolos alternativos de la experiencia", by Luis Miguel Isava.
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10/25
Without Magic or Miracle: The 'Romance of Silence' and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness
Without Magic or Miracle: The 'Romance of Silence' and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness
Friday, October 25th, 2019
02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Storrs Campus Oak 236
The Medieval Studies program welcomes Masha Raskolnikov (Cornell University) to speak on the prehistory of genderqueerness in the Old French 'Romance of Silence'. We encourage and welcome everyone to attend! -
10/29
America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe – Talk by Rebecca Erbelding
America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe – Talk by Rebecca Erbelding
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019
12:30 PM - 01:45 PM
Storrs Campus Class of '47 Room, Babbidge Library
"Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe" - Book presentation by Rebecca Erbelding, historian at Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The program is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.
About the Book: America has long been criticized for refusing to give harbor to the Jews during World War II as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In her book Rescue Board, Rebecca Erbelding tells the extraordinary unknown story of the War Refugee Board, a US government effort late in the war to save the remaining Jews. In January 1944, a young Treasury Department lawyer named John Pehle went to a meeting with the president to argue for the relief funds needed to help Jews escape Nazi territory. Pehle prevailed, and within days, FDR created the War Refugee Board, empowering it to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution, and put Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. This is the story of how the War Refugee Board saved tens of thousands of lives.
About the Speaker: "Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe" won the JDC-Herbert Katzki National Jewish Book Award in 2018. Erbelding holds a PhD in American History from George Mason University. She worked as an archivist and curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2003-2015, and since 2015, has been a historian for the Museum's newest exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust, which opened in April 2018. Her work has previously been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and on the History Channel and National Geographic.
The event is sponsored by the UConn Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. -
11/6
Department Meeting
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11/7
Atina Grossmann on German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Atina Grossmann on German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Thursday, November 7th, 2019
12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Storrs Campus Dodd Center Konover Auditorium
Shelter from the Holocaust: German Jewish Refugees in Iran and India
Presentation by Dr. Atina Grossmann
About the Talk:
This lecture examines the intensely ambivalent and paradoxical experiences, sensibilities, and emotions of bourgeois Jews who found refuge in the “Orient” of India and Iran after 1933. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, these uprooted Jews navigated complex and unfamiliar terrain; homeless, stateless, having lost their livelihoods and professions, and with only an inchoate anxious sense of their families’ fate or what their future held, they were also oddly privileged as adventurous Europeans in exotic non-western, colonial or semi-colonial societies. On the margins of their collapsing and devastated Jewish European world, they lived as hybrids, themselves on the margins, emigré and refugee, caught uneasily, more or less comfortably, between colonizer and colonized. In flight from homelands that had condemned them as racially inferior, they carried with them a fraught sense of cultural superiority. Expelled from the “West” they never really left it behind, remaining, for variable but sometimes considerable lengths of time, in “global transit.”
Drawing on archival sources, memoirs and letters, fiction, and an extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia from both Iran and India (1935-1947), the talk probes refugees’ understanding of their own unstable position, the changing geopolitical situation, and their efforts to come to terms with emerging revelations about the destruction of European Jewry.
About the Speaker:
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City. She co-edited Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick). Further publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German 2012), and Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (2012). Prof. Grossmann was a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in the spring semester of 2015 and the Walter Benjamin Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2014.
The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
This program is held in remembrance of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, and is made possible by the Center for Judaic Studies Frances and Irving Seliger Memorial Endowment Fund.
If you require an accommodation to participate, please contact Pamela Weathers at 860-486-2271 or pamela.weathers@uconn.edu.
