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GLOBAL CONNECTIONS THROUGH TEACHING AND RESEARCH
from SCJS Annual 2021
“What Starts Here Changes the World” is something we are used to associating with the research, teaching, and innovation that happens at UT Austin. But how does the Schusterman Center contribute to this global conversation? In this issue, we highlight the different ways in which faculty and students in Jewish Studies are expanding our reach beyond the Forty Acres. From faculty research projects to virtual classrooms that allow UT students to work directly with peers at Hebrew University to many more initiatives— the Schusterman Center connects people, artists, ideas, and research across time and space to explore enduring issues in our world.
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History and Testimony in Motion: Representation of the Holocaust in Dance
By Dr. Rebecca Rossen, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance
In 1994, the New York City choreographer, Tamar Rogoff premiered “The Ivye Project,” performed in the woods just outside of Ivye in today’s Belarus. In these woods is a small memorial marking a mass grave where over 2,500 Jews were killed in 1942, including many of Rogoff’s own relatives. Rogoff brought together an international cast of dancers, musicians, and actors, as well as numerous local children and four elderly survivors to create a performance that re-animated the Jewish lives and culture destroyed there. Tamar Rogoff’s piece is just one of the performances that I investigate in my new research project, Moving Memory: Holocaust Representation in Contemporary Dance. Other projects include dances that engage the stories of specific survivors, including Ballet Austin’s “Light/The Holocaust and Humanity Project,” based on the life of Houstonian Naomi Warren, and a moving duet for a 90-year-old Hungarian survivor and a younger dancer (chronicled in the dance film, “The Euphoria of Being”).
The Holocaust has been a major focus of film, theater, literature, and visual art, and there have been numerous books published to address Holocaust representation within these media. While dance has served as a powerful forum to address the Holocaust, there is little research on this topic. In my view, representations of the Holocaust in dance set history and testimony into motion, nudge memorials out of statis, and activate individual and collective memories. Moving Memory will be the first book to examine dance as a critical site for Holocaust representation in performance pieces created between 1961 and the present by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers working in North America, Europe, and in Israel.
Fellowship Offers Research Opportunity in Munich
By Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies
In 2019, I was awarded a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to conduct research at Ludwig Maximillian University (LMU) in Munich, Germany. This prestigious fellowship will enable me to devote time to complete a monograph that explores the reception of the biblical jubilee legislation in early Judaism and Christianity through the lens of Utopian Studies. My first four-month research trip in Munich was scheduled to begin in late April 2020. One week before the world shut down in March 2020, I was still hoping that the trip would happen. I had all of the paperwork ready for my research trip to Munich, but my plans were cancelled within a month.
Fortunately, because of the Humboldt Foundation’s special pandemic provisions, I was able to postpone my first research visit to Munich until this summer. As life is still shut down in much of Europe, I began my first fellowship period this summer remotely from Austin. My research is being hosted by Professor Loren T. Stuckenbruck, a professor of New Testament and early Judaism in the Protestant Theology Faculty at LMU. For the next several months, I will be participating in bi-weekly colloquia held on Zoom for students and researchers affiliated with his professorship. The colloquia are conducted primarily in German. As Munich is seven hours ahead, it means rising early to join the meetings of the colloquium. The rest of my time is spent here in Austin on researching and writing my monograph. In summer 2022, I intend to travel to Munich for my second research visit and complete my monograph.
By Dr. Amy Weinreb, Senior Lecturer, SCJS
From enduring ideas about Jewish Diaspora and exile, to narratives of Eastern European immigrant settlement during the pre-state period, to the lived experiences of diverse populations arriving at Israel’s borders today, teaching Israel Studies involves the global. Each phenomenon contains hopes and controversies, but all of them illustrate how Israel remains linked to other locations worldwide.
In my Israel Studies classrooms at UT, students also explore Israel’s contemporary international reality. Ethnographic readings, the footage I’ve captured, and conversations with community partners transport students to locations that reveal Israel’s place in the world. In class, students might find themselves virtually immersed in the packed Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station. There, Filipina women open popup nail salons and Christmas food stalls, and Sudanese and Eritrean asylum-seekers manage walk-in health clinics. In another session, an American woman pans her camera to the hills bordering her suburban home in Beit Shemesh. She tells the students why she chose to move to Israel with her husband and five children, even if it did not make financial sense. Later, a Palestinian student describes the frustration of arriving at Ben-Gurion airport
after time abroad to discover that she has lost her status as an East Palestinian resident during her absence. She fields questions about what her residential status and statelessness mean. While each of these interactions illuminates the problems and prospects of Israel’s global relationships, in Summer 2021, I am introducing a new and even more immersive international Israel Studies experience at UT: The Contemporary Jerusalem Global Career Launch. The Global Career Launch is a competitive internship opportunity supported by Texas Global. In an intensive eight-week research internship in Jerusalem, a cohort of eight UT interns will assist Hebrew University affiliates working on community development projects. Hebrew University will offer dedicated meeting space, dorm rooms, library access, and trained assistants.
The Contemporary Jerusalem Global Career Launch will guide students as they gain cultural competency and academic experience through research internships. These involve data collection and analysis on projects related to smallholding farmers; peacebuilding and sports, environmental peacebuilding; and psychosocial support in refugee communities, Palestinian workers in the Israeli labor market, identifying opportunities and challenges for Russian-speaking Jews, and the Ministry of Diaspora’s role in working with global Jewish communities to prevent antisemitism. Our students are excited to be working closely with supervisors who may one day be future employers, colleagues, or academic collaborators.
Image: Hebrew University students set out to conduct ethnographic research in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. They will then discuss their experiences, perspectives, and reading assignments shared with UT students during the Global Virtual Exchange in Weinreb's "Multicultural Israel" course. Photo: Martine Wolber.
UT Austin Seminar Explores Civil Society in Israel/Palestine
By Dr. David Eaton, LBJ School of Public Affairs
From December 28, 2021 through January 7, 2022, and continuing into the Spring Semester 2022, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies will offer an undergraduate seminar exploring opportunities, challenges and complexities of shared society and coexistence in Israel.
The course, “Civil Society Activities Promoting Coexistence, Shared Society and Peace in Israel/ Palestine,” focuses on activities carried out by Muslim, Christian, Jewish and non-denominational non-profit organizations operating within Israeli civil society. These NGOs deal with Israeli/Palestinian coexistence and the advancement of civil and human rights, with an emphasis on the Arab-Palestinian population. Activities include educational and social services programs, equality before the law, community work and advocacy activities, and prevention of systematic discrimination based on ethnic and religious affiliation. The goal is to create dialogue and build coexistence among the different populations in Israel and Palestine.
The course introduces students to key issues for shared society and human rights in Israel, where civilizations, religions, national identities and ideologies converge. Through a series of in-class lectures and discussions, reading material, pre-recorded lectures, virtual and in-person field study, students will be able to learn about and observe a variety of social initiatives, communities, people, and perspectives on civil society related to coexistence. The course provides opportunities for meetings with people who live the power imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as civil society activists, leaders of nonprofit organizations, government officials, and professional experts. Many of the key leaders of these organizations have experienced personal loss.
“You get so much perspective actually visiting a place and talking to the people who are experiencing every day what you are studying.” - Olivia Hay, Student
The Israeli nonprofit sector is one of the most complex in the world. In the last decade, a growing number of organizations, including nonprofits, social enterprises and philanthropic foundations, are dealing with issues related to co-existence and the social and political situation of the ArabPalestinian population in Israel.
While coexistence of populations practicing different religions is a major issue in Israel, its complexities are shared in other societies around the world, including the US. Many nonprofit organizations in the US are also building coexistence among populations of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds; lessons from this course are transferable to the American reality.
“When we were at Hebrew University, we met with a lot of people that were from different parts and from different sectors of society, they were NGOs and they were families, people who worked with the government and people who worked outside of the government, and I feel like here were multiple approaches to how everyone was coping with the violence, coping with the situation there […] It has been the most educational experience of my life time.” - Rahma Sohail, Student
International Migration Experiences, From Museum to Classroom and Back out in the Field Again
By Dr. Suzanne Seriff, Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
I am a third generation Jewish Texan. All my grandparents immigrated to this country from the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the 20th century. As anthropologist and museum curator, I have dedicated much of my research, publications, teaching, and curating to the topic of immigration in general—and Jewish immigration in particular. My interest has focused on the intersection of immigration, xenophobia, and race, especially concerning the racialized depiction of immigrants as unwanted and “undesirable” aliens in popular culture cartoons, folk arts, film, fiction, and musical lyrics around the world. Two of my recent exhibitions have had a direct impact on the courses I teach right here at UT. In 2009, I curated a nationally traveling exhibition for the Bullock Texas State History Museum that explored the role of Galveston, Texas as an immigrant port into the US. The exhibition drew on this piece of forgotten American history as a way to ask prescient questions about present-day immigration, such as “Who can be an American?” and “Who gets to decide?”
FORGOTTEN GATEWAY
Coming to America Through Galveston Island
Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island included a section on the famed “Galveston Movement,” an organized immigration plan from 1907 to 1914 that was designed to bring Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the US through the port of Galveston. This section of the exhibition drew on firstperson accounts to illustrate the restrictive laws and racist treatment of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at that time. The NEH-funded exhibition traveled throughout Texas and the US, including six months at The Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
Forgotten Gateway sparked my early association with SCJS, which co-hosted a major international symposium on the racialized depiction of Jewish immigrants. It also became the catalyst for a Difficult Dialogue course at UT which I have taught for the last decade. The material culture of
Exhibition produced in partnership with: Traveling exhibition poster from Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island. Courtesy of The Bullock Texas State History Museum. Jewish immigration (what people bring with them when they move to a new country) and the material culture about Jewish immigrants (how Jewish newcomers are depicted in arts, film, fiction, and photography) is also a focus of two additional courses I have developed for SCJS: “American Jewish Material Culture and Museums,” and “Representations of Jews in the American Public Sphere.”
The other exhibition that has inspired me to develop new courses and research projects is Between Two Worlds: Folk Artists Reflect on the Immigrant Experience, which I co-curated in 2013 when I served as the Director of the Gallery of Conscience at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. This exhibit focused on the words and works of international folk artists who draw on their expressive arts to educate, advocate, and engage the public around issues of longing, belonging, and displacement surrounding the immigrant experience.
Back at UT, this exhibition led me to develop two upcoming international projects, including a Maymester study abroad course for undergraduate students that explores the migrant experience through the lens of folk arts and artists, and a new research project exploring the role of folk arts for Jewish Israeli and Palestinian artists to educate, advocate and engage around issues of home, longing, belonging and displacement.
By Julia Mickenberg, Department of American Studies
In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, Dr. Mickenberg traces the attraction of the Soviet Union to leftist American women activists, who imagined the Soviet Union to be a place where a new revolutionary era for women could take place. Here Dr. Mickenberg describes how Palestine and the Soviet Union alike were locations where American Jews imagined they could shed the burden of antisemitism and marginalization.
Pauline Koner was of the same generation as Edith Segal, Anna Sokolow, and other leading figures in the revolutionary dance movement of the 1930s (nearly all of them Jewish), but she was only tangentially connected to it. Koner grew up in a socialist milieu of immigrant Jews in New York City and trained with Russian émigré Michel Fokine, among others. Koner’s eclectic training, exotic looks (long, dark hair, olive skin, high cheekbones), and tremendous adaptability launched her reputation as an “ethnographic” or “neo-ethnic” dancer, who performed dances based on a variety of traditions, including many with a Far Eastern flavor, such as an Indian priestess in “Nalamani” (1930) or a Javanese temple dancer in “Altar Piece” (1930). As Rebecca Rossen has discussed, she even performed in “Hasidic drag.” Koner performed such dances to demonstrate her own universality, “or her ability to represent a variety of Others.”
In 1932 and 1933, Koner spent nine months studying and dancing in Egypt and Palestine; a year later she went to the Soviet Union. Koner’s itinerary thus encompassed two of the most popular sites of pilgrimage for Jews in the 1930s, the former a place to be proudly
Pauline Koner dancing on the beach in Leningrad, ca. 1935. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundation. Photographer unknown.
Jewish, the latter a place to shed the burdens associated with Jewishness since antisemitism was officially outlawed (though still prevalent). While in Tel Aviv, Koner saw “young settlers from the kibbutzim, energetic, sunburned, work-steeled bodies, and minds honed by the difficulties of survival—a look of life in their eyes and a warmth in their heart […] The atmosphere breathed enthusiasm, hope, and progress.” Koner “felt vibrantly free, as if I had shed an invisible layer of skin, and proud of my Jewishness.”
For many Jews, Palestine and the Soviet Union were popular sites of “magic pilgrimage,” both homelands of a sort with utopian promise, places where new people were being created along with new civilizations. While Palestine was called a Jewish homeland, the Soviet Union offered Jews with roots in the Russian empire a chance to reformulate in terms of “class and political solidarity,” their emotional connection to a land once known for its brutal oppression of Jews. The creation of a Jewish autonomous region known as Birobidjian in the Soviet Far East in 1928 attracted support and settlers from the US, who hailed the idea of a “a territorial enclave where a secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialist principles could serve as an alternative to Palestine.” For Jews, part of the Soviet Union’s attraction was the possibility of having distinctions like race or ethnicity no longer matter.
SJCS CORE PROGRAMS
Gale Collaborative Brings People from the Americas Together
By Dr. Naomi Lindstrom, Director, Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas
The Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas has been able to bring the Americas to UT in part through the longstanding and strong collaborative ties between Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA, founded in 1982 by Judith Laikin Elkin).
The listserv of LAJSA was created in 1996 at UT and has been operating here continuously ever since. The participants in the list now number 421 and are spread out over the Spanish American countries, Brazil, Israel, the US, Canada, and Europe. Lajsa-list is published two or three times a week and includes bibliographic information on new publications, research queries, and news of Jewish life in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world.
Since the Gale Collaborative began to take form in the early 2010s, larger-scale cooperative activities have become possible. In 2013, the SCJS hosted the 16th International Research Conference of LAJSA, conducted in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. This event brought over a hundred scholars in the field to UT for three days of scholarly panels, musical performances, and readings from creative works. The Gale Collaborative hosted the website of LAJSA until the organization was able to establish an independent site. Two portions of the new LAJSA website are curated from UT. One is the continuously updated registry of doctoral dissertations and masters theses in Latin American Jewish Studies. The other is an archive of syllabi and descriptions of course offerings on Latin American Jewish themes and Sephardic topics.
While universities have struggled to maintain their normal activities during the pandemic, reliance on distance-learning technology has had some benefits. It has drawn LAJSA members closer to the Gale Collaborative as they are now able to attend our virtual public programming. Since the events have become accessible to scholars everywhere, they are announced over the LAJSA listserv and attract a sizeable international audience.
When in Fall 2020 the distinguished Mexican poet Myriam Moscona spoke about her use of Ladino or Judeo-Spanish as a contemporary literary language, her talk was attended by both Co-Presidents of LAJSA as well as several colleagues who are well recognized for their scholarship on the Ladino language and Sephardic literature and culture. In Spring 2021, the Berlin-based researcher Mariusz Kałczewiak spoke about the cultural life of Yiddish-speaking Polish immigrants in Buenos Aires. His lecture was attended by many Argentines, including Perla Sneh, probably the most recognized expert on Yiddish Buenos Aires. The presence of these specialists has led to rich Q&A periods, with information about learning resources being freely shared. When it becomes possible to hold in-person events again, we plan to continue providing online access in order to continue to benefit from the stimulating participation of the far-flung LAJSA community. Despite the pandemic, the horizons of Israel Studies at UT have continued to expand. Not only were we able to invite people from outside Austin, Texas, and the US to join our events through Zoom, but the events themselves, along with the accomplishments of our students, also reflect the transnational currents informing our conceptualization of Israel.
By Dr. Karen Grumberg, Israel Studies Faculty Coordinator at SCJS, and Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Over the last year, we heard Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins on waste infrastructure in Palestine, Dr. David Barak-Gorodetsky on American Zionism, and Dr. Yehudit Henshke on the origins of the Mizrahi Sociolect in Israel. We heard comedian Yair Nitzani link the Jewish humor of Eastern Europe and New York to Israeli humor; we viewed the gender-bending art of the Berlin-based Israeli artist Roey Victoria Heifetz, who discussed cultural cross-currents in Israel and Germany; and we chatted with folks from a Houston-based theater company that had performed Anat Gov’s Hebrew play “Oh My God” in English translation.
The student activities supported by Israel Studies demonstrate the same commitment to understanding Israel in a broader context. Though we had to redirect the Israel Studies Travel Fellowship toward research, we were able to award several fellowships.
Two Dual Language Fellowships were awarded to students for their commitment to the study of both Hebrew and Arabic: Hannah Salmon (Ethnomusicology) and Garrett Shuffield (Middle Eastern Studies). Two Travel/Research fellowships were awarded to students whose research contributes to Israel Studies: Tara Ginnane (Government), for her comparison of absentee voting politics in Israel and elsewhere; and Robyn Croft (SpeechLanguage Pathology), for her consideration of cross-cultural differences among people who stutter in Israel and the US.
The ongoing research of UT faculty working on Israel has also benefitted from the support of Israel Studies at UT. For the first time this spring, we launched a competition for the Israel Studies Faculty Summer Research Stipend. For this award, our committee selected Dr. Amy Weinreb (Senior Lecturer, SCJS) and Dr. Jason Lustig (Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, SCJS). Weinreb's proposed project, “The Essential Israel Studies Teaching Guide: Global, Virtual, and Ethnographic Approaches,” draws on her decade of expertise teaching Israel Studies and her in-depth interviews of Israel Studies program directors and faculty worldwide. It offers strategies and pedagogical innovations for approaching Israel Studies through an academic lens.
Lustig's proposed project, “Fake Jews: Trust and the Contested Epistemologies of Jewishness,” offers “a history of modern Jewish life as a history of trust.” Global in scope, the project poses timely questions regarding truth and disinformation in the context of ascertaining who is or isn’t a Jew, and examines the way trust has informed Jewish history.
OUR STUDENT FUNDING
Israel Studies Dual Language Fellowships 2020-2021: $2,000
Israel Studies Travel Fellowship 2020-2021: $3,000
Israel Studies Essay Award 2020-2021:$2,000, supported by the Consulate of Israel in Houston, TX
Israel Studies Graduate Fellowship
2020-2021 Recipient: Benjamin Rangell, Middle Eastern Studies 2021-2022 Recipient: Atalia Israeli-Nevo, Anthropology
Israel Studies Supplementary Graduate Fellowship
2020-2021 Recipient 2020-2021: Libby Hilliard, Middle Eastern Studies
From Our Internship Program Director
By Dr. Suzanne Seriff, Director of the Internship Program in Jewish Studies at SCJS, and Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
If necessity is the mother of invention, then COVID-19 was one heck of a motivating Ima for the 2020-2021 social justice internship program. Each of the three pillars of the program—hands on learning, lessons from our elders, and “chevrutah-style” text study—changed fundamentally to accommodate social distancing. The result may have been the best year ever!
Instead of trying to work around the restrictions of the pandemic, we leaned into it. The first innovation of Fall 2020 came directly from the human rights issues uncovered by the global health crisis. Each organization with which we work had been drastically affected. Each was struggling to meet the needs of their most atrisk populations: the un-housed, the poor, the incarcerated, essential workers, immigrants and asylum seekers, underserved youth, and people living with disabilities.
We saw the crisis situation as an opportunity for renewed collaboration with host organizations. Students became part of a real-time “rapid response” COVID-19 documentation project of global proportions. Our student interns helped document their organizations’ inventive efforts as they were occurring by working with UT’s Humanities Institute’s “Communities of Care” initiative. This digital storytelling project will join a growing archive of stories, objects, and artworks being collected worldwide to bear witness to the unprecedented crises of health care this year.
The second innovation was to open the internship program to a wider cohort of undergraduates from throughout UT Austin, not only from the College of Liberal Arts. The result was an inspiring mix of pre-med students interested in global health, science and math students schooled in the arts of data collection and analysis, and liberal arts students with strong career goals in social service fields. With this blend of aspirations and experiences, students encountered a diversity of people from whom they could learn.
Even though the students’ internships were 100% virtual, each ended up engaging in some of the most consequential projects of any cohort to date. Projects included preparing bills on workers’ right for the Texas Legislature, setting up a national tracking system for migrant vaccinations, promoting free arts programs for underserved youth, documenting music and healing programs for marginalized communities in detention centers, prisons, and schools, and marketing art shows for artists experiencing homelessness.
Their work was so vital to the host organizations that, for the first time ever, every single student in the Spring 2021 class will continue interning through the summer months. The third innovation of the pandemic year involved an “experiential learning” component for our community-wide celebrations—surrounding Sukkot and Passover. While the dinner program shifted to a Zoom event— with readings, study, stories, and song—the students got a special “taste” of the Jewish holiday delivered by yours truly to their front doors. The Fall “Sukkah for Social Change in a Box” contained supplies for students to make their own temporary shelters, along with homemade challah. The spring “Freedom Seder on a Plate” included the ingredients needed to learn about the Passover Seder plate, as well as a pint of matzoh ball soup, grape juice, and chocolate-covered matzah.
We responded to crisis by learning from the moment itself, by expanding our tent, and by deftly adapting ancient tradition to new technologies. The added work and commitment it took from all of us testifies to the importance of the work itself—striving toward tikkun olam (repair of the world) in the midst of a global pandemic. For the first time, I understood the wisdom of our ancestors’ teaching from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of our Ancestors) that recognizes the agency and effort involved in the very things we tend to take for granted: “Appoint for yourself a teacher; acquire for yourself a friend; and judge every person according to their own merits (Avot 1:6).”
I have lived a relatively privileged life, yet still I am only a generation removed from homelessness. My parents were migrants. Prior to my birth, home security was something my family didn’t have. Then with the pandemic it became all too real and close to home how quickly families can become homeless and how my own family was just a couple of paychecks away from it. The pandemic highlighted the stigma I unintentionally held about people who were experiencing homelessness. Working with Art from the Streets and Texas After Violence Project, I have continued to find out how different my perspective on homelessness and incarceration was from reality. Being able to process my internship experiences weekly through a Jewish lens has been more helpful than I initially thought. One of the takeaways that I found in the Jewish religion is the idea of being aware and making conscious decisions. This is extremely important to the interpersonal interactions I will only continue to have through my internships.
- Amy Ruiz, Intern, Art from the Streets and Texas After Violence Project, Fall, 2020
Top: Student presentations about lessons learned in their internships, including Cruz Zamora's presentation on Workers Defense Project (top), Sofia Hobb's presentation on Migrant Clinicians Network (middle), and Amber Jones's presentation on the AFLCIO.
Right: Intern Students, Christine Carranza (left) and Ben Chanditeya (right), each receiving their "Freedom Seder in a Box" for the Passover event, spring 2021.
GALE LECTURES 2021-2022
Before there was the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies on the Forty Acres, there was “The Gale”! For almost 50 years, the Gale Family Foundation Annual Lecture Series has brought preeminent scholars, artists, performers, writers, and others working in Jewish Studies to the UT campus. The Gale Lectures, which take place in the Fall and Spring, are the Schusterman Center’s signature semester events.
The Gale Family Foundation’s continuous support of Jewish Studies at UT Austin has performed a vital function of introducing undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from across campus, and diverse public audiences to the world of Jewish academic studies, to Jewish arts and culture, and to observers of pressing contemporary issues that touch all our lives.
THE FALL GALE LECTURE SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2021 5:00-7:00 PM Dr. Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania
"The Ties That Bind Us: African Americans and Jews in America and Our Shared Future"
The history of the Civil Rights movement and the partnership between Blacks and Jews has been one of shared discrimination and struggles. Since the 1960s there has been a fracturing in this religious political and social association. Mixing a combination of local, state and national history, Professor Butler’s talk will explore the history, myth, and challenges to the relationship between these two communities from a religious and political perspective.
Anthea Butler is Chair of Religious Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her new book, entitled White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, was published in March 2021. Her other books include Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World. A historian of African American and American religion, Professor Butler’s research and writing spans African American religion and history, race, politics, and evangelicalism. Professor Butler currently serves as President Elect of the American Society for Church history. She is also member of the American Academy of Religion, American Historical Association, and the International Communications Association.
THE SPRING GALE LECTURE SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022 5:00-7:00 PM Dr. Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto
"Saving Christianity, Killing Jews: German Military Chaplains and the Holocaust"
During Hitler's rule, more than 1,000 men served the German military as chaplains. These Catholic priests and Protestant pastors accompanied Wehrmacht units wherever they went. What role did Christian chaplains play in Nazi German atrocities, including the mass murder of Jews? Can this history shed light on religion and violence in our own times?
Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, including War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (3rd edition 2016). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Bergen was part of the team that designed the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. She has served on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
