The Cornell Jewish Studies Program is pleased to announce our spring 2017 line-up of events. As always, admission for all of these events is free and faculty, students and community members are all warmly invited.
Monday, February 13, film director Michael Levine, along with Cornell’s resident Lower East Side expert Elissa Sampson, will be joining us for a viewing and discussion of his film “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream.” This film about the last matzo bakery on the Lower East Side is a story of tradition, of resistance and resilience, and a celebration of a family whose commitment to their heritage and to their employees is inspiring proof that the family that bakes together, stays together. The screening will be held at Willard Straight Theater at 7:15pm. Co-sponsored with Cornell Cinema.
On Tuesday, March 14 at 5:30 p.m. in 165 McGraw Hall, author Shulem Deen will discuss his National Jewish Book Award-winning book All Who Go Do Not Return. The book is a sensitive memoir about growing up in and then leaving the community of Skver Hasidim in Rockland County’s New Square, one of the most insular Hasidic groups in the United States. Co-sponsored with Cornell Hillel.
On Monday, March 27, at 5:30pm in 165 McGraw Hall Naomi Seidman, Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union, will give the Benjamin and Rachel Siegel Lecture in Jewish Women’s Studies. Her talk, “Sister Scholars: The Emergence of Orthodox Girls' Education in Interwar Poland,” will be a foretaste of her biography in progress of Sarah Schenirer, the pioneering founder of the Beis Yaakov network of Orthodox Jewish girls’ school. Co-sponsored with Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Curator at Polin: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, will be giving a lecture titled, “Materializing History: Time and Telos at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.” This distinguished guest’s appearance, made possible by the University Lecture series, will be held at 5:30 on Thursday, April 27, location to be determined.
Our final event of the year will be with Dorit Rabinyan, bestselling author of the acclaimed Persian Brides and Strand of a Thousand Pearls. She will be speaking about and reading excerpts of her new novel All the Rivers (Also known as Borderlife). The book tells a story crisscrossed by physical and emotional borderlines and courageously marks the deceit in the separation between “you” and “I,” between “us” and “them.” There will be an event held in English and one in Hebrew, both on Thursday, May 4.
More specific information on the events will be found on our website jewishstudies.cornell.edu as the dates approach.
