4th Floor Conference Center, Golda Meir Library and over Zoom

Faye Greenberg Sigman Woman of Valor Lecture

Hybrid Event: In person and also streaming via Zoom, 
Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956) was a prolific Yiddish writer certain of her own importance, even as she was ignored by critics and largely forgotten during her own lifetime. In this lecture, Jessica Kirzane, who has devoted the past several years to translating and championing Karpilove’s work, will explore the author’s barbed criticism of turn-of-the-century Yiddish societal expectations around gender and sexuality. Interweaving Karpilove’s biography with excerpts and discussion of her clever and humorous writing, Kirzane will paint a portrait of a quick-witted writer and the worlds she inhabited and created.

Jessica Kirzane is the assistant instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She is the translator of three works by Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020), Judith: a tale of love and woe (Farlag Press, 2022) and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming). Kirzane publishes regularly about Yiddish language pedagogy and Yiddish Studies pedagogy more broadly, in addition to her scholarship on representations of gender and race in American Jewish literature.

To download PDF flyer click here.

Made possible by the generosity of the Taxman and Temkin families.

Cosponsored by 51����’s Creative Writing Program and Departments of English, Translation and Interpreting Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies

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A lecture by Keith Kahn-Harris, author of Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity

In his 2019 book Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity, Keith Kahn-Harris argued that we are seeing the emergence of a “selective” antisemitism, in which non-Jews combine a philosemitic attraction to some sorts of Jews with an antisemitic rejection of others. In this context, drawing attention to – and celebrating – the diversity of the Jewish people can have the unintended consequence of providing a ‘catalogue’ for those who wish to ‘choose’ their preferred Jew. In this lecture, Dr. Kahn-Harris will explore how it might be possible to engage with Jewish diversity in ways that do not unwittingly reinforce selective antisemitism. He will discuss how he dealt with this challenge in working on an educational book of portraits of British Jews, What Does a Jew Look Like (2022)?

Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer, based in London. He is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, an associate lecturer and honorary fellow at Birkbeck College, and the project director of the European Jewish Research Archive at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The author or co-author of eight books and editor of several collections and many articles and reviews, his career bridges academia and multiple other worlds. His most recent books are The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (Icon) and What Does a Jew Look Like? (in collaboration with Rob Stothard).

Co-sponsored by 51����’s Departments of History and Sociology and Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and by Marquette University’s Department of History and Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Studies

To download the PDF flyer click here.

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In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman’s “brilliantly constructed auto-fiction” (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants – a Guatemalan Catholic mother and a Russian Jewish father – in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb. Told in an irresistibly funny, tender and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of family explores the pressures of living between worlds.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, AND Washington Independent Review of Books

WINNER OF THE ALMA AWARD FOR BEST JEWISH FICTION

“Monkey Boy is a moving story on what it means to be Jewish and Catholic, what it means to have immigrant parents from vastly different parts of the world, and how a Guatemalan Jewish kid in a white Boston suburb finds his way in the world.” — ALMA

About the Author
Francisco Goldman has published four previous novels and two books of nonfiction. The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The Interior Circuit was named by the Los Angeles Times one of 10 best books of the year. The Art of Political Murder is now an HBO documentary. Goldman’s most recent novel, Say Her Name, won the Prix Femina étranger. His books have been published in sixteen languages.

About Rachel Buff
Rachel Ida Buff teaches history and comparative ethnic studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is author, most recently, of A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham University Press, 2020). Currently she is working on a novel, Holy Toledo, and a book of essays, Thinking Like a Caravan.

The book may be

In partnership with Boswell Books
Co-sponsors: 51����’s English Department, Creative Writing and Cultures and Communities programs, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Part of the Stahl Center’s ‘Colors of Jewishness’ series, made possible with generous funding from Bader Philanthropies and the Ettinger Family Foundation

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