School of Humanities

Professor Zeke Levine talks about how Yiddish song has been a fundamental aspect of cultural life within a variety of communities in the United States, from early 20^th century urban immigrant enclaves to Yiddish schools and summer camps. 

The tradition continues today with contemporary klezmer festivals and workshops. This talk introduces audiences to both the history and repertoire of Yiddish song in America and the communities who have fostered Yiddish music from the 1900s until the present day. “Let’s All Sing” was the title of a 1956 songbook, Lomir Ale Zingen.

Laura Cresté is the author of In the Good Years (Four Way Books) and You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.

What happens when we place commerce at the center of American Jewish immigration history?

Honoring our students academic achievements.

Grand Prize Winner at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, All We Imagine as Light offers a sensitive and woman-centered portrait of working-class life in Mumbai. Following the lives of two nurses and a hospital cook, director Payal Kapadia captures the complex mix of constraints, indignities, moments of transcendence and gestures of solidarity that characterize daily life in a South Asian megacity. 

Film screening will be followed by a Q&A with Professor Gaura Narayan.

Dinner is provided by Mumbai Katta Restaurant of Port Chester.

NEVER ALONE tells the gripping story of Jewish refugees seeking safety in Finland during WWII. 

Why did renowned Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski steal tens of thousands of archival documents from France—and why did libraries in the U.S. and Israel accept them? In this gripping talk based on her award-winning book The Archive Thief, Prof. Lisa Leff uncovers the complex story of a scholar whose illicit actions helped preserve a vital Jewish past. Through Szajkowski’s life, Leff explores urgent questions of memory, ownership, and the legacy of Holocaust-era archives.