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.

Professor Dina Danon explores the long-overlooked history of the Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, she tells a story through the voices of beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? What happens when there is no “Jewish Question?” The talk underscore how it was new attitudes to poverty and social class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community’s encounter with the modern age.

Join us for a compelling talk with Professor Christophe Lebold as he discussed his book, Leaonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw Angels Fall. Blending literary analysis, theology, and cultural theory, Prof. Lebold explores the poetic, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of Cohen’s life and lyrics, tracing how the legendary singer-songwriter navigated faith, doubt, desire, and redemption. Lebold reveals Cohen as a modern-day mystic whose art continues to resonate across generations.

We rightly celebrate altruistic individuals who rescued Jews in the Holocaust. But for Jews to survive, it took so much more than one person’s heroism. It is only now that historians are beginning to unearth the true history of rescue – one no less miraculous but far more complicated than the tales we are used to.