Jewish Restitution and Cultural Genocide
Professor Leora Bilsky joined us on March 15 for our third BUJS Forum of spring semester to give a lecture on the challenges in international law when facing restitution for Jewish communities in cases of cultural genocide. Bilsky is the William and Patricia Kleh Visiting Professor in International Law as supported by a grant from […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #3
This week marks the first anniversary of Professor Elie Wiesel’s death on July 2, 2016 (26 Sivan 5776). Thus far, our retrospective has taken a chronological approach to the works of Professor Wiesel, beginning with the autobiographical Night and moving on to his first novel, Dawn. This week, as we reflect on the richness of his […]
Maccabees Project Spring 2017
Ancient texts and archaeological remains rarely provide a neat and tidy picture for historians to analyze. Sometimes the texts reference events not attested in the archaeological record, and other times material evidence seems to contradict what is described in ancient narratives. This dilemma came into sharp focus during the Maccabees Project’s Spring Dialogue Series on […]
Maccabees Project Fall 2016
On December 1st and 2nd, Boston College hosted the Maccabees Project Fall 2016 Dialogue Series featuring scholars Dr. John Collins of Yale University and Dr. Paul Kosmin of Harvard University. This semester’s theme, “Imperial Time vs. Jewish Time in the Period of the Maccabees,” explored how the Seleucid Empire projected its authority through its dating […]
Jewish Poets/Jewish Prayers: Women Changing the Siddur
Siddurim, Jewish prayer books, are written mainly in Hebrew and contain a fixed liturgy that dates back to medieval and ancient times. On January 30, 2017, in our first BUJS Forum of the spring semester, Dr. Kathryn Hellerstein of the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that Jewish women have contributed to the cultural, religious, and literary […]
Theatre as a Form of Resistance to Oppression and Genocide
How can theatre be used as a tool of resistance against oppression and genocide? On March 29, the Elie Wiesel Center welcomed Joshua Sobol to the Metcalf Trustee Center to help us find an answer to this question. Sobol, an Israeli playwright in residence at Israeli Stage, spoke to an audience filled with students, faculty, […]
Leon and Alice F. Newton Family Lecture in Jewish Studies 2017
The Elie Wiesel Center held the 2017 Leon and Alice F. Newton Lecture in Jewish Studies at the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House on April 3. Dr. Ruth Calderon gave this year’s lecture on “The Need for Religious Pluralism in Israel” to an audience filled with faculty, staff, students, and community members. The evening began […]
Holocaust and Genocide Studies Minor Launch
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt (Religion, Emory University) joined us on October 19 for a two-part event to celebrate the launch of Boston University’s new minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The afternoon began with a screening of the film Denial (2016) at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Based on Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in […]
Converting Spain: Muslim Converts and the Contemporary Renewal of the Moorish Mediterranean
On September 15, the new Modern Mediterranean Societies Seminar Series opened with Dr. Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (Anthropology, University of Nevada) presenting at the first BUJS Forum of the fall semester. She led an engaging discussion on her paper “Converting Spain: Muslim Converts and the Contemporary Renewal of the Moorish Mediterranean” in which she examines approaches to […]
Conversion, Citizenship, and the Pragmatics of Jewish Inclusion in Contemporary Spain
What does it mean to return to a people, place, or time? In the third lecture of the Modern Mediterranean Societies Series on November 14, Charles McDonald (Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology and History, The New School for Social Research) took up this question in relation to Spain’s recent citizenship legislation and the return of Sephardic […]