Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #6
Elie Wiesel’s A Beggar in Jerusalem, originally published in 1968 as Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, explores the experiences of David, a Holocaust survivor, who visits Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. In A Beggar in Jerusalem, Wiesel weaves together a complicated understanding between the past and present as well as the spiritual and physical. He reveals these […]
Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles
What role did maps that depict the Holy Land and other biblical locations play in constructing spaces construed as “Jewish”? This is the question that drove our second BUJS forum of spring semester on February 13. Our speaker, Professor Jeffrey Shoulson (University of Connecticut), described his exploration of early maps as he tried to find […]
How Judaism Became an American Religion
Our last BUJS Forum of the year took place on April 27 in the Elie Wiesel Center library. Our speaker, Dr. Rachel Gordan, joined us to speak about how Judaism rose to prominence as a major American religion in the 1950s and 1960s, even becoming known as “America’s third faith.” The forum was titled after […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #5
Our text this week is Wiesel’s 1964 The Gates of the Forest, first published in French and translated to the English in 1966. This novel, set at the beginning of World War II, follows the struggle of a seventeen-year-old Hungarian Jew, Gregor, who is hiding from both Nazi and Hungarian forces in a cave in […]
Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #4
In 1962, Elie Wiesel published the final part of his Night trilogy, the novel DAY. The book first appeared in French as Le jour and in English as The Accident. Like Dawn, Day addresses the struggle of the Holocaust survivor to dwell in the world of the living while feeling a ceaseless pull toward the world of […]
Beyond Sartre and Adorno: Jean Améry’s Radical Questioning of Jewish Identity and Philosophy in the Wake of the Shoah
What the Shoah has left philosophy with is a failed transcendence. The writings of philosopher Jean Améry in response to his experiences of the Holocaust do not focus on ideology, nor do they focus on the incomprehensible theological meaning behind this destruction. Rather, they focus intensely on the issue of identity. In our second BUJS […]
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 […]