Uncategorized

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 […]

Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #2

Dawn, published in 1961, is Elie Wiesel’s second book. The work explores an ethical question he imagines that he might have faced under different circumstances. For this purpose, he creates a protagonist named Elisha, a young Holocaust survivor who goes to the British Mandate of Palestine in order to fight for “the Movement,” which is […]

Elie Wiesel: A Retrospective, Week #1

We begin our retrospective with Night, Elie Wiesel’s first and most widely read work. This harrowing account of his experience as a fifteen-year-old in the Nazi death camps became a foundational work of Holocaust literature. It was first written in Yiddish (in a longer form as Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, or and the world […]