Rebecca Goldstein
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
October 25 2006, 6:30 PM
The Newberry Library
60 W. Walton Street, Chicago
On July 27, 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community declared Baruch Spinoza excommunicated, and, at the age of 23, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He denied the immortality of the soul and challenged the accepted belief that the Torah was literally given by God. In her new book,
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein rediscovers the flesh-and-blood man beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality and shows how his Sephardic heritage shaped his work. Goldstein is the author of
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and five novels, including The
Mind-Body Problem.
Listen to Rebecca Goldstein talk about Spinoza, the famous heretic.
Esther Schor
Emma Lazarus: American Original
October 30 2006, 7:00 PM
Woman’s Club of Evanston
1702 Chicago Avenue, Evanston
In 1903, sixteen years after Emma Lazarus's death, a plaque with her poem "The New Colossus" was mounted onto the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The addition transformed a monument to the American Revolution into a symbol of hope for millions of immigrants and made Emma Lazarus famous. But as Esther Schor shows in her new biography,
Emma Lazarus, this was only a surprising epilogue to a life of remarkable achievements. Drawing on recently discovered letters, Schor traces Lazarus's childhood among New York's Sephardic elite, her teenage friendship with Emerson, and her work on behalf of victims of Russian pogroms. Esther Schor is a poet and professor of English at Princeton.
Listen to visitors at the Statue of Liberty read Emma Lazarus' historic poem "The New Colossus".
David Margolick
Strange Fruit: The Voice of Protest
December 7 2006, 6:30 PM
Alliance Française de Chicago
In 1939, Billie Holiday took the stage at Café Society, a New York nightclub, and sang these words: "Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." David Margolick talks about how "Strange Fruit" became an anthem for the civil rights movement. He also examines the lives of Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the Jewish schoolteacher who wrote the song. Margolick is the author of
Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song and
Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and A World on the Brink.
Isabel Vincent: White Slaves: The Trafficking of Jewish Women
January 24 2007, 7:00 PM
Woman’s Club of Evanston
1702 Chicago Avenue, Evanston
From the 1860s to 1939, thousands of poor young women from Eastern Europe were sold into prostitution by a notorious Jewish gang called the Zwi Migdal. The "white slaver" even became a figure of literature in works like I.B. Singer's Scum and Sholem Aleichem's "The Man from Buenos Aires." In her book
Bodies and Souls, Isabel Vincent describes how Jewish women were lured to cities like New York, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. She also shows how these women, shunned by the Jewish community, banded together to form their own cultural institutions. Vincent's other books include
Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold,and the Pursuit of Justice.
In partnership with the NCJW, Chicago North-Shore section.
Jonathan Wilson
Chagall Revealed
March 20 2007, 7:00 PM
Woman’s Club of Evanston
1702 Chicago Avenue, Evanston
In his new book,
Marc Chagall, Jonathan Wilson traces the painter's life from his impoverished youth in Belarus to the art schools of St. Petersburg to galleries of Paris and New York. Detailing Chagall's use of Yiddish idioms, his obsession with Jesus, and his bold experiments with color and form, Wilson challeges the conventional notion of Chagall's work as sugary or nostalgic. He also shows how Chagall's work represented a last flowering of Yiddish culture in Europe. Wilson is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. His books include
A Palestine Affair and An
Ambulance Is on the Way.