Daniel Mendelsohn
Desire and the Riddle of Identity
November 1 2004, 7:30 PM
Washington DCJCC
Jew, homosexual, classics scholar, devotee of the American South—Daniel Mendelsohn ponders the difficulties and occasional amusements of being a writer with many identities. Mendelsohn is the author of
The Elusive Embrace, an unconventional memoir that combines autobiography and cultural criticism to describe his life in two places: his gay neighborhood in Manhattan and the suburban New Jersey town where he acts as a role model for the son of a close friend. He is currently working on a book about his efforts to tell the story of a relative killed in the Holocaust.
Dara Horn
Sibling Revivalry: The Singers of Warsaw
December 14 2004, 7:30 PM
Washington DCJCC
On the occasion of the Isaac Bashevis Singer Centennial, novelist and scholar Dara Horn talks about Singer's relationships with his older sister and brother, the Yiddish writers Esther Kreitman and Isaac Joshua Singer. She explores their childhood together in Warsaw, how they both supported and provoked one another's literary ambitions, and how their story challenges the romantic notion of the writer as solitary genius. Horn's first novel,
In the Image, received a 2003 Jewish Book Award.
David Margolick
Strange Fruit: The Voice of Protest
January 6 2005, 7:30 PM
Washington DCJCC
In 1939, Billie Holiday sang these words for the first time: "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 the musical and political legacy of "Strange Fruit." He also examines the lives of Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the Jewish schoolteacher who wrote the song and later became famous for adopting the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. A contributing editor for
Vanity Fair, Margolick is the author of
Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song.
Jeffrey Shandler
Aliens in the Wasteland: The Holocaust and Sci-Fi Television
February 17 2005, 7:30 PM
Washington DCJCC
Jeffrey Shandler explores the surprising ways classic science fiction shows helped shape an American understanding of the Holocaust. With examples from
The Twilight Zone and the original
Star Trek, he examines how otherwordly retellings of the Holocaust facilitated an American conceptualization of the Holocaust as a morally galvanizing event of universal significance. Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers and the author of
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust and
Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting.
Franklin Foer
Away Game: Soccer and the Jews
March 17 2005, 7:30 PM
Northern Virginia JCC
When an eight-year-old Franklin Foer discovered a tattered copy of
Great Jewish Sports Legends, what captured his imagination was not Hank Greenberg or Sid Luckman but Hakoah of Vienna, the Jewish soccer club that won the 1925 Austrian championship. Author of
How Soccer Explains the World, Foer talks about the history of Jews and soccer, from the club teams of the 1920s to the ravages of the Nazis to contemporary teams like Ajax of Amsterdam that have consciously adopted a Jewish identity. Foer is a senior editor at
The New Republic, where he writes about politics and media.
Jacqueline Osherow
Yiddish Poems in America
April 7 2005, 7:30 PM
Washington DCJCC
Jacqueline Osherow's most recent collection,
Dead Men's Praise, opens with the poem
Sc'vil Schreiben a Poem auf Yiddish ("I want to write a poem in Yiddish"). Osherow talks about the influence of Yiddish poets like Jacob Glatstein, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, and Kadya Molodovsky on her own work and how our notions of American literature would be enriched by including works written in languages other than English. Osherow has published four collections of poems, including
Conversations with Survivors. Her new collection,
The Hoopoe's Clown, will be published in 2005.