Maya Arad, Alona Kimhi, & Nava Semel
New Israeli Writing
In partnership with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
November 16 2005, 7:00 PM
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall, UW
University of Washington, 15th Avenue NE and NE 41st Street
Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and David Grossman are well known to American readers, but their work represents only a narrow slice of Israeli writing. Maya Arad, Alona Kimhi, and Nava Semel talk about the writers who are reshaping Israeli literature and why so few books—especially by women writers—make it onto American bookshelves. Arad is a scholar of Semitic linguistics and an award-winning Hebrew author. Born in Ukraine, in 1966, Kimhi settled in Israel in 1972; her most recent book in English is the novel
Weeping Susannah. Semel is a journalist, novelist, playwright, and young adult author; she has published two books in the United States,
Becoming Gershona and
Flying Lessons.
Daphne Merkin
Brand-New Jews
December 1 2005, 7:00 PM
Henry Art Gallery
University of Washington, 15th Avenue NE & NE 41st Street, Seattle
The Daphne Merkin event has been postponed and will be rescheduled for 2006
Emblazoning their tops and bottoms with "Jewcy," dancing to remixed klezmer, reading Jewish magazines that resemble
Vibe more than
Commentary or the
Forward, many young Jews are seeking to re-brand their identity as hip and sexy. Is this an expression of a new confidence or of a deep anxiety? Can Judaism, with 613 commandments, be free and easy and still be Judaism? Is there substance behind the new style? Is there style? Daphne Merkin braves this new cultural terrain. Merkin writes for
The New Yorker and is the author of the essay collection
Dreaming of Hitler and the novel
Enchantment.
Sander Gilman
Extreme Makeover: Jews And The Invention Of Cosmetic Surgery
January 19 2006, 7:00 PM
Henry Art Gallery
What does the nose job have to do with the Dreyfus Affair or Kant's theories of beauty? Sander Gilman considers philosophical and historical questions rarely broached by cosmetic surgeons or their patients. He looks at how new notions of race, beauty, and happiness arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how these turned "the Jewish nose" into an obsession for Jews and non-Jews alike. How are ideals of beauty informed by notions of race and ethnicity? How does external appearance relate to emotional well-being? And how has plastic surgery affected debates about Jewish identity? Sander Gilman's many books include
The Jew's Body, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, and
Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery.
Douglas Century with David Shields
Barney Ross: Not Without A Fight
February 16 2006, 7:00 PM
Henry Art Gallery
"The bitterness and hatred inside me made me a much tougher fighter," said legendary boxer Barney Ross. At 13, Ross saw his father murdered, his mother suffer a nervous breakdown, and his three younger siblings sent to an orphanage. Determined to make enough money to reunite the family, he became a petty thief, a gambler, a messenger boy for Al Capone, and a professional boxer. In his new book, Douglas Century tells how Ross went from being the "Jew Kid" to winning the lightweight, junior welterweight, and welterweight titles. He also describes his heroic actions at Guadalcanal, his addiction to morphine, and his covert missions to run guns to Palestine. Century is the author of
Street Kingdom and
Hip Hop Babylon. He will be joined by David Shields, professor of English at the University of Washington, and the author of numerous books, including
Baseball Is Just Baseball,
Black Planet, Heroes, and
Remote.
Jeremy Dauber
Write, Sammy, Write: the Hollywood Novel
March 30 2006, 7:00 PM
Henry Art Gallery
Whether or not the Jews invented Hollywood, they certainly spent a lot of time writing about it; from Budd Schulberg to Bruce Wagner, Nathanael West to Daniel Fuchs, Jewish writers have been instrumental in shaping our ideas of Hollywood, the place and the industry, with its hustlers and loners, the idolized and the forgotten. Jeremy Dauber talks about the place of Hollywood in Jewish fiction, and the place of Jews in the Hollywood imagination. Dauber is the Atran Assistant Professor of Yiddish at Columbia University. He also writes about television and movies for the
Christian Science Monitor online, for which he received an award in 2003 from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.