November 2017
Gertrude Weil’s Fight for Suffrage: A Southern Lady and New Jewish Woman
Sylvia and Irving Margolis Lecture on the Jewish Experience in the American South Gertrude Weil (1879-1971), leader of the state’s women’s suffrage campaign, embodied North Carolina’s liberal and traditional paradoxes. Rooted in the small-town South, she fought not just to remake women’s role in politics and civil society, locally and globally, but to transform Jewish communal life. Beyond her Zionism and Jewish activism, Weil rooted in Judaism her struggle as a progressive for labor reform, social justice, and black…
Find out more »March 2018
On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited
Community lecture with Ella Shohat of New York University. This lecture will offer a genealogical reading of the gradual splitting of the once-linked Semitic figure into “Arab” and “Jew” and its ramifications for contemporary discourses about Jews and Muslims. Examining the shifting Orientalist imaginary in the wake of the Enlightenment and colonialism, the lecture traces contemporary assumptions about a longstanding Arab / Jewish divide — and the ambiguous position of the Arab-Jew within it — back to crucial shifts…
Find out more »October 2018
Jewish American Soldiers: Stories from WWII
The Center is pleased to co-sponsor this event, which is hosted by the UNC Friday Center. Film screening: Jewish American Soldiers: Stories from WWII Join us for a screening of this important documentary film, followed by a discussion with film director, Glenn Fishkin, and producer, Mason Sklut. Jewish American Soldiers: Stories from WWII recounts the stories of Jewish WWII veterans, who share their personal narrative. Of the twelve veterans interviewed, nine are from North Carolina and several are Holocaust…
Find out more »Jonathan Weisman: Antisemitism and the Jewish experience in the South
Community lecture with Jonathan Weisman, The New York Times. The Sylvia and Irving Margolis Lectureship on the Jewish Experience in the American South Antisemitism and the Jewish experience in the South Please join us for a conversation between author Jonathan Weisman and Ryan Thornburg, UNC School of Media and Journalism, focused on Weisman book, (((Semitism))). The discussion will be followed by a book signing and reception. October 29, 7pm, UNC Friday Center. Free and open to the public,…
Find out more »November 2019
The Navel of the Dream: Freud and/in Yiddish
UNC: Eli N. Evans Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies Community lecture with Naomi Seidman of University of Toronto. Co-hosted with: "The Navel of the Dream: Freud and/in Yiddish" This lecture explores the role of Yiddish in Freud’s writings and in the reception and translation of psychoanalysis. Was Yiddish, as the French psychoanalyst Max Kohn suggests, the "unconscious" of Freud's German works? Were Yiddish translations a minor episode in the dispersion of psychoanalysis, or do they have a special place…
Find out more »