Wyman Institute News & Events – October 2010

UPCOMING EVENTS:

“STUDENTS AGAINST THE HOLOCAUST: Jewish and Christian Seminary Students Who Spoke Out Against the Nazi Genocide” – the eighth national conference of the Wyman Institute.

The opening session, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, will take place at the Union Theological Seminary (Broadway & 121 St., New York City). Speakers: Prof. David S. Wyman on “American Christian Responses to the Holocaust”; Dr. Susan Subak on “The Role of the Unitarian Church in the Rescue of Jews from Europe”; and Dr. Rafael Medoff on “Building a Jewish-Christian Coalition for Rescue.”

The second session will be held at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Broadway & 122nd St., New York City) from 3:40 to 5:25 pm. Speakers: Rabbi Dr. David Golinkin on “Noah Golinkin and the 1943 JTS Student Activists”; Robert Weintraub on “American Jewish Responses to the Holocaust”; Rabbi Jonathan Lipnick on “Jerry Lipnick’s Activism, from the 1940s to the 1960s”; and Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein on “Jewish Unity and Disunity During the Holocaust.” With additional comments by Rabbi Dr. David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Admission is free for JTS, UTS, and Columbia students, faculty, and staff; $25 for all others. (Kosher box lunches will be available for an additional $10 during the hour prior to the first session.) To register, please visit www.WymanInstitute.org or call 202-434-8994.

The conference is cosponsored by Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and Targum Shlishi.

 

NEW BOOKS AND ARTICLES:

1. Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff and Advisory Committee member Rabbi Dr. David Golinkin have authored The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust, copublished by the Wyman Institute, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Targum Shlishi. Foreword by Aryeh Rubin, of Targum Shlishi; introduction by Rabbi Dr. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, chairman emeritus of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. The book, which chronicles efforts by Jewish and Christian seminary students to alert the American public about the Holocaust, will premier at the Wyman Institute’s November 10 national conference.

2. The new documentary film “Not Idly By–Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust,” by Wyman Institute Arts & Letters Council member Pierre Sauvage, won the documentary award at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. It was also screened on October 4 for the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington DC.

3. Arts & Letters Council member J. David Spurlock of Vanguard Productions coauthored, with Rafael Medoff, an article on Bela Lugosi’s involvement in protests against the Holocaust:
http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2010/09/30/opinions/edit01.txt

Spurlock appears as the voice of Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the Wyman Institute’s upcoming animated short, with Disney, on America’s response to the 1930s refugee crisis.

4. Other recent articles by Dr. Medoff appeared in the newsletter of the Institute for the Study of Genocide: http://www.instituteforthestudyofgenocide.org/newsletters/isg44/ISG44.pdf
and The Forward article: http://www.forward.com/articles/131501/

5. Foreign Bodies, the new novel by Arts & Letters Council chair Cynthia Ozick, is being published next month (November 1) by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

6. The latest book by Academic Council member Prof. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath (University of Texas) is When the Danube Ran Red (Syracuse: University Press, 2010). She also recently authored “Budapest Is Burning” in The Sewanee Review (Spring, 2010), Vol. CXVIII.

7. Arts & Letters Council member Ya’akov (“Dry Bones”) Kirschen spoke on October 21 at Yale University, as a fellow of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism.

8. Academic Council member Prof. Alan L. Berger (Florida Atlantic University) authored “Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay: The Return of the Golem,” in Studies in Jewish American Literature (November 2010); lectured on ” ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz:’ Two Texts from Hell as Templates of Sacrality” at Brigham Young University; and served as guest editor of a special issue of the Saul Bellow Journal on Bellow and the Holocaust, to which he contributed “Blinded by Ideology: Bellow and the Partisan Review Crowd,” a discussion with Greg Bellow.

9. Academic Council member Prof. Haim Genizi (Bar Ilan University) recently authored “The Attitude of the World Council of Churches toward the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” in The Protestant-Jewish Condrum: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. XXIV (Oxford University Press, 2010); and a review of Menachem Weinstein’s bookPeduyim Lezion Berinah (Activities of the Mizrachi Movement among the Holocaust Survivors in Germany, 1945-1949), in Yalkut Moreshet, 87 (December 2009, Hebrew).

10. Congratulations to Jack Yampolsky, longtime adviser and supporter of the Wyman Institute, on winning the 2010 New Jersey Authors’ Award for Fiction, for his first novel, A Boardwalk Story.

11 . The American Academy of Religion-Western Region and Western Jewish Studies Association recently hosted a panel discussion on Maven in Blue Jeans: Festschrift in Honor of Zev Garber (Purdue, 2009), a book edited by Academic Council member Steven L. Jacobs (University of Alabama) and honoring Academic Council member Prof. Zev Garber (L.A. Valley College). Panelists included Prof. Garber (on “Learning Together, a Dvar on Faith and Fate”) and Prof. Jacobs (who spoke on “An Overview of the Festschrift & Jewish-Christian Relations”).