Archive of Past Events
2019
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Wednesday, December 11, 2019 – Friday, December 20, 2019 Through Our Eyes
A photography project made by the refugee children forced into the Greek hot spot of SamosCampus Center, Lobby Opening on Wednesday, December 11, from 6pm to 7pm. |
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Monday, November 11, 2019 Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel
Lana TatourColumbia University, Center for Palestine Studies Olin Humanities, Room 202 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 In this talk, Lana Tatour of Columbia University will trace the making of the Israeli citizenship regime, focusing on the period between 1948 and 1952. During these formative years, the 1950 Law of Return, which governs Jewish entitlement to citizenship, and the 1952 Citizenship Law, which governs the status of ’48 Palestinians, were enacted. Situating the Israeli case within the broader history of citizenship-making in Anglophone settler colonial sites and drawing on analogies with Australia, the United States, and Canada, she is interested in what this formative period, in which the constitutional cornerstones of Israel’s citizenship regime came into being, can tell us about Palestinian citizenship in Israel and about the institution of citizenship in settler-colonial contexts more broadly. Drawing on original archival material, this talk argues that in Israel, as in other settler polities, citizenship has figured as an institution of domination, functioning as a mechanism of elimination, a site of subjectivation, and an instrument of race making. Racial subjects, space, and citizenship were constituted in relation to each other in intimate ways. Citizenship transformed space from Arab/Palestinian to Jewish, rendered settlers indigenous, and produced Palestinian natives as alien. Israel’s citizenship regime was predicated on the racial demarcation between Palestinians, whose citizenship was governed by the logic of naturalization, and Jewish settlers, viewed as natural and authentic subjects of citizenship. Presented in association with Live Arts Bard’s festival about borders, Where No Wall Remains. Lana Tatour is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights. Tatour completed her Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in 2017. Her doctoral research was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial runner-up prize for best Ph.D. dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic in the Social Sciences or Humanities by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (2018). She was previously a fellow at the University of New South Wales(UNSW) Faculty of Law, UNSW School of Social Sciences, the Australian Human Rights Centre, and the Palestinian American Research Center. |
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Thursday, November 7, 2019 Israel’s Occupation at 50: Territory and Demography in the West Bank
Yinon Cohen, Columbia UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 102 4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 In this talk, Yinon Cohen demonstrates that the strategies Israel has deployed to dispossess Palestinian land and settle Jews in the West Bank have been uncannily similar to those used in Israel proper. After briefly analyzing the Judaization of space from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, he focuses on territorial and demographic processes in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) since 1967. He Shows how the settler population has flourished demographically and socioeconomically, thereby enhancing Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank. Yinon Cohen is Yosef H. Yerushalmi Professor of Israeli and Jewish Studies in the department of sociology at Columbia University. Before moving to Columbia in 2007, he was a professor of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on labor markets, social demography, ethnic inequality, and immigration. His most recent publications are on Israel’s territorial and demographic politics (Public Culture, 2018), Ashkenazi-Mizrahi education gap among third-generation Israelis (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2018), and rising inequality in fringe benefits in the US (Sociological Science 2018). |
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Monday, October 28, 2019 Learning Politics with Art: Lessons from Curation under Occupation
Kirsten Scheid, American University of Beirut / Clark Art InstituteOlin Humanities, Room 202 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Studying imagination shifts attention to the emergent and yet-possible. In 2018, I cocurated an exhibition that invited Jerusalem audiences to reimagine the city’s “possible” existence by building on ludic spatial-temporal moves that have distilled in contemporary Palestinian art. This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a possible Jerusalem, one not confined to space-time coordinates we use to understand realpolitik, offer the exhibition’s participants and audiences. Associate professor of anthropology at the American University of Beirut, Kirsten Scheid studies imagination technologies, artistic materialities, and social change specifically through cases of modern and contemporary Arab art. Her essays appear in Anthropology Now, ARTMargins, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Museum Anthropology and can be accessed at https://aub-lb.academia.edu/KirstenScheid. She has cocurated The Jerusalem Show (Jerusalem, 2018) and The Arab Nude (Beirut, 2016), exhibited at the New Museum (2011), and consulted for the Tate Modern (2014) and MoMA (2016–18). The 2019–20 Clark/Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Scheid is currently completing an historically informed ethnography of aesthetic encounters that comprise contemporary Palestine and point to new political imaginings. This event is cosponsored by the Africana Studies Program, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Art History and Visual Culture Program, and the Human Rights Project. |
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Thursday, October 3, 2019 The Cultural Politics of Translation and the Nahda in Egypt
Samah Selim, Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Rutgers University Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This talk explores the cultural geography of Cairo in the first decade of the 20th century in order to unpack and critique nahdawi representations of modernity as simulacrum. I offer a brief reading of Muhammad Al-Muwaylihi’s iconic text Hadith ʿIsa Ibn Hisham that shows how the nahda discourse on cultural authenticity masked a deep social conservatism that banished the “errant trajectories” of everyday translation practices emerging in and through the modern. Against this discourse, the talk will conclude with a discussion of adaptation as the motor of social change and cultural creativity. Samah Selim teaches at Rutgers University. She is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature. Her most recent book, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. She is currently working on a translation of Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s final novel Sultana (1987) with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This event is co-sponsored by the Division of Languages and Literatures, Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, and Human Rights Project. |
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Monday, May 20, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, May 15, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, May 13, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, May 8, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Tuesday, May 7, 2019 Getting the Vote: Suffrage and the Women’s Movement in Post-Independence Lebanon, a talk by Ziad Abu-Rish
Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4This presentation narrates and analyzes the struggle for women’s suffrage in Lebanon between political independence in 1943 and the first parliamentary elections in which women participated in 1953. In doing so, it takes into account the views expressed and strategies pursued by different women’s organizations. Of particular interest is the 1950 formation of the Executive Committee of Women’s Organizations in Lebanon, which served as the key node around which Lebanese women sought to secure their suffrage rights, including issuing statements, organizing demonstrations, and building alliances with politicians, political parties, and select constituencies. A key concern of the analysis presented is the changes and continuities between the 1943–53 mobilizations for women’s suffrage and women’s activism in the colonial period. It therefore accounts for the contexts and contingencies that revived mobilizations for women’s suffrage in 1943 (after years of dormancy) and secured it in 1953. Rather than an inevitable consequence of independence, women’s suffrage emerges as the product of women’s agency and strategic decision-making within a complex set of contexts and contingencies involving postcolonial state building, intra-elite rivalries, and shifting norms of development, governance, and citizenship. |
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Monday, May 6, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 29, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 29, 2019 "Modernism in Translation: Poetry and Politics in Beirut's Belle Époque"
Robyn Creswell (Yale University)Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What was the fate of literary modernism beyond Europe? Robyn Creswell's talk will explore the work of the modernist poetry movement in Beirut during the decades following WWII. By translating the techniques and ideology of modernism into Arabic, the intellectuals of Shi'r magazine radically altered the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. This lecture will focus on the Arab modernists' exchanges with French poets, American spies, and the classical past. |
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Wednesday, April 24, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 22, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Thursday, April 18, 2019 Fake News! The View from Israel’s Military Occupation
Rebecca L. SteinDuke University Department of Anthropology Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This paper studies the impact of new photographic technologies and image-sharing platforms on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Taking its cue from Trumpian political discourse, I focus on the right-wing Jewish Israeli reckoning with the growing visual archive of Palestinian injury at Israeli state or settler hands – a reckoning that occurs through the discourse of “fake news,” or the charge that such images are fraudulent or manipulated in some regard to produce the damning portrait of Israel. I will trace the long colonial history of repudiation in the Israeli context, its modification in the digital age, and consider the ways it has become an increasingly standard right-wing response to images of state violence believed to damage Israel’s global standing. I will argue that the fraudulence charge is marshalled as a solution to the viral visibility of Israeli state violence -- a charge that works to bring these damning images back in line with dominant Israeli ideology by shifting the narrative from Palestinian injury to Israeli victimhood. The story of the “fake” image of Palestinian injury endeavors to strip the visual field of its Israeli perpetrators and Palestinian victims, thereby exonerating the state. Or such is the fantasy. |
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Wednesday, April 17, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 15, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 15, 2019 Text Unbound: (Re-)Imagining the Talmud
Multiple Locations, See Poster 11:45 am – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Judaism is often thought of as a religion of the book, and the most influential book in the Jewish canon is the Talmud—a famously complex, genre-defying text that has been at the center of Jewish life and learning since the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the Talmud is most often encountered in book form, typically in large tomes whose pages are imprinted with an iconic, typeset design. And yet the Talmud is considered to be the culmination of Judaism’s Oral Torah, and it was produced and originally transmitted orally by rabbis living in late antique Iraq. This workshop will gather scholars, artists, a printer, a digitalist, and a performer to consider the many manifestations of this classical work and related Jewish textualities, from late antique graffiti and lament; to contemporary fiction, illustration, and printing; to the virtual universes of digitization and the internet, and experimental voice art. These explorations bear relevance not only for Jewish Studies, but also for broader matters such as the study of writing and orality, and the future of the book in the digital age. Participants Zachary Braiterman is professor of religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. Jessica Tamar Deutsch is a New York based artist. In 2017, she published The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics. Victoria Hanna is a Jerusalem based composer, creator, performer, researcher, and teacher of voice and language. Galit Hasan-Rokem is a poet, translator, and Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Professor of Hebrew Literature (emerita) at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Scott-Martin Kosofsky is an award-winning printer, book designer, and typography expert based in Rhinebeck. Ruby Namdar is an Israeli novelist based in New York City. His novel The Ruined House (Harper, 2018) won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious prize in Hebrew literature. Jonathan Rosen is a writer and essayist, and wrote The Talmud and the Internet (Picador, 2000). He is the editorial director of Nextbook Press. Karen B. Stern is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Shai Secunda holds the Jacob Neusner chair in Jewish Studies at Bard College. Sara Tillinger Wolkenfeld is the director of education at Sefaria.org. |
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Wednesday, April 10, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 8, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, April 3, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, April 1, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, March 27, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, March 25, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, March 20, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, March 18, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, March 13, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Monday, March 11, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 |
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Wednesday, March 6, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, March 4, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, February 27, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, February 25, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, February 20, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, February 18, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, February 13, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, February 11, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, February 4, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Wednesday, January 30, 2019 Arabic Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline Commons 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |
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Monday, January 28, 2019 Hebrew Table
Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.Kline, President's Room 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 |