Past Events: 2018-2019

Film Screening: "The Dybbuk"

**Film Screening: The Dybbuk (1937)**

Sunday, September 23, 2018
6:00 PM | Atlas 100, CU Boulder Campus

Part of CU's Leonard Bernstein at 100 Festival.
This event was free and open to the public.

The College of Music and campus partners the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts hosted a screening of the 1937 film "The Dybbuk." The film inspired Leonard Bernstein's musical compositions for the 1974 ballet of the same title.

The screening was preceded by short talks about Bernstein and the film by Professor of Piano Andrew Cooperstock, Associate Professor of Music Theory Yonatan Malin, Director of the Program in Jewish Studies Nan Goodman, and Director of the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, as well as director of ACE: Arts, Culture and Education at the Boulder Jewish Community Center.

This film screening was part of CU's Leonard Bernstein at 100 Festival, celebrating the 100th birthday of Leonard Bernstein, composer, conductor, educator, musician, cultural ambassador, and humanitarian. The festival was hosted by CU's College of Music. Learn more and find the full event line up here.

Peak to Peak Lecture in Carbondale

Refugees: Sanctuary, Hospitality and Solidarity

A CU Boulder Peak to Peak Lecture with Professor Beverly Weber in Carbondale, CO

Thursday, October 4, 2018
6:00 PM | Carbondale Branch Library Community Room
320 Sopris Avenue, Carbondale, CO 81623

This event was free and open to the public.

In the last few years, Germany and the United States have faced dramatically different situations surrounding refugee migration: while the US issued a ban that interrupted refugee migration, Germany welcomed (not without great controversy) well over a million refugees. Both countries have increased deportation of long-time residents at the same time. In her talk, Professor Beverly Weber discussed these developments and the rise of the notions of sanctuary in the US and hospitality in Germany. She considered how the history of refugees during and immediately after the Holocaust raise important questions for ethical action and solidarity today.

Beverly Weberis Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies (Program in Jewish Studies) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Violence and Gender in the “New” Europe: Islam in German Culture (Palgrave, 2013) which examines the intersections of race and gender in public discussions of Islam, as well as Muslim artistic responses to those discussions. She has published widely on race, gender, immigration and refugee migration in contemporary Germany; as well as on contemporary German literature.

This event was brought to you by and the in partnership with the CU Boulder Program in Jewish Studies and the . It was part of the CU Boulder Peak to Peak Lecture Series, which brings CU Boulder humanities scholars to communities around Colorado to share innovative perspectives of historical figures, events, and enduring questions.

Community Talks Lecture with Rukhl Schaechter

How the Forverts is Being
Transformed in the Digital Era

Community Talks lecture with Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward

Thursday, October 11, 2018
7:00 PM | Chancellor's Silver & Gold Room, University Club, CU Boulder campus

This event was free and open to the public.

Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward (Forverts), explored how the publication, founded in 1897 as a newspaper for Jewish immigrants, has adapted to the changing demographic of its readership. Today, there is a growing interest in the Yiddish language and culture, not only in the Diaspora, but also in Israel.

In addition, many Hasidim, the largest Yiddish-speaking community today, read the Forverts on their smartphones since it brings them material they don't get in their own newspapers. Through its website and social media, the Forverts serves all these groups as an international clearinghouse for the latest Yiddish news, analyses cooking shows, and music videos.

Schaechter's public lecture was part of the Program in Jewish Studies Community Talks Series, Yiddishkvell: An Appreciation of All Things Yiddish.

Photo: Today's Forverts readers viewing it on a tablet, by Yehuda Blum.

The Powerful Role Women Played in the Yiddish-Speaking Shtetl

Colloquium with Rukhl Schaechter

Thursday, October 11, 2018
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Location and pre-ciruclated reading distributed upon RSVP

Open to CU Students, Faculty, and Friends of Community Talks

In this colloquium, Rukhl Schaechter discussed how women in Ashkenazi Jewish societies played a subordinate role to their husbands in the public sphere, but had a good deal of power within the home. A child's religion followed the religion of the mother; last names often followed the mother's name; women were the dominant voice in the home and were often the major breadwinners. Schaechter highlighted Yiddish phrases and proverbs illustrating women's power in these societies.

Rukhl Schaechter, editor of the Yiddish Forward (Forverts), is the first woman to hold that position since its founding in 1897 and the first editor of the Forverts to be born in the United States. Since taking the helm, Schaechter and her staff have increased the Yiddish Forward’s profile. With active Facebook and YouTube channels, international podcasts, regularly translated articles, and subtitled videos, the newspaper has found broad audiences.

As editor, Schaechter has brought in a number of new writers, including women from secular and Hasidic backgrounds to mirror the eclectic landscape of Yiddish writing today. The Yiddish Forward has become a clearinghouse for the latest developments in the Yiddish world with almost daily news reports related to Yiddish language and culture. Before Schaechter became a journalist, she was a prize-winning Yiddish short story writer as well as a songwriter.

Rukhl Schaechter's visit was hosted by the Program in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by CU’s , Department of Journalism, Department of Media Studies, Center for Media, Religion and Culture, and ATLAS Institute. Schaechter's visit was also part of the Community Talks Series, made possible in part by a grant from Rose Community Foundation. Community Talks features nationally and internationally renowned scholars, authors, artists, and performers for themed public events with the goal of enriching community learning and expanding access to academic programming on Jewish culture and history.

2018 Jim & Diane Shneer Fellow

From the Frankfurt Lehrhaus to Havurat Shalom: Fellowship, Renewal, Counterculture

Faculty and Student Colloquium with Sam Shonkoff
2018 Jim & Diane Shneer Fellow in Post-Holocaust American Judaism

Thursday, October 25, 2018

The Program in Jewish Studies and the University Libraries' Special Collections, Archives, and Preservations annually support a visiting scholar whose research interests take advantage of the unique resources in the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections through the Jim and Diane Shneer Fellowship in Post-Holocaust American Judaism.

The 2018 Shneer Fellow was Professor Sam Shonkoff, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Oberlin College. Professor Shonkoff was in residence at CU Boulder October 22 - 25, 2018 conducting research in the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections.

Professor Shonkoff presented a faculty and student colloquium on Thursday, October 25 on his archival work with the Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi Papers, held at CU Boulder. His research in the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections supports his larger project on the formative years of Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts and the Jewish counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s more broadly. Schachter-Shalomi was a founding member and teacher of Havurat Shalom in 1968, and he had an especially profound impact on that community's own very influential approaches to prayer and Hasidic sources.

is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Oberlin College. He holds a PhD in History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School, an MA in Religion and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto, and a BA in Religious Studies from Brown University. Shonkoff's edited volume Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy was published this year, and his writings have also appeared recently in the Journal of Religion, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, and Brill’s Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers.

Learn more about the Jim and Diane Shneer Fellowship in Post-Holocaust American Judaism.

91��Ƭ�� the Jim and Diane Shneer Endowed Fellowship Fund

Sam Shonkoff's visit was made possible by the Jim and Diane Shneer Endowed Fellowship Fund, which supports the initiative to make the University of Colorado Boulder a center for the study of American Judaism after the Holocaust. To accomplish that goal, the Fund supports the active effort of building archival resources for research, hosting scholars conducting that research, and supporting our students to learn the skills of information management, archiving, and digital literacy.

91��Ƭ�� the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections

The Program in Jewish Studies and the University of Colorado Libraries' Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation Department annually support a visiting scholar whose research interests take advantage of the unique resources in the . The Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections provide access to materials examining Judaism and the Jewish experience as a religious re-engagement, social movement, and philosophy of spiritual transformation in America from the late 1940s to the present.

Explore the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections.

Concert Featuring Songs in Yiddish

Concert with
Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird

Thursday, November 8, 2018
7:00 PM | Old Main Theater, CU Boulder Campus

Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird band photo

is a German-based klezmer band founded by Kahn in 2005. Described as “an absolute must for lovers of unusual, intelligent, challenging, exciting folk music and a blast at every instant,” the band performed a free concert featuring songs in Yiddish in November 2018 on the CU Boulder campus, as part of the Program in Jewish Studies Community Talks Series, Yiddishkvell: An Appreciation of All Things Yiddish.

A Detroit area native, Daniel Kahn attended the University of Michigan where he studied acting, directing, playwriting and poetry. After finishing his studies he lived, played music, recorded, acted, directed plays and composed theater music in New Orleans, Detroit, New York and Ann Arbor. He has received awards for his playwriting, poetry, acting, and composing.

Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird's visit was hosted by the Program in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by CU’s College of Music, Department of Musicology, , and the American Music Research Center. It was part of the Community Talks Series, made possible in part by a grant from Rose Community Foundation. Community Talks features nationally and internationally renowned scholars, authors, artists, and performers for themed public events with the goal of enriching community learning and expanding access to academic programming on Jewish culture and history.

Photo by Esra Rotthoff.

DU's 16th Annual Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture

From Witness to Perpetrator: The Active Role of Nazi Women in the Holocaust

A conversation with Professor Wendy Lower of Claremont McKenna College &
Professor Adam Rovner of the University of Denver

Sunday, November 11, 2018
4:00 PM | Elaine Wolf Theatre, MACC at the JCC
350 S. Dahlia St, Denver, CO 80246

For ticketing and more information about this event, please visit .

“500,000 women had front-row seats to the Final Solution . . . and yet their presence, and their atrocities, have been largely ignored for the last 70 years” [LA Review of Books]. After WWII, many complicit women were excused for their roles entirely; lawyers argued, and judges agreed, that Nazi women could not be held accountable for the crimes of the men around them. In her book, Professor Wendy Lower (John K. Roth Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow and Director of Mgrublian Center for Human Rights; Claremont McKenna College) questions this historical narrative not only by uncovering historical details that have often been overlooked, but by inviting us to question the line between individuals and their societies, as well as the line between witnesses, bystanders, accomplices, and perpetrators: Aren’t Nazi women culpable for standing by as witnesses, taking lives, and serving as accomplices? Lower fills an historical gap by answering “yes” to this question. “Genocide,” Lower argues, “is also women’s business.” This event was an in-depth conversation with Professor Lower on these and other topics discussed in her book, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields.

Professor Wendy Lower's visit marked the 16th Annual Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture hosted by the at the University of Denver. This event was cosponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, , , and .

International Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture

The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: A Chapter in Spiritual Resistance to the Nazis

Public Lecture in Honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day with
Professor David E. Fishman

Thursday, January 24, 2019 | 7:00 PM
Old Main Theater | CU Boulder Campus

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Professor David E. Fishman discussed his new book, , which tells the story of ghetto inmates who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts – first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets – by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania."

A Community Mourns Its Own Demise: The Holocaust Exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Soviet Vilnius, 1945-1949

Student, Faculty, and Friends of Community Talk Colloquium with Professor David E. Fishman

Thursday, January 24, 2019 | 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Location and pre-circulated reading provided upon RSVP
Lunch will be served.

Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) was a pre-eminent center of Jewish religious and secular culture in Eastern Europe, that was dubbed "the Jerusalem of Lithuania". Of the 60,000 Jews in Vilna on the eve of the German invasion (June 1941), only 5% survived the Holocaust. Shortly after the city was liberated by the Red Army, survivors and returnees established a Jewish museum, as a monument and memorial to the city's glorious pre-War community.

This talk focused on the museum's permanent exhibit on the Holocaust in Lithuania, which was mounted in the territory of the former ghetto and curated by people whose families had been murdered by the Nazis. The exhibit was a rare instance of public Holocaust education in the Soviet Union, a country which paid scant attention to the genocide of the Jews.

David E. Fishman is a Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) where he is an authority on the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe. Fishman is also the director of Project Judaica, JTS’s academic program in Jewish Studies in the former Soviet Union, which allows students to pursue a major in Jewish history and culture at universities in Moscow and Kiev. Fishman is a native Yiddish-speaker and frequently travels to Ukraine, Lithuania, and 91��Ƭ�� to conduct research and lecture.

David Fishman's visit was hosted by the Program in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the Department of History, Program for Writing and Rhetoric, Department of English, and University Libraries. It is part of the Community Talks Series, made possible in part by a grant from Rose Community Foundation. Community Talks features nationally and internationally renowned scholars, authors, artists, and performers for themed public events with the goal of enriching community learning and expanding access to academic programming on Jewish culture and history.

Dessert Party with Jewish Studies Faculty

Jeffersonian Dessert Party with CU's Jewish Studies Faculty

Presented by the Boulder JCC and CU's Program in Jewish Studies

Thursday, February 7, 2019 | 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Levin Hall at the Boulder JCC | 6007 Oreg Ave, Boulder, CO 80303

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies and the invited community members of all backgrounds to a Jeffersonian Dessert Party, featuring desserts, cordials, coffee, and shared conversation with CU Boulder Jewish Studies faculty members.

The evening featured Jewish Studies faculty members leading discussions on a variety of topics. During registration, attendees chose which topic interests them most and were placed at that presenter’s table for discussion. Prior to the event, attendees received a discussion question from the presenter as well as a pre-circulated reading, podcast, or other media to explore and were asked to prepare some discussion questions and thoughts to share at the event.

Conversations for the Jeffersonian Dessert Party included:

Professor Hilary Kalisman - the changing connections between American Jewry and Israel
Professor Yonatan Malin - Jewish music and how it contributes to Jewish culture
Professor Elias Sacks- the idea of God
Professor Rebecca Wartell - the state of Sephardic Judaism 500 years after the expulsion of Jews from Spain

Tickets included admission to the event, desserts baked by local professional baker and cookbook author, Miche Bacher, and coffee.

This event is co-hosted by the and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies.

2019 Sondra & Howard Bender Visiting Scholar

Yiddish, English, or Maybe Both: The Evolution of an “Yidea”

Featuring poet and professor Irena Klepfisz
2019 Sondra & Howard Bender Visiting Scholar

Thursday, February 21, 2019 | 7:00 PM
University Club, Chancellor's Silver & Gold Room | 972 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80302

In her talk, Irena Klepfisz described some of the issues she faced when she began trying to incorporate Yiddish into her English poetry and prose. What seemed easy enough (just put it in! use it!) turned out to be more difficult and raised questions about appropriateness, intelligibility, and, perhaps most importantly, purpose. Klepfisz illustrated her literary process and evolution through readings of her own work and the writings of other Yiddish women writers.

The Artist Manqué: Four Yiddish Stories by Four Women Writers

Student, Faculty, and Friends of Community Talks Colloquium

Thursday, February 21, 2019 | 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Location and pre-circulated reading provided upon RSVP
Lunch will be provided

In this colloquium, Irena Klepfisz explored the short stories of four Yiddish women writers: Fradel Schtok, Yente Serdatzky, Rokhl Brokhes, and Celia Dropkin. The writers vary in background and their stories are situated on different continents and in different communities, secular and observant. Yet directly and indirectly all four stories address the aspirations and challenges Jewish women face in expressing their inner artistic longings while fulfilling the traditional social roles assigned to them.

Irena Klepfisz is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and teacher. She is serving as Jewish Studies’ 2019 Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar and will be in residence at CU Boulder February 20 - 21, 2019. She has taught at Barnard College, in the college program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a women's maximum-security prison, and elsewhere. Among her many other literary accomplishments, she was a founder and co-editor of the award-winning Conditions magazine, the Yiddish editor of the Jewish feminist Bridges, a major contributor to Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, and co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology.

The annual Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar series is generously supported by the Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholars Endowed Fund, honoring the lives of Sondra and Howard Bender.

Special thank you to the Bender Foundation and the family of Eileen and Richard Greenberg for their generous support.

Learn More about Sondra and Howard Bender

Irena Klepfisz's visit was hosted by the Program in Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of Religious Studies, and the Department of English. It is part of the Community Talks Series, made possible in part by a grant from Rose Community Foundation. Community Talks features nationally and internationally renowned scholars, authors, artists, and performers for themed public events with the goal of enriching community learning and expanding access to academic programming on Jewish culture and history.

Scholar in Residence Weekend with Professor Daniel Matt

From Kabbalah to the Big Bang
Scholar in Residence Weekend

with Kabbalah Scholar Daniel Matt

March 14-16, 2019

Congregation Har HaShem, Congregation Bonai Shalom, Scientists in Synagogues, and the University of Colorado’s Program in Jewish Studies and Department of Religious Studies welcomed Professor Daniel Matt, renowned Kabbalah scholar and translator, for a series of talks in Boulder. Professor Matt’s Scholar in Residence Weekend, “From Kabbalah to the Big Bang: Ancient Wisdom and Contemporary Spirituality,” took place March 14-16, 2019.

Daniel Matt is now teaching Zohar online. Learn more here:

Public Lecture at CU Boulder

God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Religion

University of Colorado Boulder Public Lecture

Thursday, March 14, 2019 | 7:00 PM

Benson Earth Sciences, Room 180, 2200 Colorado Avenue, Boulder, CO 80309
Free and open to the public

The theory of the Big Bang serves as the scientific creation myth of our culture. What does it have to do with God? How can it help us discover a spiritual dimension in our lives and recover a sense of wonder? In this talk, Daniel Matt explored these questions, drawing on the insights of the Kabbalah as well as contemporary cosmology. He suggested several parallels between these two schools of thought, e.g., between what physicists call “broken symmetry” and what Kabbalah calls “the breaking of the vessels,” but his purpose was not to demonstrate that medieval kabbalists knew what scientists now know about the universe. Rather, he showed how we can appreciate each approach in light of the other and deepen our understanding of both.

Full Schedule of Events

The Feminine Half of God
Friday, March 15, 2019 | 6:00 PM
, 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder 30075

Professor Matt gave a brief talk during services. Services are free and open to the public. After services, he gave a larger presentation during dinner.

One of the boldest contributions of Kabbalah is the idea that God is equally female and male. Daniel Matt briefly traced the development of Kabbalah and then focused on the concept of Shekhinah (the feminine aspect of God) from its rabbinic origins to its full flowering in the Zohar, where Shekhinah is identified with the Sabbath Bride.

The Mystical Meaning of Torah
Saturday, March 16, 2019 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
, 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder 30075

Free and open to the public.

How does the mystical approach to Torah differ from a literal approach? From a midrashic approach? How can a mystical approach enrich our lives today? Daniel Matt explored these questions with us by teaching several passages from his award-winning translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition.

The Zohar: Masterpiece of Kabbalah
Saturday, March 16, 2019 | 11:30 AM (during services) and 1:00 PM (during lunch)
, 1527 Cherryvale Road, Boulder 80303

Professor Matt gave a ��’v�� Torah during services which are free and open to the public. After services, he gave a larger presentation during the kiddush lunch.

The Zohar emerged in 13th-century Spain. How exactly did it originate and what is its significance for us today? How does this mystical masterpiece interpret and reimagine the Torah? Scholar-in-residence Daniel Matt explored these questions with participants by teaching several passages from his award-winning translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition.

Raising the Sparks: Finding God in the Material World
Saturday, March 16, 2019 | 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
, 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder 30075

Free and open to the public.

How can God be encountered in our daily life? Daniel Matt explored this question with participants by teaching passages from Kabbalah and Hasidism on the nature of God, the act of Creation, and the challenge of discovering God in the material world.

Daniel Matt is one of the world’s leading authorities on Kabbalistic texts, especially the Zohar. He taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley for twenty years. He has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published over a dozen books, including The Essential Kabbalah (translated into seven languages) and God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony between Science and Spirituality.

Recently Professor Matt completed an 18-year project of translating and annotating the Zohar, the masterpiece of Jewish mysticism. This work, consisting of nine volumes was published by Stanford University Press and is entitled The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. This annotated translation has been hailed as “a monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought.”

Daniel Matt's scholar in residence weekend was hosted by , , Scientists in Synagogues, and CU Boulder's Program in Jewish Studies and Department of Religious Studies.

5th Annual CU-DU Week of Jewish Philosophy

Religion & Feminism

Fifth Annual CU-DU Week of Jewish Philosophy with Professor Mara Benjamin
April 10 & 11, 2019

The Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver are pleased to welcome Professor Mara Benjamin as the 2019 visiting scholar for the annual CU-DU Week of Jewish Philosophy. Benjamin will present two events on the CU Boulder and DU campuses on the theme Religion and Feminism.

University of Colorado Boulder Symposium

Embodiment in Jewish Feminist Theology

University of Colorado Boulder Symposium
Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Can human bodies be holy? Can they help us understand the divine, or only separate us from it? In contesting the denigration of both corporeality and women in Western thought, feminist theologians have identified the embrace of embodiment as a central task. In the eyes of Jewish feminist thinkers, rabbinic texts and practices offer a mixed legacy for embarking on the project of reclaiming the role of the body. Professor Mara Benjamin's talk will examine embodiment as both obstacle and path to God, using Rachel Adler’s “Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings” (1976) and her later recantation of that essay, “In Your Blood, Live: Re-Visions of a Theology of Purity” (1993).

University of Denver Symposium

From Embodiment to Intersubjectivity: Rethinking Feminist Views on Maternity

University of Denver Seminar
Thursday, April 11, 2019

Childbearing and childrearing hold a complicated place in feminist thought: motherhood anchors the identification of women with embodiment in Western philosophy; at the same time, maternity offers untapped resources for rethinking bodies, intersubjectivity, ethics, and other fundamental questions. In this seminar, Professor Mara Benjamin will draw on Judith Plaskow’s “Woman as Body: Motherhood & Dualism” to assess the risks of and rewards of giving maternity a central role in feminist thought.

Professor Benjamin's visit marks the fifth annual Week of Jewish Philosophy, a joint initiative presented by and .

Professor Benjamin's visit is cosponsored by the Departments of Women and Gender Studies and Religious Studies at CU Boulder, , and the . It is also supported by the at the University of Denver.

Mara Benjamin is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge, 2009) and The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Indiana, 2018). She holds a Ph.D. in modern Jewish thought from Stanford University and has taught at the University of Washington, Yale University, and St. Olaf College.

2019 Holocaust Genocide and Contemporary Bioethics Program

Medicine & Morality in Times of War

Public Lecture with Professor Len Rubenstein and Dr. Zaher Sahloul

Monday, April 29, 2019 | 7:00 PM - 9:00 P

Nearly 80 years after German physicians and other health professionals carried out some of the most heinous Nazi war crimes, health professionals today continue to practice during times of war and political conflict. While some work on behalf of authoritarian dictatorial governments to inflict harm, many others work to protect human rights and to treat soldiers and civilians with dignity and respect, even in the most extreme conditions imaginable. These latter health professionals – whether they recognize it or not – have absorbed critical lessons from the Holocaust about the necessary roles of health professionals in wartime and what that means for society today, both in zones of conflict and for refugees who have fled their homelands searching for a peaceful existence in foreign lands.

Additional programs were held at the Anschutz Medical, Colorado Springs, and Downtown campuses.

Featured Speakers

, from Johns Hopkins University, is a lawyer and the former Executive Director and President of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that carries our forensic documentation of war crimes and advocates for the protection of health workers in war zones. Professor Rubenstein has broad knowledge about the origins of human rights laws and the laws of war that arose out of the experiences in WWII.

, is a critical care specialist at Christ Advocate Medical Center in Chicago and the immediate past president of and a senior advisor to the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a humanitarian and advocacy organization that provides medical relief to Syrians and Syrian refugees. Dr. Sahloul is the founder of the American Relief Coalition for Syria, a coalition of 14 US-based humanitarian organizations working in Syria. He also is a former medical school classmate of Bashar al-Alssad.

This event was hosted by the at CU Anschutz Medical Campus and the Program in Jewish Studies at CU Boulder. The 2019 Holocaust Genocide and Contemporary Bioethics Program is supported by the MB Glassman Foundation, Jewish Colorado, and the founding sponsor, the William S. Silvers, MD Endowment.

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