Past Events 2019-2020
Klezmer Concert with Cookie Segelstein and Joshua Horowitz of Veretski Pass
Monday, September 16, 2019 | 7:30 PM
Grusin Music Hall in the Imig Music Building, CU Boulder Campus
The Program in Jewish Studies and College of Music welcomed Cookie Segelstein and Joshua Horowitz of Veretski Pass for a free concert on the CU Boulder campus. Cookie Segelstein and Joshua Horowitz are two members of Veretski Pass, a klezmer music group based in Berkeley, CA. Veretski Pass has a mix of Jewish, Romanian, Ottoman, Moldavian, and Polish influences, amongst others. Their free concert will feature music from Veretski Pass’s latest release, The Magid Chronicles. The project draws on material from Sofia Magid, a Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist, who worked intensively to document Jewish music in Belarus and Ukraine during Joseph Stalin’s regime. Magid’s 600 recordings contain rare examples of women’s songs and instrumental pieces. The project also features music from Moyshe Beregovski and includes Romanian, Turkish, Greek, and Hutsul traditions.
Colloquium: Modes, Ethnography, and Creativity in Klezmer Music
Tuesday, September 16, 2019 | 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Imig Music Building C-125, CU Boulder Campus
In the first part of this colloquium, Horowitz demonstrated internal modal characteristics of klezmer (Jewish instrumental music from Eastern Europe), drawing connections to both the Ottoman maqam system and Ashkenazi cantorial gestures. In the second part, Horowitz and Segelstein engaged in conversation with Yonatan Malin about their backgrounds in klezmer music and paths towards new and traditional works, using 1930s field recordings of the Soviet ethnographer Sofia Magid.
Klezmer Workshop
with Cookie Segelstein and Joshua Horowitz
Tuesday, September 17, 2019 | 7:30 PM
Segelstein and Horowitz lead a workshop for all instruments. They taught klezmer melodies, ornaments, and accompaniment styles from the Carpathian Bow. This workshop was free and open to the public and no prior experience with klezmer was required.
This event was hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies and College of Music. It was sponsored by the Roser Visiting Artist Endowment and other University cosponsors.
New Frontiers in Israel/Palestine Studies
Israel/Palestine Panel with Orit Bashkin, Ilana Feldman, and Hilary Kalisman
Thursday, October 17, 2019 | 7:00 PM
Old Main Theater, CU Boulder Campus
In this panel, Professor Bashkin examined education in the Middle East. Much attention has been placed on the role of the colonial powers, the state and the nation in shaping the minds and bodies of children and students. In recent years, historians reassessed their archival practices and engaged in innovative reading techniques in order to reconstruct such voices.
Professor Kalisman focused specifically on public school teachers in Palestine and Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates, arguing that in order to study education, state and nation-building in Israel/Palestine we need to take a regional approach.
Professor Feldman also discussed the effects of long-term displacement on Palestinian refugees and education in the Middle East. Refugees struggle with questions about how to live in exile, even as they hope for return. They also confront conditions of dying that are in part a product of both long-term displacement and the limits of humanitarian response.
Jews Out West
4th Biannual Embodied Judaism Symposium & Exhibit
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Fiske Planetarium, CU Boulder Campus
Confronted by the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of a Jewish State after WWII, Jews found new ways to think of themselves as Jewish Americans in the American West. Summer camps founded in the post-war years played a significant role in this expression – shaping children’s identities through outdoor western-themed activities such as horse riding, archery and shooting practice, and arts and crafts.
In Colorado, the founding of the Maurice B. Shwayder Camp of Temple Emanuel in 1948 and the J Bar Double C Ranch in 1953 demonstrates the response of Denver’s Jewish communities to the new popularization of American camping. As in many American summer camps, appropriation of Native American cultures played a role in the outdoor experience.
This same generation would come of age in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s to organize Jewish retreats in the American West to seek their own revolutionary sense of identity, solidarity, and spiritual expression. Movements such as Jewish Renewal and the Mosaic Jewish Outdoor Club are part of this continuum of experiential Judaism as it manifested in the natural beauty of Western landscapes.
Drawing on archival materials housed in the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections, the biannual symposium explored the historical and contemporary ways in which Jews have married their religious identities with their sense of belonging to the independent spirit and physical beauty of the American West.
The interactive, multidimensional exhibit will be on display on the second-floor landing of Norlin Library on the CU Boulder campus from November 4, 2019, for two years. The exhibit features archival photographs, relics, audio recordings, and a poetry installation.
91ÖÆƬ³§ the Embodied Judaism Series
series explores embodied Jewish life and experience through public gatherings and multimedia exhibits aimed at academic and non-academic audiences, drawing on materials in the held at CU Boulder. This year, the symposium and exhibit will explore the historical and contemporary ways in which Jews are part of the American West. It is a partnership between the Program in Jewish Studies, University Libraries' Special Collections, Archives & Preservation, and cosponsors.
The 2019 Embodied Judaism Symposium & Exhibit was hosted by CU Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies and the University Libraries' Special Collections, Archives & Preservation. It was part of the Jewish Studies’ Community Talks Series, made possible by a grant from the Rose Community Foundation, and cosponsored by The Center of the American West and additional university cosponsors at CU Boulder. Jews Out West also used archival materials from the Beck Archives at the University of Denver, Shwayder Camp – Temple Emanuel, and the JCC Ranch Camp. Photo Credit: JCC Ranch Camp.
±á¾±³Ù±ô±ð°ù’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Reflections on the Process of Genocide and Conquest in the Nazi East and the U.S. West
In Honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27
Thursday, January 23, 2020 | 7:00 PM
Old Main Theater | 1600 Pleasant St, Boulder, CO 80302
In his lecture, Professor Edward Westermann offered a comparison between the National Socialist conquest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the process of U.S. westward expansion between 1850 and 1890. His talk offered important insights into the similarities and the differences between the two national projects of conquest and the acts of atrocity and mass killings that accompanied them.
Toward a History of Jewish–Native American Relations: 2020 Bender Visiting Scholar
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Old Main Theater 7:00 p.m.
1600 Pleasant Street, Boulder, CO 80309
In this lecture, Professor David Koffman will map the broad contours of the American Jewish – Native American encounter from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. On the one hand, Jews in the American west acted as agents of colonialism, seeing Native Americans as impediments to immigrant aspirations for social inclusion and economic mobility. On the other hand, enfranchised Jews of the mid-twentieth century – lawyers, social scientists, educators and journalists – promoted tools of progressive pro-Native ideology and policy. Koffman considers how Jewish interactions with Native Americans provide a unique lens through which to re-think Jewish modernity as part and parcel of the complexities of colonial/immigration history.