THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS OF THE SPEAKER – We hope to reschedule soon

Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Presents:

Monday, April 18, 2016

7:00pm

Gerlinger Lounge

Professor McReynolds, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University, is the author of the book Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Northwestern UP, 2008) and is the editor of the Second Norton Critical Edition of The Brothers Karamazov (2011). She is currently completing a book on Russian nationalism and antisemitism as seen through the prism of Dostoevsky’s writings.

This program is made possible by the Clark Honor’s College, The Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies, the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program, the Department of English, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Oregon Humanities Center, and the UNESCO Chair at UO.

Tuesday, April 19th, 2016

7:00 pm

Knight Library Browsing Room (Room 106)

University of Oregon

A talk by Paul Slovic and Scott Slovic

This presentation by a father-son team will explore how the social sciences and the environmental humanities can come together to enable us to understand how information is presented and perceived in the contexts of genocide, the refugee crisis, global climate change, and other humanitarian and environmental challenges.

Paul Slovic is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and President of Decision Research.

Scott Slovic is Professor of Literature and Environment and Chair of the English Department at the University of Idaho.

Reception to Follow.

Free and Open to the Public.

Sponsored by the University of Oregon Global Justice Program.

Contact Ashleigh Landau at alandau2@uoregon.edu

CANCELLED-will reschedule for Fall 2016

Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Presents:

A Workshop for Faculty and Students on

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union

Led by Daniel Newman

Friday, April 15, 2016

3:00pm

159 Prince Lucien Campbell Hall

Daniel Newman is the Program Manager of the Initiative for the Study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He holds a PhD in modern European history from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he completed a dissertation entitled “Criminal Strategies and Institutional Concerns in the Soviet Legal System: An Analysis of Criminal Appeals in Moscow Province, 1921-1928.” His research interests include Russian and Soviet history, comparative legal history, and the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.

Thursday, January 28th, 2016

4:00 pm

111 Susan Campbell Hall

Federica Francesconi is Howard Berger-Ray Neilsen Chair in Judaic Studies, Assistant Professor at the College of Idaho

This talk is sponsored by the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies.

Free and open to the public.

Lecture 1:

January 26, 2016 at 3:30 pm

Knight Library Browsing Room

Latin America and the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?

Lecture 2:

February 2, 2016 at 3:30 pm

Knight Library Browsing Room

The Jewish Dimension in the Repression Under Military Rule in Argentina [1976-1983]: The Bigger Picture and a Case Study

Lecture 3:

February 9, 2016 at 3:30 pm

Knight Library Browsing Room

TACE – Academic Diplomacy Cuba/USA: Lessons Learnt and Best Practices

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Knight Library Browsing Room

7:00pm

Towards a Shared Israeli/Palestinian Academic Freedom:

A Constructive Appeal Facing the Pro/Anti Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campus Cleavages

Professor Edward “Edy” Kaufman has served both as the Director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland and the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He concurrently teaches at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Haifa University, and the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. He is the Singer Scholar in Residence at the University of Oregon Fall 2015.

After decades of violent conflict, academics and intellectuals globally and in our respective societies renew our hope that Palestinian and Israeli institutions of higher learning can fulfill our social responsibility and contribute to a just peace and academic freedom. It is understood that instances of internecine fighting and prolonged occupation have instilled a sense of disillusionment on both sides, and this frustration has often manifested itself in calls for boycotting all forms of cooperation with the other, including academic collaboration.

Saturday, August 22nd at 10:00am

Sunday, August 23rd at 10:00am

Join Ana-Maurine Lara, winner of the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, as she performs Landlines: a public performance exploring the ideas of home and homeland in Eugene. The Sephardic Jewish notion of kasa (home) inspires TWO public processions that reflect on what home means for multiple communities-Black, Native, Asian American, Jewish, Latino-that constitute Eugene.

LANDLINES 1:

Saturday, August 22nd, 2015

10:00am from Skinner Butte

7.5 mile tour

Ana-Maurine will conduct a solo performance walk of 7.5 miles, walking in a loop through Skinner Butte, Whiteaker, North Eugene, and Alton Baker Park. As part of this solo performance walk, Ana-Maurine will erect temporary “historical markers,” using stones, poetry and ritualized performance that draw from Jewish poetic and cultural forms. These “historical markers” will reference the histories of Native, African American, Jewish, Chinese and Latino communities in Eugene.

LANDLINES 2:

Sunday, August 23rd, 2015

10:00am from WOW Hall to the Park Blocks

You are invited to join the landlines public procession through downtown Eugene. We will meet at the parking lot on West 8th Ave & Charnelton (site of Eugene’s first synagogue) to process in a spiral to Park Blocks. The Klezmonauts will play live music for the procession. Please bring an object that symbolizes home for you. Together we will celebrate the multi-ethnic and interfaith communities that have shaped Eugene’s Jewish communities in our city.

For more information:

Ana-Maurine Lara (Artist): zorashorse@gmail.com

Alai Reyes-Santos: alai@uoregon.edu

Artist Bio: Ana-Maurine Lara is a national award-winning fiction author and Cave Canem poet. She was awarded the PEN/Northwest, the Barbara Deming Award and the National Latino/Chicano Literary Contest Third Prize. Her novel, Erzulie’s Skirt was a Lambda Literary Finalist. In addition, she has participated in prestigious writing residencies, studying with world-renowned poets and fiction writers. She draws from her experiences as a Dominican-American writer of Native, African, and Jewish ancestry to produce literary works and performances that blur the boundaries of artistic genres and cultural traditions.

Ana-Maurine has published extensively in a variety of genres. Her novels include Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press, 2011) and her short fiction has appeared in Sable LitMag, Callaloo and other literary journals. Her multi-genre piece Cantos will be released on September 18th at Cave Canem’s headquarters in New York City.

Ana-Maurine’s essays are widely anthologized and she has published articles in peer reviewed journals, including Phoebe Journal of Arts and Culture and GLQ. She is a graduate of Harvard (BA 1997) and Yale (PhD 2014). She joins the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon this academic year.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

358 Susan Campbell

12:00pm-1:30pm

Light lunch will be served

Open to the public; limited seating

Please RSVP to: heidi@uoregon.edu or 541-346-5288

…Have you heard

About the Historian who became an International Banker?

He spent the last years of his life in jail.

It’s All in the Numbers (and the Stories).

In 1764 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took a census of the Jews of Lithuania, and it was the best demographic source that exists for the eighteenth century. A parallel count of the Jews of Poland was published over one hundred years ago, but the full data of the Lithuanian count has never appeared until now. This delay in publication is the product of the ‘sociology of science,’ but it was worth waiting for. Study of this census teaches us a great deal about East European Jews 250 years ago—and about how they were studied over the years.

Shaul Stampfer is the Rabbi Edward Sandrow Professor of Soviet and East European Jewry and Chair of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also taught at Harvard University and elsewhere, including Moscow (1989 – 91), where he helped establish the Jewish University. Through his many published articles he has made a seminal contribution to the Jewish social history of eastern Europe, opening up new areas of research in the history of Jewish education, Jewish demography and family life, community organization and leadership, and related topics.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

125 McKenzie Hall

4:30pm

Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies in the
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Maxime Silverman specializes in post-Holocaust cultures in France, in colonial and postcolonial theories and cultures, as well as in questions of trauma, memory, race and violence as they reverberate in literature and film. He is one of very few scholars working to align Jewish and post-Colonial studies in French and to seek to understand how their attitudes toward “Frenchness” are aligned. While questions of identity and national belonging in France are shared by survivors both of the Shoah and of French colonial policies, the concerns of these groups do not often come into dialogue. Indeed, they are sometimes played against each other. Silverman specializes in the study of interactions among memories and behaviors related to multiple experiences of trauma, loss, and violence.

This talk is sponsored by the department of Romance Languages, the UO College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost, the Harold Schnitzer Program in Judaic Studies, and the Oregon Humanities Center. For information, contact Evlyn Gould (evgould@uoregon.edu)

Friday, April 17th, 2015

166 Lawrence Hall

3:30pm-5:30pm

Jonathan Skolnik is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also on the faculty in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and in History.

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first comprehensive study of how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing.

What did it imply for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language? Skolnik makes the case that the answer lies in the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists, both in Nazi Germany and in exile, employed images from the Sephardic past to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The book goes on to show that this past not only helped Jews to make sense of the nonsense, but served also as a window into the hopes for integration and fears about assimilation that preoccupied German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German culture not as an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory.