In the continuation of the Canadian Jewish Studies lecture series this semester, Professor Hasia Diner from New York University will present: Making Space Sacred: American Jews and the Memory of the Lower East Side. This lecture is the first part of a two part series titled, “American Jewish Identity: The City and Food.”
It will take place on March 14th, 2007 between 4:30-5:30 in the Hall Building, Room H-760.
From the announcement:

How did moving from Europe to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century leave its mark upon the food ways of immigrant Jews? How did their experiences reflect a common immigrant experience and in what way did the role played by food in Jewish life create a unique situation?
Prof. Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, with a joint appointment in the departments of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She is also the Director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History. Her research interests include American Jewish history, American immigration history and women’s history.

In the continuation of the Canadian Jewish Studies lecture series this semester, Dr. Adele Reinhartz will present “Jesus the Jew: The View from Hollywood” on March 1st between 2:45 - 4:00 in the Hall Building, room H-620.
Dr. Reinhartz comes to Concordia University as the Associate Vice-President for Research at the University of Ottawa. From the announcement:

She holds the position of Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Her main areas of research are the Gospel of John, early Jewish-Christian relations, feminist criticism, and, most recently, the Bible and film. Her latest book is a study of the Jesus movies, entitled Jesus of Hollywood (Oxford, 2006).
It is common knowledge that Jesus was a Jew, and lived his life in the context of the religion, culture and politics of first century Galilee and Judea. The movies about Jesus are ambivalent about portraying Jesus as a Jew. We will look at the ways in which the Jesus movies both highlight and obscure Jesus’ Jewish identity, by looking at and talking about clips selected from the range of films from the early silent movies to the most recent feature-length films.

Another Israeli Apartheid Week is scheduled to take place at campuses around the city between February 12-17.
Although certain events are planned, and approved by the various universities, last year, it was the surprise display put on by the Concordia chapter of the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights that became the highlight of the week:

What was touted as an “exhibit” became a full-fledged, two-day, anti-Israeli demonstration by the Concordia chapter of the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR). Rows of graves complete with tombstones and flowers lined the mezzanine floor, dedicated to the Palestinian children who, according to SPHR, were allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers. However, despite the graveyard in the centre of an academic institution, it was a massive banner – hung with the words ‘Made in Israel’ printed in large black letters – which caught the overwhelming amount of attention.

According to the SPHR website, two of the planned events taking place this year as scheduled are:

“Jamal Zahalka: Dr. Jamal Zahalka is a Palestinian Israeli and member of the Israeli Knesset and will be speaking about the nature of Israeli apartheid in a lecture entitled “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy. Thursday February 15th 2007@ 8:30pm, Concordia University, Hall Building, H-937″
“We would like to cordially invite you to SPHR’s much anticipated marquee event, “Citizenship…Palestine?”. It is to take place on Saturday, March 10th at the Salle Marie-Gerin-Lajoie theatre hall in UQAM. The starting time is 7 pm sharp. The preparations for this event have been underway since September, with a lot of gossip and media attention surrounding the event. We hope that this play will entertain as well as inspire you.”

Jews, whores, and mothers will be on the agenda when Dr. Ruth Panofsky of Ryerson University comes to speak on Thursday, February 15th at 4:30. Her lecture to Concordia University students is titled, “This was her punishment: Jew, Whore, Mother in the Fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lillian Nattel.”
According to the announcement from the Concordia Institue for Canadian Jewish Studies:

Miriam Waddington’s 1942 poem “The Bond” characterizes a “Jewish whore” as “twice outcast”, “twice isolate”. As “Jewess” and as whore, the woman who forms the locus of Waddington’s poem is positioned at the margins of Canadian society. Ostracized for being a Jew - she experiences anti-Semitism on Toronto’s Jarvis Street where she works during the 1940s - she is condemned to further isolation for her crime of prostitution and suffers alienation. In fact, as historian of medicine Lara Marks confirms, the Jewish prostitute faced “a triple oppression - as a woman, as a Jew and as a member of the Jewish working-class” - and she “symbolized the tenuous position and vulnerability of Jewish women as a whole”. A rare enough figure in Canadian literature, the Jewish prostitute reappears in the fiction of Adele Wiseman and Lilian Nattel, with an important difference: she is also a mother. Through a study of two novels, Wiseman’s Crackpot (1974) and Nattel’s The Singing Fire (2004), this talk considers the punishing cost to Jewish prostitutes who dare to become mothers.

The lecture will take place in the EV Building, 001-605.

A fair amount of controversy was in the air last week as the director general of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, addressed a crowd at the Hillel House in Montreal.
Oppenheimer, who was joined for the Montreal session with Waleed Ziad, a political analyst and former Yale University activist, is currently on a national tour of Canada sponsored by Hillel and National Jewish Campus Life. Speaking on how to become active on campus and in cities, Oppenheimer generally avoided the political issues his organization supports, although he did use his organization as the foundation for his examples.
“We are not making a lot of effort to try to convince people who think the total opposite [Of what we do],” said Oppenheimer. “We are looking at the public that we focus on, the people who think like Peace Now, but those who aren’t doing anything about it…our goal in Peace Now is not to convince people to become Left Wing, but our goal is to take people that think like Peace Now and mobilize them into action.”
Ziad, who was at the session to speak about his experiences at Yale University offered various techniques on how to improve relationships between Jews and Muslims on campus. For Ziad, it was the events of September 11th, 2001 that proved to be the turning point in relations between the two groups. “It suddenly dawned on many students, like shock therapy, that our communities are essentially not very different,” said Ziad, asserting “The key to reverting this trend [of anger and hostility] is fostering cultural, economic and even religious ties wrapping it up with really effective marketing.”
This working relationship eventually translated into the creation of a group called Jews and Muslims, whose goal was “To create a space where Muslims and Jews can come every week to build a lasting relationship, with the hope that one day they could tackle relevant problems.” Although now a graduate, Ziad said that J.A.M. continues to grow on campuses throughout the United States, and that students are invited to receive training on how to successfully grow their chapter of J.A.M. much like the original in New Haven.
The question and answer session sparked one heated argument when Oppenheimer said Israel should begin peace talks with Syria, but was mostly calm.
Despite the efforts made by Oppenheimer to leave politics out of the session, some attendees still questioned why Peace Now was given a forum to speak by NJCL and Hillel Montreal. The President of NJCL, Richard Diamond, explained that all views should be heard. “NJCL supports speakers who are on all stages of the spectrum. Our students reflect views from all over the spectrum,” he said, adding that “Having a stance which includes the Palestinian point of view is not necessarily anti-Israeli…Peace Now is not anti-Israel.”
Sam Langleben, a McGill Hillel representative, agreed with Diamond, and said that Hillel has to offer events from both the right and left wing. “We do run events that affiliate themselves with the Jewish Right Wing, with the Zionist Right Wing,” he said, adding “This was to breakaway from that, to reach out to a side of the community that we don’t always do, we thought it would be a great idea to try an event such as this one.”
Student Dafna Wisbaum said she did not agree with Oppenheimer’s views and parts of his speech, but understood why Hillel felt that it was important to have him speak. “I didn’t agree with what he was saying about peace with Syria or returning the Golan Heights…[Also] he made it sound like Peace Now was a very manipulative organization, trying to attract members,” said Dafna Wisbaum, a McGill student, noting “however, I still think it was good [For Hillel] to have him speak, so people can at least hear what he had to say.”