Preparing for the High Holidays – Sukkot

Understanding our Sephardic Laws and Traditions with Hakham Rabbi Elie Abadie, MD Rabbi Elie Abadie, M.D., comes from a long and distinguished rabbinical lineage dating back to fifteenth century Spain and Provence. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he grew-up in Mexico City before settling in the United States. Following in the footsteps of the great Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides (the…

COVID-19 in Iran: A Conversation on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Public Health in Iran

A panel of interdesplinary scholars will discuss the medical and sociopolitical aspects of the current crisis of COVID-19 in Iran. They will explore similar public health instances in the modern history of Iran. The conversation will situate COVID-19 in the sociohistorical, political, medical, and cultural contexts in which the discipline of public health has emerged and has been interpreted and…

It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became…

Christ, Hadji Murat, and the Late Tolstoy’s Non-Hegemonic Masculinities

Join us for another 19v seminar! In this lecture, Professor Ani Kokobobo traces a new minority masculinity in Tolstoy’s late narratives after the author denounces sexuality in works like The Kreutzer Sonata. If typical Tolstoyan “seeker” characters, like Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, and Konstantin Levin were always social misfits who did not fit within societal roles and sought a sphere…

Family History Today: Donating Your Family Papers – How, When, Where and Why?

Karen Franklin, Director of Family Research at the Leo Baeck Institute, is donating her voluminous family papers to LBI, providing her a unique dual perspective on the donation process as both a donor and a recipient. This session will address what you can do to organize and prepare your collection for donation to ensure that the material will be accessible…

VIRTUAL EVENT. Georgian Election 2020: What to Expect and Why It Is Important

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event. Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion about the 2020 parliamentary election in Georgia. On October 31, 2020, Georgia will go to the polls to elect a new parliament.…

Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Judith Surkis, in conversation with Stephanie McCurry, Karuna Mantena, and Emmanuelle Saada, moderated by Camille Robcis To RSVP, please click here. During more than a century of colonial rule over Algeria, the French state shaped and reshaped the meaning and practice of Muslim law by regulating it and circumscribing it to the domain of family law, while applying the French…

Book Club on Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

Join us for a lively Zoom conversation on Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Robert Baldick (Penguin). Based on Flaubert’s own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning…

Interrogating the Declining Significance of Pushkin’s Blackness: Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Literary Nationalism

Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative talk (prepared by a transatlantic historian…

VIRTUAL EVENT. Sexism, Homophobia, and Anti-Western Narratives on Russian Social Media: The Case of Sorok Sorokov on VK

Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at the Harriman Institute for a discussion with Andrejs Berdņikovs, editor at the European Journalism Observatory and Technology Scout at the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA). Andrejs Berdņikovs is a data analyst, activist, and social entrepreneur with experience in research, technology scouting,…