The Rest of the Story: Finding your Family in Online Newspapers

Center for Jewish History 15 W. 16th Street, New York City, NY, United States

Janeen Bjork will share her search methodology using several case studies to illustrate the techniques of finding and preserving family items from online newspapers. She will discuss OCR (optical character recognition, the technology that allows newspapers to be searched online), and how to work around its significant failure rate. Other topics will include best practices for searching in popular newspaper…

$5

StrategEast Westernization Index 2020: Cross-country Analysis

Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room 420 W 118th Street, #1219 International Affairs Building, New York City, NY, United States

Join us for a presentation by Anatoly Motkin, founder and president of StrategEast. The StrategEast Westernization Index 2020 assesses the processes of adherence to Western values in post-Soviet countries outside of Russia across five dimensions: political, legal, economic, cultural, and lifestyle. This second edition of the Index, like the first one released in 2018, is the only report to analyze the fourteen…

Between Serialism and Suprematism: Nikolai Roslavets’s Modernist Music

Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room 420 W 118th Street, #1219 International Affairs Building, New York City, NY, United States

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a presentation by Leah Batstone (Hunter College, CUNY). The compositions of Nikolai Roslavets, one of many Ukrainian composers often mistaken for Russian, demonstrate the unique musical position of Ukraine in the history of early twentieth-century music. As a mediator between the compositional serialism of the Second Viennese School of…

Book Talk. A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas by Maxim D. Shrayer

Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room 420 W 118th Street, #1219 International Affairs Building, New York City, NY, United States

Please join us for a book talk with Maxim D. Shrayer, internationally acclaimed author of the memoirs Waiting for America and Leaving Russia and of the story collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. Shrayer’s new book of fiction, A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas, explores the lives of immigrants from Russia and the former USSR. A Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, Shrayer is the winner of the 2007 National Jewish…

Lew Nussimbaum aka Essad Bey aka Kurban Said – Wanderer between Worlds

Center for Jewish History 15 W. 16th Street, New York City, NY, United States

Born to a Jewish family in Kiev, raised in Baku, and converted to Islam in Berlin, Essad Bey’s orientalist writings reached a huge audience in the Weimar Republic. Although his novels and essays depicting life in locales such as Azerbaijan and the Caucasus helped shape notions of a mysterious and romantic East in the German public imagination, the Muslim community…

Lecture: How and Why Immigrant Muslim Communities Are Losing Women

NYU Abu Dhabi Institute 19 Washington Square North, New York

How and Why Immigrant Muslim Communities Are Losing Women: Nearly half of Muslim Americans never attend the mosque and have very few Muslim friends. How and why does “unmosquing” happen and to whom? Eman Abdelhadi traces second-generation immigrants’ engagement with Muslim communities using life history interviews and presents four trajectories that emerge from these data. Abdelhadi finds that while most Muslim…

Sephardic Art Song: A Musical Legacy of the Sephardic Diaspora

Center for Jewish History 15 W. 16th Street, New York City, NY, United States

The history and culture of Sephardic Jewry can be found in the rich repertoire of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) folksongs. These folksongs reflect on Jewish traditions and stories as well as universal human themes such as love, death, and despair. In the 20th and 21st century Western classical composers such as Alberto Hemsi, Yehezkel Braun, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Joaquin Rodrigo, Wolf Simoni (Louis…

$15

Collaboration as a Decolonial Practice

Hamilton Hall 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, New York City, NY, United States

Presenter: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel (Writer) and Simone Brioni (Stony Brook University) Respondent: Graziella Parati (Dartmouth College) Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University, Italian) Through its dialogic form, this paper presents key issues in Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s career as representative of her cohort of Somali-Italian authors’ struggles to be heard and read, including the processes of translation and self-translation in Lontano…

Reading for Energy: Conversion, Excess, and Entropy in Leo Tolstoy (with Jillian Porter, University of Colorado)

Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia 19 University Place, 2nd Floor, New York City, NY, United States

Jillian Porter explores energy—the “power to make work”—as a shaping force in Tolstoy’s fictions. From the psychic “safety valves” of War and Peace to the steam engines of Anna Karenina and the excesses of The Kreutzer Sonata, the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics provided Tolstoy with a powerful store of metaphors for the workings of minds, bodies, and literary texts. How…