This lecture will tell the story of a long-overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow…

Professor Jonathan Haslam will discuss his most recent book, The Spectre of War. International Communism and the Origins of World War II, which explores the roots of the Second World War in the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the interwar period. Jonathan Haslam retired as George F. Kennan Professor at the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study last July. He…

Opera arrived in America as a European import, with Jews playing an essential role in its promotion from the moment Lorenzo da Ponte landed in Philadelphia. A century later, a generation of European refugees would take their operatic experience and use it to develop two of the most quintessentially American art forms: the Hollywood movie and the Broadway musical. But,…

In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to…

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a presentation of the book Contemporary Ukrainian Art and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives (ibidem Press, 2021). The event will feature presentations by the volume’s editor Svitlana Biedarieva and contributors Ieva Astahovska, Olena Martynyuk, and Margaret Tali with moderator Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute). Contemporary Ukrainian Art and Baltic Art focuses on political and social expressions in contemporary art of…

While James Joyce’s place in the modernist pantheon has long been firmly entrenched, its resonances continue to be uncovered. In the Russian context, the Irish writer has occupied many roles since his work was first translated in the mid-1920s. This talk will trace the development not of a monolithic Joyce, but rather of five separate Russian Joyces — the versions of…

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, celebrated artist Edmund de Waal investigates his illustrious family history, their journey from Odessa to Vienna and Paris in the 19th century, and how they lost everything during the Holocaust except a collection of rare Japanese netsuke, which were rescued by a family maid. This collection is now the subject of an exhibition at…

Please join us for a discussion with Tinatin Japaridze (MARS-REERS ’19), author of Stalin’s Millenials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism (Lexington Books, February 2022), moderated by Alexander Cooley, Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, Barnard College. Stalin’s Millennials examines Joseph Stalin’s increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues…