Based on a true story, the directorial debut of popular Swedish personalities Filip and Fredrik is an outrageous, unconventional comedy set in the 1980s about an eccentric villager who decides to put his sleepy hamlet on the map by assembling the world’s longest layer cake. When in 1984 the small town of Koping is named “the most boring town in…
Ghouls and goblins alike will agree, there’s no better way to celebrate Halloween than with a dance party at Manhattan’s historic Bohemian National Hall. Live music by Ex press Band. Dance show by professional dancers Stephen & Alexandra Hughes will teach you the tricks and treats of dancing the night away. Plus, there will be a Halloween costume contest! Program:…
Just in time for Halloween, Ron Sopyla and Ellen Shapiro of the Hans Christian Andersen Storytelling Center bring some Nordic “not-too-scary” troll stories to Scandinavia House! In this combined event, kids will first hear some tales from Scandinavia and the far North, and then participate in a “crankle”-making workshop, in which they will make scrolls that can be read from a…
Contrary to dusty first impressions, genealogy can be an adventure. In Dan Oren's book, The Wedding Photo, a visit to an abandoned Polish Jewish cemetery in 1993 launches a 20-year search to solve the mystery of "Who is Buried in Sarah's Tomb?" A visit with a cousin unearths a breathtaking photo of a Berlin family wedding from 1926 and leads…
Join Mikhal Dekel in conversation with Natalia Aleksiun about a family story that complicates our understanding of refuge, displacement, new homes, and the unexpected fate of child refugees. Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey tracks the fates of those Polish Jews who during WWII were "saved by deportation.” It follows them alongside other Polish nationals from their Polish hometowns, into the Soviet interior,…
Join for a talk with Peter Reddaway on his book The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990(Brookings Institution Press). It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system’s collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This…
Presenting Fabio Parasecoli's "Food" Food (2019, MIT Press) by Fabio Parasecoli The author in conversation with Meryl Rosofsky (NYU) A consumer's guide to the food system, from local to global: our part as citizens in the interconnected networks, institutions, and organizations that enable our food choices. Everybody eats. We may even consider ourselves experts on the topic, or at least…
Director Levan Akin joins us to discuss his new film And Then We Danced, which has recently been selected as the Swedish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. In this passionate tale of love and liberation set against the backdrop of Georgian traditional dance, ambitious young Merab has been training from an early age…
With a wealth of archival footage and detailed re-enactments, this film recounts the incredible story of Emanuel Ringelblum, who secretly led a team of writers and intellectuals to preserve a vibrant Jewish culture in the Warsaw Ghetto shortly after the Nazis took over. What resulted was a startlingly deep and diverse portrait of European Jewish life, as the Oyneg Shabes…
Bio: Krug is an author and illustrator whose work has appeared in publications around the world. She was named Illustrator of the Year 2019 by the Victoria and Albert Museum, and her book, “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home”, about WWII and her German family history, won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Abstract: Heimat (Belonging: A…