Jewish Studies

“The Biblical Book of Samuel and the Birth of Politics: Two Faces of Political Violence” Speaker: Moshe Halbertal, Gruss Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will deliver the 29th Annual Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies.

Roman Kent, Chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and President of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, will give a public lecture on his life and work in the week leading up to Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Speaker: Susanna Schrafstetter

Title: Negotiating Life in Illegality : Ordinary Germans and Jewish Flights from Deportation

Lecture “Displaying Sexual Violence: Activism in Israeli Women’s Filmmaking” by Rachel S. Harris, Associate Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture, The University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Sponsored by Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, Hebrew Program, Jewish Studies Program, Comparative Literature Program

Is America Different? Antisemitism in the United States in Historical Perspective”

Co-produced by Roman Kent and narrated by Liv Ullman, Children in the Holocaust is an examination of the plight of Jewish children in the Holocaust, from the viewpoint of those children – now adults – who survived. The survivors tell of groups of terrified children being caught smuggling food into the Warsaw Ghetto, the intense anti-Semitic air that permeated pre-war Eastern Europe, and most painful of all, their experiences in the concentration camps.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher reads from his new novel, Before All the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which follows two Yiddish-speaking immigrants from a fictional shtetl in Northeastern Ukraine, to Philadelphia of the 1930s, where they connect to a Black, communist writer, and the three of them try to navigate America’s racial and sexual politics, alone and together. 

Short Bio for Moriel Rothman-Zecher

2022 Hannah A. Quint Lecture
Speaker: Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University

Professor David Nirenberg of the University of Chicago will deliver the Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies on the topic: “What Does the History of Anti-Semitism Tell Us About its Future?” David Nirenberg is Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought. This is the 32nd Annual Hannah A. Quint Lecture in Jewish Studies, established by the late Eliot Levinson, Class of 1964, in honor of his late mother, Mrs. Quint.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher, ‘11, returns to Middlebury to read from his first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, a coming-of-age novel of which the Jerusalem Post has said that it “conveys the complexities of Israeli and Palestinian life with passion, nuance and tenderness…” Rothman-Zecher “has shown a fearlessness and vulnerability on these pages that speak to his ability to explore difficult terrain without feeling the need to draw any neat or concise conclusions. It shuns certainty and is open, nuanced, inconclusive and often contradictory. Just like Israeli reality.”