Participation Level: Grant Center Library Resource

Ballots, Babies, & Banners of Peace

“Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace – Rottman Family Lecture Series with Dr. Melissa Klapper
This talk with Dr. Melissa Klapper will explore the social and political activism of American Jewish women from the 1890s through World War II, focusing on three mass women’s movements of the day: suffrage, birth control, and peace. No history of first wave feminism is complete without understanding the outsize impact of Jewish women on these movements and the powerful effect of their activism on contemporary American life.”

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Golan Moskowitz introduces his book Wild Visionary

Wild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak’s life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children’s books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive “inner child,” drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents’ Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision—from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell’s Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak’s investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist’s perspective—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak’s picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time. For more information: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31783

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Colloquium in American Jewish Studies

This regular series brings innovative scholars to Tulane University to share and discuss new research with Tulane faculty and students, creating a space for bridging and sharing cutting edge research across disciplines and institutions. Our 2021-22 visitors have included Dr. Gregg Drinkwater (UC Berkeley) and Dr. Mijal Bitton (Shalom Hartman Institute), and our topics range from Queer Jewish studies to Sephardic Jewry and religious intermixing of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions in the American Context.

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Current American Jewish Music Studies

The study of Jewish music in America is not as robust and diverse as other topics in Jewish Studies. For one thing, most approaches to Jewish Music are Eurocentric (which is true of Jewish Studies in general). But the main reason might be that the subject falls into a kind of academic no-man’s-land.

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