“Jews and Politics”

July 12-16, 2009

Schedule

Sunday, July 12th

5-8 p.m. – Registration/Dinner at the University Club

Monday, July 13th at 9:00 am

9:00 a.m. - Steven Nadler, Weinstein Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies, and Chair, UW Department of Philosophy
“Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Law”

10:45 a.m. – David Sorkin, Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies, UW Department of History “Jewish Politics in Europe, 1600-1945”

1:30 p.m. – Nadav Shelef, Meyerhoff Assistant Professor of Israeli Studies, UW Department of Political Science “Israeli Politics from Soup to Nuts”

Tuesday, July 14th

9:00 a.m. – Chad Alan Goldberg, Associate Professor, UW Department of Sociology “Durkheimian Sociology as a Response to French Anti-Semitism: The Jews, Revolutionary Modernization, and the Old Regime in Fin de siècle French Social Thought”

10:45 a.m. – Zvi Gitelman, Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan “The Jagged Circle: From Ethnicity to Internationalism to Cosmopolitanism and Back”

1:30 p.m. – Zvi Gitelman, Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan “The Motivations, Origins, Ideologies and Practices of Modern Zionism”

Wednesday, July 15th

9:00 a.m. – Tony Michels, Mosse Professor of Jewish History, UW Department of History “American Jews and Liberalism: Past and Present”

10:45 a.m. – Ira Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council “Jewish Experience in American Politics: The Early Years”

1:30 p.m. – Ira Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council
“Jewish Experience in American Politics: The Last Half Century”

Thursday, July 16th

9:00 a.m. – Philip Hollander, Assistant Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture, UW Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies “Prophets or Ordinary Men: Political Engagement and Hebrew Literary Production”

10:45 a.m. – Allan Nadler, Professor of Religion, Director, Jewish Studies Program, Drew University, “Political Turmoil in Interwar Jewish Eastern Europe, from A to Z: Agudath Israel to Zionism”

More Information

Download the Registration Form and Schedule (Microsoft Word .doc)

For more information, call the CJS at (608) 265-4763

The Greenfield Summer Institute is funded through the generousity of Larry and Roslyn Greenfield.

UW Hillel & the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies present The 2009 Israeli Film Festival.

March 1 – March 5
The Chazen Museum of Art
800 University Ave.
Madison, WI

For more information please visit the Isreali Film Festival website.

Schedule

All events at the Chazen Museum.

March 1 – Women & Ethnicity in Tel Aviv
6:30pm – Noodle
8:30pm – Yana’s Friends

March 2 – Contemporary Life in Tel Aviv
6:30pm – The Wisdom of the Pretzel
8:30pm – Jellyfish

March 3 – The LGBT Scene
6:30pm – Stefan Braun
8:30pm – The Bubble

March 4 – The Quest for Identity
6:30pm – Out for Love, be Back Shortly
8:30pm – Jerusalem Right, Tel Aviv Left

March 5 – Golden Days, Nostalgic Nights
6:30pm – Azulai the Policeman
8:30pm – Over the Ocean

Thursday, March 26, 7 p.m.
Room L160 Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.

Documentary film specialist Ruth Diskin will speak on the exciting and illuminating world of documentary film in Israel. Documentary films allow unheard voices to be heard, and bring into discussion the complexities of life in Israel. Excerpts from recent Israeli documentaries selected for this talk will be shown, along with the award winning 2008 documentary Lady Kul El Arab (Ibtisam Marana, 2009, Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles).

Ruth Diskin, a mentor, curator and distributor of the finest contemporary independent Israeli filmmaking will open a window to the complexity of identity negotiations in Israel.

Lady Kul El Arab

Lady Kul El Arab tells the riveting story of Duha-Angelina Fares, the first woman of the Druze community in Israel to attempt to enter the Miss Israel contest as a venue for self realization, and contrary to her community’s normative roles for women. Duha, a young woman from the village of Sagur in the Galilee, was one of the 12 finalists in the beauty pageant for Israeli-Arab women – ‘Lady Kul el-Arab.’ Framed as a glamorous story of a beauty pageant, this documentary tells the moving story of a family caught between cultures. Made by a woman, the documentary filmmaker Ibtisam Marana, this film offers an unique perspective on the lives of women in Israel and the Middle East.

Lady Kul El Arab was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Silver Wolf Competition in IDFA 2008, as well as Best Directing Award at the New Delhi Int’l Women Film Festival in India. It has been selected for International Film Festivals in the USA, UK, Korea, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Thailand, The Netherlands, and Italy.

Films that Ruth Disken will discuss include

Dubak, a Palestinian Jew tells the story of an extraordinary individual whose life is thoroughly intertwined with the land. Dubak is an exceptional personality in the Gush Etzion region of the West Bank. Dubak challenges our perceptions of “Palestinian”’ “Jew”, “Religious”, Settler”, “Israeli”.

The Name My Mother Gave Me tells the untold stories of immigrants from Ethiopia to Israel. This documentation of a real journey allows an encounter with the ethnic diversity and inter-ethnic bonds among young Israelis on a quest for authentic identity.

Say Amen tells the personal story of a young Israeli from the Southern development town Yerucham, son of a Sephardic orthodox family, and his experience of coming out in his familial, social, and religious cultural context.

No longer Ahmad tells the story of a young man from the Galilee, who is torn between his Palestinian-Arab and Israeli identities – which becomes intensified in the historical-political context of the El Aqsa Intifada.

Sponsored by the Moss/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, The George L. Mosse Program.

Cool Jew is a loving and irreverent celebration of Jewish culture, identity and kitsch. In addition to its fervent call for positive Jewish identity, the book also chronicles contemporary Jewish arts and culture, with approximately 400 images, including original line drawings, vintage Israeli and Jewish posters, t-shirt designs, kabbalistic paintings from Israel, album covers and more.

Cool Jew also includes an extensive resource guide on contemporary Jewish music called “The Heebster Jewkebox.”

As co-sponsors, the Center would like to announce the addition of an exciting interdisciplinary arts course offering next spring. The UW-Madison Arts Institute sponsors an interdisciplinary arts residency each semester, giving students the unique opportunity to work closely for an entire semester with a professional artist or arts scholar. These courses are for-credit and offered through multiple departments.

Our spring 2009 artist in residence is Henry Sapoznik, an award winning author, record, and radio producer and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. He will be teaching a 3-credit course on “Yiddish-American Popular Culture, 1890-1950,” on Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:20-3:50PM in 1227 Engineering Hall. The course has no prerequisites, and will be available through the following departments: Jewish Studies 510-450, Art 448-004, Music 497-001, Folklore 530-004, Theatre and Drama 469-001

For more information on this course, please contact professor of record Douglas Rosenberg at rosend@education.wisc.edu or 265-4763.

For more information on Henry Sapoznik’s residency, please contact Kate Hewson at kahewson@wisc.edu or 263-9290 or see his website.

July 12-16, 2009
Madison, Wisconsin

A faculty-taught four-day program including classes, films, field trips, and social events.

This year’s theme:

JEWS AND POLITICS

It was a phenomenally exciting and unpredictable election year in the United States and elections in Israel are likely during the coming year. This year’s annual Greenfield Summer Institute will bring University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty together with scholars and political practitioners from the United States and Israel to look at the topic of Jews and politics. We will learn about the role of politics in Jewish communities in post-emancipation Europe, turn of the century America, and the pre-state Yishuv. We will then move to the present and examine the attitudes, voting behavior, and political activities of American Jews and Israelis. We will hear from both those who study campaigns and elections and those who work in campaigns and elections.

For more information
PHONE: (608) 265-4763
E-MAIL: allightf@wisc.edu

or, write to:
Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
308 Ingraham Hall
1155 Observatory Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1319

Showtimes:

• Friday, October 24th, 2008 – 7:00 – 9:00pm
• Saturday, October 25th, 2008 – 7:00 – 9:00pm
• Sunday, October 26th, 2008 – 4:00 – 6:00pm, lecture with director at 7pm

Contact information:
Brock Janikowski [email]
(608) 262-1143

About the movie:
BEAUFORT and Joseph Cedar’s Films: Biography, History and the transformative power of Film Art “In order to have peace of mind, you have to believe that a film speaks for itself and that people evaluate your work for what it is,” said Israeli director Joseph Cedar in an interview with Robert Welkos for the Los Angeles Times, (January 16 2008), when his film BEAUFORT was selected as Israel’s 2008 official entry in the Academy Awards’ best foreign language film category, the first such nomination for an Israeli film in twenty four years. Peace of mind is not the easiest task to achieve in the Israeli hectic context. Peace is certainly not the experience BEAUFORT depicts. The famous saying goes- when war canons roar- the muses keep silent. Israeli filmmakers, and Cedar among them, have kept creating Israeli and world acclaimed filmic art in this demanding national and social context. Should filmmaking offer escapist pleasures in a social and national demanding and challenging reality- or should it engage in reflecting upon and commenting on the social-political reality within which it is created? How does a war film- an anti-war film such as “BEAUFORT” comment on the particular Israeli context, and in what ways does it engage in a universal commentary on a painful and violent human existential experience so relevant and ongoing around the world? BEAUFORT got a world wide recognition for its universal cinematic value, awarded with the “Silver Bear” award for Best Director in the Berlin International Film Festival. It is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful Israeli films of the decade, as well as a winner of four Israeli academy awards for best cinematography, editing, art direction and sound. Based on the popular novel by author Ron Leshem, which was inspired by real events, “Beaufort” is a tense drama about a young Israeli commander and his troops guarding a mountaintop outpost in the waning days of Israel’s 18-year military involvement in Lebanon. One of the mythological and bloodiest battles in 1982, when the first Lebanon War broke, took place in a magnificent 12th century Crusaderfortress- Beaufort- which gave the film its title and the Israeli soldiers in Lebanon a myth to sustain and to survive. “The mountain was considered the most strategic spot in southern Lebanon and the first place that any military has to take over if they want to control the region,” Cedar explains in an interview. When the film “Beaufort” opened in Israel in March of 2007, its antiwar tone generated widespread debate in Israel. “The first Lebanon war was the first war that wasn’t in consensus in Israel,” Cedar explains. “The battle of Beaufort triggered the first crack in the consensus.” The fact that the film’s release followed Israel’s 2006 reentry into Lebanon in the wake of cross-border attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas no doubt played a role in that heated response. The resulting 34-day battles of the Second Lebanon War left many Israelis disillusioned and critical of the war, and made Cedar’s film all the more relevant. Cedar and his crew filmed Beaufort only one month before the Second Lebanon War broke, not on the original Beaufort, but on another mountaintop with an ancient Crusader fortress called Kalat Namrud in the Golan Heights. The site is near the Lebanese border and within view of the actual Beaufort. The filmmakers used 50 trucks to haul in 1,000 tons of concrete, creating a replica of the original Beaufort outpost. The Israeli army allowed Cedar and his team to rent military equipment for the film. The fact that the Beaufort story was so widely known and that Leshem, author of the Israeli best selling novel from which the film is adapted had co-written the screenplay with Cedar ultimately helped his cause. The Israeli film critic Yair Rave, wrote: “one of the reasons I like Cedar’s films so much is… his ability to merge the Israeli spirit… with the universal cinematic codes”. Beaufort is a fine example of an excellent war film, using universal relevant cinematic codes of the genre at their best, and still infusing them with the unique Israeli experience. It is no wonder, since Cedar, who served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces, and who served as a soldier and reservist in the Lebanon war, knows as first hand, lived experience the reality his film transforms into art.

In fact, one of the unique characteristic of Cedar’s cinematic oeuvre so far is his powerful and accurate depiction of the Israeli experience in all of its richness and complexity, from an authentic departure point that characterizes current Israeli filmmaking. Cedar’s own biography is a juncture of meanings which intersect and complicate the Israeli social and political reality: religious and secular versions of Israeli Judaism. Nationalistic right wing and pacifist left wing attitudes to the national Israeli experience, entailing different views of war and peace, the Israeli territory and Jewish history, the conflict and its resolution, individual private lives and collective-communal and national dictates.

Joseph Cedar was born in New York in August 31 1968, one year after the grand Israeli victory of 1967 in the “Six Day War”. His family of Orthodox Jewish background moved to Israel when he was just about to go to school. He went to a Hebrew Israeli school of the religious stream, and a Yeshiva High School. Cedar grew up in Jerusalem, graduated Philosophy and History of Theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Film Studies at New York University. His debut film, Time of Favor, won six Israeli (Ofir) Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film depicts the Messianic undercurrents and aspirations of the nationalistic religious Zionist right in Israel, and the dangers in associating religious and nationalistic fanaticism with arms and weapons. Although the film mercilessly criticizes the Jewish orthodox-national extremism in the West Bank, it has far reaching implications for other nationalistic, religious militant fanatic movements. Cedar did not settle for his own biographical background but actually moved and lived for two years in one of the Jewish settlements as part of his making of the film. His Second film CAMPFIRE (2003) won five Israeli (Ofir) Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (for Cedar). In this film, again, Cedar describes a piece of Israeli social and historical reality he experienced first hand in his own biography, as member of the “Benei Akiva” youth movement, which supports the idea that Jews should settle every part of biblical Israel, and as member of a family which participated in the settlement enterprise the film depicts. “Time of Favor” and “Campfire” deal with the complexities and mixed emotions Cedar has toward the “settlers”, a reality he knows first hand and criticizes from within. “I never saw it as something political,” he says in the LA Times interview about this chapter in his biography. “It was a great, social, exciting, romantic time for us.” Yet in his films, Cedar transform his personal experiences, biography and identity negotiations into powerful social and historical cinematic commentary which capture collective communal experiences. Furthermore, as in BEAUFORT, he carries these personal and collective Israeli experiences, through his artful use of the medium and art of film onto universal human realms.

Chosen Towns: The Story of Jews in Wisconsin’s Small Communities

a documentary film for public television

The Production Chosen Towns was produced by docUWM, a documentary media center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Art’s film department that offers students opportunities to produce professional work under the guidance of faculty. Chosen Towns is a partnership between docUWM and the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning’s Wisconsin Small Jewish Communities History Project. Students worked for two years in tandem with the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning to research and produce this film. The statewide broadcast of Chosen Towns is presented by Wisconsin and Milwaukee Public Television.

Chosen Towns was made possible by a generous grant from the Helen Bader Foundation. Additional funding was provided by The LE Phillips Family Foundation, Inc. and The Lucy and Jack Rosenberg Philanthropic Fund.

Screenings

All screenings will feature Q&A with student filmmakers and local experts

Television Broadcast

Wed., Oct. 15, 7pm – Statewide Broadcast of Chosen Towns on public TV