Ornit Barkai, Independent Filmaker.
HBI Scholar-in-Residence: June-August 2009.
Ornit Barkai's film credits include the documentaries From Anne Frank's Window, A Day in Poland, Past Forward (work-in-progress) which all explore post-Holocaust narratives from multi-generational perspectives, A Moment of Silence and Manhattan Moments which highlight 9/11 themes, and Let Them Fly which documents Jewish youth leadership in New England and is part of the media curriculum of the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education. Ornit offers diverse media production and broadcasting experience with regional and national radio and TV stations and international programming. She holds an M.A. in Mass Communications/TV Production emphasis from Emerson College.
At the HBI Ornit Barkai will carry out pre-production research for a documentary film on “The Polaccas” (Polish women in Spanish), young women from the shtetls of Eastern Europe who were forced into prostitution in Argentina and Brazil by members of the Argentinean Jewish crime ring Zwi Migdal during the 19th and early 20th century. Working in a cinema verite style, Ornit aims to make a documentary that will offer a glimpse of the historic consequences of the ordeal of these tragic women.
Michal Ben Ya’akov, Efrata College for Education, Lecturer, History Department.
HBI Scholar-in-Residence: Summer, 2009.
Michal Ben Ya’akov’s academic research centers around 19th and early 20th century Eretz-Israel, with special emphasis on North African and Sephardi Jewry. In recent years she has focused on Jewish women, particularly, but not exclusively in those communities. More recently she has focused on widows, both in these communities and in other settings. Combining her academic interests with her work teaching at the Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem, she has done research on the history of the school, originally the Mizrachi College for Women. She received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002.
Michal Ben Ya’akov’s project at the HBI will focus on the changing lives of Jewish immigrant widows from North Africa living in the various urban centers of 19th century Palestine. She will compare the widows' lives to those of widows in the communities of origin, as well as with those in other communities of the Holy Land, primarily Sephardi Jews from the Mediterranean Basin. Personal and communal resources meshed into new and changing networks and support systems, often defined by gender and personal status. These will be examined in light of theoretical and comparative research on widows in the fields of gender studies, geography, demography, economics, sociology and anthropology.
Past Scholars-in-Residence
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