Jews of the Americas February 2024 Newsletter
JOTA Director Dalia Wassner with CMJS Director Leonard Saxe, Jessica Liebowitz, Brandeis University President Ronald Liebowitz, and event co-host Alex Heckler ’98.
Photo Credit: The Louis Collection
Dear JOTA colleagues and friends,
As we start our spring semester, I am happy to share that, along with Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies Director Leonard Saxe, I recently traveled to Aventura, FL to join Brandeis University President Ronald Liebowitz and present the Brandeis Initiative on the Jews of the Americas to alumni and friends. The event welcomed over 150 guests and reflected their enthusiasm for our important work in expanding the depth and breadth of knowledge about global Jewry and Israel-diaspora relations to include Latin American Jews and their dynamic communities.
This coming semester will be a busy one for JOTA, featuring research, public programs, travel, and an academic conference.
- On June 10, 2024, we will bring together in conversation Rosa Lowinger, Cuban-born conservator, writer, and founder of RLA Conservation, LLC and David Fixler, architect and lecturer at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design to explore the role of Jews and their experience of diaspora as it relates to the modernist movement in architecture in the mid-20th century. (Brandeis University was itself erected during this architectural period.) Rosa Lowinger will also discuss her new book Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House, 2023). Please see full event details and registration information below (the event is free but registration is required).
- On April 8, we will host Adrián Krupnik, in collaboration with the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, for a discussion of his latest book, Between Two Homelands: Argentine Migration to and from Israel (Alabama University Press, 2023). Dr. Krupnik will speak to the experience of “return migration” among Argentines who have migrated to Israel and then left, undergoing at times multiple migrations. Understanding “aliyah” as part of the diaspora experience and vice-versa, the event will include Professor Jonathan Sarna as a respondent, a leading scholar in US history who helped pioneer the concept of “return migration,” now applied to the Latin American arena.
- From April 13-19, JOTA will accompany Brandeis Travel on a trip to Cuba, where the initiative’s expertise will contribute a specialized lens to the educational experience.
- On May 7-8, JOTA welcomes scholars from across the Americas and around the world to Brandeis as we convene for an academic workshop titled “Jewish Immigrants, Local Communities, and International Jewish Organizations in Twentieth Century Latin America and the Caribbean: A Triangular Relationship.” Keynote address by Sergio Widder, Latin America Director of the JDC. The workshop is a collaboration between JOTA, JDC Archives, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA), and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ), and will focus on the relationship between Jewish communities in Latin America and the Caribbean and international organizations such as the Joint and HIAS, which connect Jews in the United States to communities across the hemisphere.
On the research front, JOTA has undertaken a new collaborative project with Fuente Latina that aims to better understand the Latin American-Israeli experience of the October 7th attacks. Argentine migrants and others from Latin America played significant roles in the life of many of the kibbutzim that were victimized by those horrific attacks, and their experiences diversify our understanding of Israeli society and the current conceptions of the trauma and losses endured by those involved in these unspeakable crimes.
We hope that you will join us for our upcoming events and programs, and we invite you to be a part of our groundbreaking work that bridges conversations between the academy and the community.
Best regards,
Dalia Wassner
Director, Brandeis Initiative on the Jews of the Americas
June 10, 2024
A Brandeis University 75th Anniversary Event
6:00-7:30 pm
Featuring: Rosa Lowinger (Brandeis '78) and David Fixler
In memory of Professor Gerald Bernstein, Tribute by Carol Davis (Brandeis '80)
This conversation, in memory of beloved Professor Gerald Bernstein, showcases Brandeis' participation in the world of mid-century modernist art and architecture—movements intimately connected with Jewish diaspora and the promise of the future that coincided with the founding of our university by the US Jewish community in 1948.
Join us as art and architecture conservator and author Rosa Lowinger and architect and scholar David Fixler explore together their responsibilities to the material world as it intersects with the dynamic forces of time and memory.
The event will include a book signing for Rosa Lowinger's latest book Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House, 2023), where intergenerational trauma and healing are narrated through the unique lens of a Cuban-born entrepreneur, trained to maintain artistic and architectural integrity by intimately understanding the object's origin story and then making it viable and relevant to the present.
Co-sponsored by the Rose Museum, Brandeis Alumni Association, New England Conservation Association, and JFS Metrowest
Panelists
Cuban-born writer and art conservator, Lowinger is the founder of RLA Conservation, LLC, one of the largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms in the United States. Lowinger is a fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome.
Architect and lecturer at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, Fixler is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Association for Preservation Technology (APT), Peer Review Architect for the United States General Services Administration, and leader in multiple global conservation organizations.
Meet the Director, Jews of the Americas
Dalia Wassner, PhD, is the director of Jews of the Americas, an initiative of Brandeis University at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. Dr. Wassner is a historian whose research and teaching is dedicated to providing more inclusive and interdisciplinary approaches to the Jewish Diaspora and broadening the academic fields of Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies and Diaspora Studies.
Dr. Wassner is the author of Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina (Boston: Brill, 2014), which illuminates the intersecting roles of Jews and public intellectuals in bringing democracy to post-dictatorship Argentina. She is guest-editor of the launching issue of the journal Latin American Jewish Studies (Spring 2022), and her scholarship has been published in numerous academic journals, including Latin American Research Review, Iberian and Latin American Studies, Contemporary Jewry, and Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Dr. Wassner serves on the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Board of Directors, the Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia Editorial Board in the field of Latin America, and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry Board of Directors.