Jews of the Americas Spring 2024 Events
JOTA Director Dalia Wassner with CMJS Director Leonard Saxe, Jessica Liebowitz, Brandeis University President Ronald Liebowitz, and Florida spring 2024 alumni event co-host Alex Heckler ’98.
Photo Credit: The Louis Collection
April 8, 2024
6:00 - 7:30 pm
Mandel Center Atrium
Brandeis University
Join us as Adrián Krupnik discusses 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. Aliya will be discussed as part of diaspora processes; a dialectical activity that is not a singular step or uni-directional.
Professor Jonathan Sarna, a leading scholar in US history who helped pioneer the concept of “return migration,” will introduce the event. Professor Raanan Rein of Tel Aviv University, a leading scholar of Argentine Jewish history, will serve as the respondent.
April 13, 2024
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.May 7, 2024
7:00-8:00 pm, Mandel Center Auditorium
8 pm Dessert reception Mandel Center Atrium
JOTA will welcome 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 keynote address is our featured public talk held during a collaborative academic workshop hosted by the Brandeis Initiative of the Jews of the Americas and co-sponsored by JDC Archives, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA), and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ).
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.