Events
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The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is pleased to be a member of the Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture Program.
Upcoming Events
May 7, 2026
12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Edited by Goldie Morgentaler, PhD
Translated by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind
Letters from the Afterlife chronicles the experiences of two Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden. Chava Rosenfarb (1923 - 2011), Goldie Morgentaler’s mother, and Zenia Larsson (1922 - 2007) were childhood friends in Poland, lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, and parted soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish. Despite their continuing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish.
After Chava Rosenfarb’s death, Morgentaler found a stash of Chava’s letters to Zenia from 1945 to 1971. By bringing Chava's letters together with Zenia’s side of the correspondence, taken from the book Zenia published in Swedish in 1972, Morgentaler has created a testament to an emotional attachment between two women writers who had suffered through some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century and emerged with their humanity and ability to love intact.
Goldie Morgentaler is Professor Emerita at the University of Lethbridge, where she taught 19th-century British and American literature and modern Jewish literature. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb's work, including Rosenfarb’s epic Holocaust trilogy, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto.
Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson is available at McGill-Queen's University Press (EBOOK/PDF), Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.
Photo Credit: Sarah Wood
June 1, 2026
12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series. Cosponsored by The Jewish Library of Baltimore
Winner, 75th National Jewish Book Award in Education & Jewish Identity
Miriam Udel’s rich Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature explores the world of Jewish literature written for Yiddish-speaking children during the 20th century when the community clung to Jewish heritage while also helping their children make sense of being a Jew in the modern world. Udel elegantly traces how these stories and poems underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness, creating a world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
HBI is delighted to have supported Udel’s research for Modern Jewish Worldmaking. In 2022, Udel explored the "New Girl" — a creature of freedom and central character in Yiddish literature — as an HBI Scholar in Residence.
Miriam Udel is an associate professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University, and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press) and the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press).
Modern Jewish Worldmaking is available at Princeton University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.