Events
View our past events page to watch recorded events.
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All of HBI’s events are free and open to the public. HBI is pleased to participate in the Mass Cultural Council’s Card to Culture Program.
Upcoming Events
Left: Lauren Bergman, "Tema Schneiderman", Oil on cradled panel, 36 by 36 in. Right: Tema Schneiderman, member of the Jewish underground in the Bialystok ghetto, with family members. Source: Yad Vashem.
Photo Credit: painting, Lauren Bergman
Art Exhibition
September 7 to October 25, 2023
Kniznick Gallery, Epstein Building, 515 South Street, Waltham
Gallery Hours: Monday-Wednesday: 10 am-4 pm, Thursday: 10 am-6 pm, Friday-Sunday: 11 am-3 pm.
An immersive exhibition of painting and music. Painter Lauren Bergman and composer Ella Milch-Sheriff honor young women and girls murdered in the Holocaust by using art to imagine the lives they might have led. Listen to Milch-Sheriff's composition accompanying Bergman's portrait of Tema Schneiderman.
Read At Brandeis, A New Holocaust Memorial Unlike Any Other, by Kara Baskin of JewishBoston.com, and watch the powerful interview, Art exhibit at Brandeis University reimagines lives cut short by Holocaust, by NBC Boston's Eli Rosenberg.
Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated is presented in partnership with the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation.
Now I know their names: Family members murdered in the Holocaust.
Photo Credit: ©Karin Rosenthal 2023
October 11, 2023
7:00 pm ET / Hybrid
In person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery and online.
Six members of the HBI Holocaust Research Study Group (HRSG) will discuss aspects of their own work that intersect with the themes of the Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated exhibition. A panel discussion will follow, focusing on questions and issues raised by the exhibit and reflected in our individual work.
Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated, an immersive exhibition of painting and music. Painter Lauren Bergman and composer Ella Milch-Sheriff honor young women and girls murdered in the Holocaust by using art to imagine the lives they might have led.
Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated is presented in partnership with the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation.
October 17, 2023
7:00 pm / In Person
Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery
Join HBI for the book launch of The Weavers of Tratenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust, by Janine Holc, newest offering in the HBI Series on Jewish Women.
Holc’s talk is paired with Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated, an immersive exhibition of painting and music. Painter Lauren Bergman and composer Ella Milch-Sheriff honor young women and girls murdered in the Holocaust by using art to imagine the lives they might have led.
Holc will consider Bergman’s paintings that deal with sexual assault to present the instances of survivors responding to being forced to be naked in 1944 and how they remember their teenage selves responding. She would contextualize this instance with material on how they found themselves in these forced labor camps and how gender played an important role in how these women experienced the Holocaust.
Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated is presented in partnership with the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation.
October 18, 2023
12:30 pm ET / Online (new time)
Join HBI for an in depth conversation between noted scholars Janine Holc, author of The Weavers of Trautenau: Female Jewish Forced Labor in the Holocaust (2023) and Joanna Michlic, HBI Research Associate and Editor, Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present: History, Representation, and Memory (2017), about the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on Jewish families and communities, especially the lives of women and girls. Both works are publications in the HBI Series on Jewish Women.
The Weavers of Trautenau is available at Brandeis University Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present is available at Brandeis University Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
Register here to join this event
Susan Chen, Free Tampax, 2023, Ceramics Installation, Tampax Box: 6” W x 7” D x 7.5” H Free Sign: 3” W x 3” D x 2.25” H
Art Exhibition
November 2 to December 14, 2023
An ambitious, multidisciplinary exhibition that looks at abortion and reproductive justice through the lens of faith, bringing Jewish feminist artists into dialogue with artists from other faith communities and backgrounds. Curated by Caron Tabb, Deeply Rooted brings together 21 national and international artists working in sculpture, photography, painting, fiber, and video.
Supported by grants from Combined Jewish Philanthropies/CJP and the Mass Cultural Council.
Opening Reception
November 2, 2023
5:30-8:30 pm / In Person / hors d’oeuvres
Welcoming remarks and artists talk at 6:30 pm
Kniznick Gallery, Epstein Building, 515 South Street, Waltham
Register here to join this event
November 7, 2023
7:00 pm ET / Hybrid
In person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery and online.
A presentation by visiting artist Claudia Bernardi, followed by a discussion between Bernardi and Professor Toni Shapiro-Phim about the power of art, moderated by HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe.
Tying into HBI’s art exhibition, Deeply Rooted: Faith in Reproductive Justice, Bernardi will focus on the tenacious search for the right of identity while looking at the merging of activism, art, human rights, legal demands and the pursuit of justice which includes the necessity to design and preserve laws that will ensure gender and reproductive rights.
Bernardi will focus on the intersection of art and human rights, with special emphasis on Argentina, where she lived during the military junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983 (Argentina’s "Dirty War"), examining the role of artists and activists from the time of the military dictatorship until the present.
Register here to join in person
November 13, 2023
12:00 pm ET / Hybrid
In-Person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery and online.
Allegra Goodman, writer, independent
The Family Rubinstein
Allegra Goodman’s novels include Sam (a Read With Jenna Book Club selection), The Chalk Artist (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist).
At HBI, Goodman will finish a story cycle about a Jewish American family. In eighteen linked stories she tells the larger tale of the Rubinstein family—their relationships, their feuds, and their changing, sometimes contradictory beliefs about God, cake, politics, children, marriage, Israel, and history. She is particularly interested in motherhood, and in this project she considers Jewish mothers as creators, partners, caregivers, and complex individuals.
Please note this program will not be recorded as this is work in progress.
November 16, 2023
7-8:30 pm ET / Hybrid
In person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery and online.
In the post-Dobbs legal landscape, states across the US are passing laws that prohibit almost all abortions. These bans are inconsistent with the more subtle and complicated approaches to reproductive decision-making counseled by many faith communities. For many, they find support in their religious texts and values for respecting pregnant people's needs and visions for their reproductive lives. In this session, Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy will describe the ways in which religious traditions offer alternate ways of framing debates about abortion.
Details to come.
November 19, 2023
4-5:30 pm ET / Hybrid
In person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery* and online.
5:30-6:15 pm / Refreshments, gallery visits, book sales and signing by Ken Grossinger
* Kniznick Gallery extended hours until 6 pm
Ken Grossinger’s new book, ArtWorks: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World shows that when artists and organizers combine forces, new forms of political mobilization follow which shape lasting social change. The panel will discuss this concept as illustrated through two exhibitions, Deeply Rooted: Faith in Reproductive Justice at HBI’s Kniznick Gallery between Nov. 2 and Dec. 14 and Be the Change, on display through October at the corner of Kilmarnock and Van Ness in the Fenway, Boston.
Co-sponsored with JArts: Jewish Arts Collaborative
Moderator: Ruth Messenger
Panelists: Ken Grossinger, Caron Tabb, Cecily Carew
Concluding remarks: Laura Mandel, Executive Director of JArts, Olivia Baldwin, curator of the HBI’s Kniznick Gallery.
November 27, 2023
12:00 pm ET / Hybrid
In-Person at the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Kniznick Gallery and online.
Melissa Klapper, Rowan University
At Home in the World: American Jewish Women Abroad, 1860-1920
Dr. Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's & Gender Studies at Rowan University. At HBI, Klapper will be working on At Home in the World: American Jewish Women Abroad, 1860-1920. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the democratization of travel meant that going abroad became an increasingly common experience for American girls and women from a range of social strata, including Jewish girls and women. This book will explore the experiences of American Jewish girls and women as an illustration of broader trends in the rise of mass tourism and the turn-of-the-century challenges to gender norms while also attending to the specific American, Jewish, and gender identities that animated their travel for the purposes of education, sightseeing, work, activism, and family heritage.
Please note this program will not be recorded as this is work in progress.
November 28, 2023
11:00 am ET (online)
Anthropologist Lea Taragin-Zeller joins HBI Director Lisa Fishbayn Joffe in conversation about Taragin-Zeller's work, The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land. In this groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, Taragin-Zeller investigates the impact of recent Israeli state policies attempting to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families. Utilizing interviews to provide an intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state, Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting.
Lea Taragin-Zeller (she/her) is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in religion, medicine, gender, and reproductive politics. She is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee.
The State of Desire is available at Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.