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
January 22, 2025
7 pm EST | Online
The Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
HBI is honored to have supported Kerry Wallach’s research on this with a 2019 HBI Research Award.
Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. After she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing.
Kerry Wallach is Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College.
Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit is available at Amazon, Bookshop, Penn State University Press (30% off with code NR24), and your local bookseller.
This event will be recorded and shared with registrants.
February 3, 2025
12 pm EST | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
HBI Seminar Series
Dr. Jordan Katz, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, HBI Scholar in Residence
Jordan Katz’s current project examines the delivery records kept by Jewish midwives in eighteenth-century Europe. In this lecture she will explore the paths that midwives took to pursue training and licensure, the populations they served, and the larger urban contexts in which they worked. By keeping records and engaging in municipal business, Jewish midwives became part of larger recordkeeping efforts as well. Katz's work reflects on what we can learn from these records about the diverse Jewish communities that populated 18th-century Europe.
Katz is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2020. Katz has received fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Center for Jewish History, and the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Social Studies, and in Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History.
As a scholar in residence at HBI, Katz is completing her current book project, Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe.
February 10, 2025
12 pm EST | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
HBI Seminar Series
Dr. Rachel Perry, University of Haifa, HBI Scholar in Residence
Rachel Perry’s current project examines graphic albums and artwork created by Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust. She is particularly interested in the perspective of gender and how it impacted and shaped early Holocaust research institutions and artistic initiatives. At HBI, Perry is working on her manuscript which will consist of six chapters, one on each survivor artists: Ágnes Lukács, Edith Bán Kiss, Elżbieta Nadel, Regina Lichter-Liron, Zofia Rosenstrauch, and Luba Krugman Gurdus.
Perry teaches in the Weiss-Livnat Graduate Program for Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa. Her research straddles the fields of art history, visual culture, and Holocaust studies, focusing on the representation and memory of the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period and questions of ethics, exhibition design, and cultural diplomacy. She is the recipient of fellowships from EHRI, the Getty, the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts, Yad Vashem, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
Shofar (To Catch One’s Breath), 2024, Archival pigment print, 24 x 30 inches
Photo Credit: Hannah Altman
February 13, 2025
Exhibition Dates: February 13 - June 12 | Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University
Opening Reception: February 13, 5:30-7:30 pm at the Kniznick Gallery
Artist Talk: March 20, 6:30 pm in-person at the Kniznick Gallery and online | Register to join online
In As It Were, Suspended in Midair, Hannah Altman’s photographs examine how Jewish myths are shared, inherited, and reshaped across the diaspora. Altman draws from Yiddish literature and Jewish mystical texts as she situates her female protagonists in lush landscapes and fraught interiors. Animated by sunlight, their postures, gestures, environments, and ritual objects foreshadow abundance and danger. Their mere presence threatens dominant narratives grounded in patriarchal tradition. Layering symbols and allusions, Altman builds a world that recasts and transforms Jewish ritual and folklore toward the world ahead.
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey and based in Boston. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs portray lineage, folklore, memory, and narrative. Her work has been exhibited at major museums and galleries. Her first photobook Kavana (2020, Kris Graves Projects) is housed in permanent collections including the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library. Her new monograph, We Will Return to You (2025) is published by Saint Lucy Books.
February 26, 2025
4 pm EST Hybrid: In-Person at HBI/Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
The Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Inspired by a true story, We Would Never is a gripping mystery, an intimate family drama, and a provocative exploration of loyalty, betrayal, and the blurred line between protecting and forsaking the ones we love most.
“We Would Never is utterly spellbinding. Mirvis has written a knockout exploration of the ways people shape and misshape their lives through anger, and the lines people never believe they'll cross until they do.”—Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink
Tova Mirvis, a former HBI Scholar in Residence, is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as three novels, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller.
We Would Never is available now for pre-order. For those attending at HBI, books will be available for purchase and signing at the event or pre-order now and bring it to the event for signing.
This event will be recorded and shared with registrants.