Brandeis Magazine

Gannit Ankori has been named the Henry and Lois Foster Director and chief curator at the Rose Art Museum. Ankori, a professor of fine arts at Brandeis, has served as the museum’s interim director since July. She will lead all artistic and programming initiatives at the Rose as well as the museum’s management. Ankori and her team are planning an ambitious collection show to mark the Rose’s 60th anniversary this year, in addition to a schedule of rotating special exhibitions bringing new voices and perspectives to the museum. Ankori succeeds former director Luis Croquer, who left the museum in June.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public television station WGBH, has assembled an archive of all 29 episodes of “Prospects of Mankind,” a current-events TV series hosted by former First Lady (and Brandeis trustee) Eleanor Roosevelt from 1959-62. Most of the episodes were filmed at the Slosberg Music Center in front of a live audience. John F. Kennedy (then a U.S. senator), journalist Edward R. Murrow and philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich were among Roosevelt’s guests. Topics discussed included disarmament, the Berlin crisis, Vietnam and the status of women. Visit the AAPB website to watch episodes or learn more.

“All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War” (HarperCollins, 2020), by Paul Jankowski, the Raymond Ginger Professor of History, was named one of the best history books of 2020 by the Financial Times. The newspaper called Jankowski’s focus on the Geneva disarmament talks and the London world economic conference “a rewarding approach” to explaining the lead-up to World War II, and praised his “engaging narrative style.”

Jonathan Krasner, PhD’02, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis, is the co-author of “Hebrew Infusion” (Rutgers University Press, 2020), which won a National Jewish Book Award in the Education and Jewish Identity category. The book looks at how American Jewish summer camps teach a familiarity with Hebrew by using Hebrew words (mostly nouns) in English sentences, and why this hybrid approach attracts both criticism and praise.

Anand Patwardhan ’72, widely considered India’s preeminent documentary filmmaker for four decades, was profiled in the Dec. 6 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Patwardhan’s work is increasingly under attack by right-wing extremists, and his latest film, “Reason,” — which the Times article describes as “structured around the murders of four Indian activists, all of whom appear to have been targeted for their resistance to Hindu orthodoxy in some way” — is still officially unreleased in India, three years after debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the article, the 71-year-old Patwardhan talks about becoming an activist while at Brandeis: “Suddenly I was attending Black Panther rallies, going to jail for anti-Vietnam demonstrations.” College friend Sundar Burra ’71 is also quoted: “We had a joke about a certain [Brandeis] professor, that your grades in his course depended on the number of times you’d been to jail with him.”

The Boston Art Commission selected associate professor of painting Joe Wardwell to create a mural installation inside a renovated Boston Public Library branch in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Local poet Nakia Hill and high-school students from 826 Boston, a youth writing center, penned the poems featured in the installation, scheduled to be completed this spring. Wardwell, who lives in Jamaica Plain, maintains an art studio in Roxbury. His murals also appear at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and above Boston’s North Station.