Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies

Tickets are $25 | $20 for Spertus members, and include a kosher lunch. To guarantee a lunch, please reserve by March 13. For reservations call 312.322.1773.

Multi-media presentation and book signing. Free, but reservations are recommended. Call (312) 322.1773.

Free, but reservations are recommended. Call 312.322.1773.

In 2006, poet Joy Ladin convened a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review to debate the challenges — both aesthetic and moral — of poetry about the Holocaust. What is a "good" Holocaust poem? How have poets grappled with this, ... (more)confronting the limits of art, language, and imagination? In this special Yom HaShoah conversation, Ladin and DePaul University professor Eric Selinger explore Holocaust poetry, including Ladin’s own remarkable work, The Book of Anna, a collection of narrative poems and diary entries written in the voice of a fictional Czech-German Jewish concentration camp survivor.

An open discussion and booksigning follow.

Tickets are $25 | $20 for Spertus members, and include a kosher lunch. To guarantee a lunch, please reserve by May 7 For reservations call 312.322.1773.

In 1068, the scholar Salomon ben Isaac — better known as Rashi — returned home to the family winemaking business. He embarked on a path that ... (more)indelibly influenced the Jewish world, writing the first Talmud commentary and secretly teaching Talmud to his daughters.

In the first book of Maggie Anton’s dramatic — and romantic — trilogy, Joheved finds her spirit awakened by religious study, but has to keep her passion hidden. Must she choose between marital happiness and her study of Talmud?

Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members, and $10 for students. Call 312.322.1773.

As the unbelieving child of immigrants, Louis Zukofsky (1904 – 1978) sought to study his way out of his father’s Lower East Side sweatshop and to write his way into Western literary history. He did so by placing ... (more)himself among the "high modernist" poets, whose conception of culture was often covertly or explicitly anti-Semitic. Dr. Mark Scroggins’ new book explores Zukofsky’s growth into one of his century’s most fascinating and complex poets, growth paralleled by his navigation of poetry and Jewishness, and his discovery of Jewish-inflected modernist poetics, which continue to influence and inspire contemporary poets.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members | $10 for students. Call 312.322.1773.)

SYNOPSIS: The graphic novel – an exciting, alternative form of storytelling – is increasingly attracting the attention of literary critics and scholars. Dr. Rachel Rubinstein introduces Jewish contributions to this ... (more)genre, from Jewish artists who created comic superheroes more than half a century ago to current graphic novelists, such as Art Spiegelman and Joann Sfar, who address identity, politics, history, and sacred texts in their works.

Rachel Rubinstein received her BA from Yale University and her PhD from Harvard University and is currently assistant professor of American literature and Jewish Studies at Hampshire College. A widely published scholar, her work has appeared in such journals as American Quarterly and Shofar. She is co-editor of a forthcoming essay collection titled Arguing the Modern Jewish Cannon.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members | $10 for students Call 312.322.1773.)

SYNOPSIS: By the 1920s, some 500 small U.S. cities and towns had Jewish populations of 100 to 1,000. In his most recent book, Dr. Lee Shai Weissbach explores how these communities came to be, celebrates their heyday, ... (more)and considers how small-town life differed from the experiences of Jews in America’s larger cities.

Lee Shai Weissbach is widely published on the experience of Jews in the United States. Professor of History at the University of Louisville, he has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Scholar Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members | $10 for students. Call 312.322.1773.)

SYNOPSIS: Benjamin Disraeli was the only Jew ever to serve as Prime Minister of England. He was a Jew in a nation of Christians, a novelist and dandy in the famously earnest Victorian age, and a conservative during ... (more)the high tide of liberalism. Author Adam Kirsch illustrates how Disraeli turned his Jewishness from a social handicap into the source of his personal allure and his enduring political vision.

Adam Kirsch is a book critic for the New York Sun. He is a published poet and author whose work regularly appears in publications such as The New Yorker and The New Republic.

This program is free, but reservations are requested. Please call the United States Holocaust Museum’s Midwest Office at 847.604.1924. In May 1939, the Cuban government turned away Hamburg–America Line’s MS St. Louis, which carried hopeful Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. The passengers sought ... (more)safe haven in the U.S. but were rejected again and forced to return to Europe. Scott Miller, of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, recounts how he and a team of researchers—through historical detective work and an exhaustive media campaign—discovered the fates of the 937 passengers of the St. Louis. After an investigation that spanned nine years and half the globe, they can tell the stories of those whose plight symbolizes global indifference to the fate of European Jewry.

Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members | $10 for students Call 312.322.1773. Two award-winning authors read from their compelling narratives of growing up Jewish and female in Chicago. At the center of both are tensions — between tradition and secular ideas and between hope for the future and ... (more)the emotional hold of the past.

Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus members | $10 for students. Call 312.322.1773. Resurrecting Hebrew The stirring story of how Hebrew was transformed from a dead language to the living tongue of a modern nation, Ilan Stavans' quest begins with a dream featuring a beautiful woman speaking an unfamiliar ... (more)language. The language is Hebrew, and he sets out in search of the man who revived it at the end of the 19th century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Stavans raises important questions about the role language plays in Jewish survival, questions that explore the origins of Israel and the idea of a promised land.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students) Renowned doctor and anthropologist Melvin Konner takes the measure of the "Jewish Body," considering sex, circumcision, menstruation, and even those most controversial of microscopic markers—Jewish genes. Konner looks at views of Jewish ... (more)physiology held by non-Jews, and the way these views seeped into Jewish thought. He describes the first nose job and writes about Nazi ideology. With grand historical and philosophical sweep, The Jewish Body explores the subtle relationship between the Jewish conception of the human body and a bodiless God.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students) In this eye-opening film and beautifully crafted memoir, a young half-Muslim, half-Christian woman from Boston travels (with a suitcase of camera equipment) to India to connect with a tiny Jewish community and her family’s Jewish past. ... (more)Author and filmmaker Sadia Shepard discovers a cast of remarkable characters and confronts haunting legacies of Jewish, Indian, and Pakistani history in this unforgettable story of buried identities, forbidden love, and poignant self-discovery.

(Jewish Book Club tickets are $25 | $20 for Spertus Members. Price includes a tea—with savory and sweet treats by Wolfgang Puck at Spertus. Please reserve by April 30.) In this daring memoir, Reva Mann shares her ultra-Orthodox upbringing and her life-changing journey. Daughter of a respected London ... (more)rabbi, she rebels into a spiral of sex and drugs before struggling to find balance between the spiritual and the everyday. For those who have grappled with their own spiritual longings, and for anyone fascinated by traditional religion and its role in modern society, this is an unforgettable read. Rachel Kohl Finegold, the Education and Ritual Director at Chicago’s Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation, leads the discussion.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students; Parking is available at Children's Memorial Hospital at 2316 N. Lincoln and at Parking in the Park at 550 W. Webster for $6 with authorized ticket stub or validation from Greenhouse Theater Center box office.) Reception at 6:30 PM / Program ... (more)at 7 PM An affinity for kitschy album covers became a quest as Josh Kun and Roger Bennett scoured attics and garage sales to collect once-loved gems. In Jewish recordings from the 1940s-1980s they discovered sacred songs, Jewish mambo, comedy, folk tunes, and the “holy trilogy” of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. Their book includes commentary from writers and performers including Aimee Bender, Michael Wex, Shalom Auslander, Sandra Bernhard, Motown legend Lamont Dozier, and TV pioneer Norman Lear. With music and visual images, Josh Kun will share how these recordings speak across generations to tell a vibrant tale of Jews in America.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students) Dahlia Finger is 29, depressed, whip-smart, honest, resolutely single, and unemployed. She spends her days stoned in front of the TV, watching movies repeatedly, like "a form of prayer" until her so-called life is upended by an aggressive ... (more)brain tumor. Hear Elisa Albert discuss her writing of this dark, fearlessly funny story of terminal illness, in which she walks the line between gravitas and irreverence and between candor and compassion.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students) In this religious coming-of-age story, Danya Ruttenberg finds, loses, and finds again like-minded seekers in her winding, semi-reluctant path through traditional Jewish practice – a path that eventually takes her to the rabbinate. Hear ... (more)Rabbi Ruttenberg discuss her journey, a story that weaves the discipline of traditional Judaism to her 21st-century life.

(Tickets are $20 | $15 for Spertus Members | $10 for Students) Although shoes appear in some of the most foundational biblical stories, they are generally regarded as only lowly accessories. With contributions from disciplines as diverse as fashion, visual culture, history, anthropology, theology, and ... (more)even performance, Jews and Shoes urges a fresh look at the makings and meanings of shoes in Jewish experience. Join editor and contributor Edna Nahshon for her revelations about why shoes are worthy of serious inquiry.