Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
Photo taken by me (Lilithcat)

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies

610 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605

United States

312-322-1700

Web site: http://www.spertus.edu

Events: http://www.spertus.edu/programs/… (updated February 14)

Amenities: food/drink

Added by: lilithcat.  Contacted: Not contacted.  Venue ID: 299

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Upcoming events

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Past events

Jewish Book Club (March 19 at 12:00pm)
Rabbi David Fox Sandmel discusses The Misunderstood Jew, by Amy-Jill Levine.
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.
Added by lilithcat.
2008 Norman Asher Memorial Lecture. Unbuttoned: Clothes and the Making of American Jewish Comedy (April 13 at 2:00pm)
Ted Merwin signs In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture.
Multi-media presentation and book signing. Free, but reservations are recommended. Call (312) 322.1773.
Interested: lilithcat Added by lilithcat.
Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Program - Poetry of the Holocaust: New Texts and Enduring Debates (May 4 at 2:00pm)
Joy Ladin discusses The Book of Anna.; Eric Selinger.
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.
Added by lilithcat.
Jewish Book Club (May 13 at 12:00pm)
Rabbi Asher Lopatin discusses Rashi's Daughters, Book 1: Joheved, by Maggie Anton.
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?
Added by lilithcat.
Louis Zukofsky: The Modernist Poet as Jew (June 1 at 2:00pm)
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.
Added by lilithcat.
RACHEL RUBINSTEIN: "The Jewish Graphic Novel" (September 14 at 2:00pm)
Rachel Rubinstein discusses Jewish contributions to the graphic novel genre, from Jewish artists who created comic superheroes more than half a century ago .
(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.
Interested: bookjones Added by bookjones.
LEE SHAI WEISSBACH (September 21 at 2:00pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
ADAM KIRSCH: "Benjamin Disraeli: The Imagination of Power" (October 19 at 2:00pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
Scott Miller (December 3 at 5:30pm)
Scott Miller discusses Refuge Denied: The Search for the Passengers of the St. Louis.
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.
Added by lilithcat.
Ilana Blumberg, Joanne Jacobson (December 7 at 2:00pm)
Ilana Blumberg reads from Houses of Study.; Joanne Jacobson reads from Hunger Artist.
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.
Added by lilithcat.
Nextbook at Spertus (December 14 at 2:00pm)
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.
Added by lilithcat.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: MELVIN KONNER (March 29 at 2:00pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: Filmscreening & Booksigning with SADIA SHEPARD (April 27 at 6:30pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
Jewish Book Club: "The Rabbi's Daughter" by Reva Mann (May 3 at 2:00pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: JOSH KUN (May 6 at 6:30pm)
JOSH KUN signs And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost.
(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.
Event location: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614
Added by bookjones.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: ELISA ALBERT (May 18 at 7:00pm)
(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.
Event location: Space, 1245 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60202, 847-492-8860
Added by bookjones.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: DANYA RUTTENBERG (June 2 at 5:30pm)
(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.
Added by bookjones.
"Nextbook at Spertus" Event: EDNA NAHSHON (June 14 at 2:00pm)
EDNA NAHSHON signs Jews and Shoes.
(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.
Added by bookjones.

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