Lunch: 12:30-2:00pm; Evening Lecture: 6:00pm–7:30pm

These events have been postponed. Please check back shortly for further information on the rescheduled dates

Lunch Conversation with Riv-Ellen Prell and Vanessa Ochs: “Nostalgia, Memory and Meaning in American Jewish Lived Religion"

The lunch conversation between Dr. Prell and Dr. Ochs will explore new ways to understand Jewish practices that may not appear to be typically religious. Who determines if they are “authentic,” or “meaningful?” What place do they have in American Jewish culture? How do they draw on history and memory, and what impact might that have on how people think about what it means to be Jewish?

Register for the lunch conversation here.

Evening Lecture: “Renaming Buildings, Confronting History: Antisemitism and Racism in American Public Universities"

Uncovering histories of American colleges and universities has become vital to understanding the nation’s structures of power, usually concealed behind an ideology of the virtues of a liberal education. As faculty and students dive into their university archives, they have brought to the surface remarkable and often long-forgotten stories of abuses of power and discrimination, and also of student resistance. These findings have inspired many to confront historical injustices, including rethinking who universities choose to honor. This lecture tells the story of the 2017 exhibition at the University of Minnesota which focused on the 1930s on campus when racism, antisemitism, and anticommunism created a public  university that excluded Black students from taxpayer-funded housing, and targeted Jewish Left-wing students for political surveillance. Jewish and Black students were excluded from many activities of campus life, and then blamed for their treatment when they protested or demanded change. The exhibition initiated a student movement to hold the University accountable for its history in 2018 by renaming buildings honoring those who were responsible for discrimination. The Board of Trustees rejected the demands, and in the process replicated this historic abuse of power.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and the Memory Project at UVA.

Register for the evening lecture here.

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Riv-Ellen Prell is Professor Emerita of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and a long-time faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work is at the intersection of anthropology and history and  is the author and editor of many books and articles about American Jewish life, specifically about the social, political and cultural dynamics of gender, religious practices, and antisemitism. Her books include Prayer and Community: the Havurah in American Judaism (which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award), and Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation, as well as a edited volumes including Women Remaking American Judaism.

She is the Curator of the 2017 University of Minnesota exhibition, “A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930-1942,” the most attended exhibition in the University’s history, and its website, which has received nearly 40,000 visits. She is the recipient of the Marshal Sklare Memorial Award for distinguished scholarship and service of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, and the Max Friedman Award for Outstanding Contribution to American Jewish History of the American Jewish Historical Society.