Scholar in Residence Professor Nancy Harrowitz
with Service Leader Jack “Yankl” Falk
Join us in Astoria for a weekend of community and study with Professor Nancy Harrowitz, whose lectures will address the history of Jews in Italy and their challenges of emancipation and identity.
March 1 – 3, 2024 | Registration $245 per person
Program begins Friday at 5pm and runs through Sunday noon
Registration includes all study sessions, three kosher-style catered meals (Friday and Saturday dinners and Saturday lunch); Shabbat services on Friday evening and Saturday morning plus Havdalah Saturday evening; optional Saturday afternoon program; and an entertaining Saturday evening program. The registration fee does not include lodging costs.
Attendees are responsible for booking their own accommodations. A block of rooms has been reserved at the Holiday Inn Express in Astoria at the discounted rate of $165 per night. This special room rate is only available through February 11, 2024. Call 503-325-6222, ext. 0 and request the special Weekend in Quest room rate.
All study sessions, services, programming, and meals take place at the hotel. Saturday and Sunday breakfasts are included in the room rate for guests staying overnight at the hotel.
If you have questions, please email or call Gail Mandel at gmandel@ojmche.org or 503-226-3600 ext. 104.
OJMCHE thanks our co-sponsors to date for their efforts to promote Weekend in Quest: Beit Haverim, Cedar Sinai Park, Congregation Beth Israel, Congregation Kol Ami, Congregation Neveh Shalom, Congregation P’nai Or, Congregation Shaarie Torah, Congregation Shir Tikvah, East Side Jewish Commons, Havurah Shalom, Jewish Family & Child Service, Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, Oregon Jewish Life, Portland Jewish Academy.
PROGRAM
Friday, March 1, 2024
- Session 1: Jewish Identity in Italy, 1860 to Fascism
How did Jews integrate after the end of the ghettos? What was that freedom like? How did challenges from that era impact fascism and the life of Italian Jews in the 20th century? Case study: Cesare Lombroso, Jewish criminologist.
Saturday, March 2, 2024
- Session 2: Giorgio Bassani, and Jews under Fascism
How did one of Italy’s most well-known writers, the author of The Garden of the Finzi Contini, represent fascism in his hometown of Ferrara? How were survivors received after their return? Poem reading.
- Afternoon film screening: Facing Windows
Facing Windows is a contemporary film about a Holocaust survivor and the amnesia of postwar Italian society. It will be discussed during Sunday’s session. (The film can also be streamed prior to attending Weekend in Quest.)
- Session 3: Primo Levi and the Role of a Survivor
Primo Levi, as a Holocaust survivor, wanted to explore his other identities as well. We will discuss Shema, his best-known poem, that illustrates his position as an Italian Jew, as a survivor, and as a writer.
Sunday, March 3, 2024
- Session 4: The Aftermath: Post-War Jewish Life and Identity
We will discuss the film Facing Windows and view clips. The discussion will also address the challenges of postwar Holocaust memory and the legacies of emancipation and fascism for Jews in Italy.
Nancy Harrowitz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, and Professor of Italian and Jewish Studies at Boston University. She teaches courses on Holocaust literature and film, and on fascism and the Holocaust in Italy. Her most recent book is entitled Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor (University of Toronto Press, 2016). Professor Harrowitz has also published Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Matilde Serao and Cesare Lombroso (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), edited Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes (Temple University Press, 1995), and co-edited with Barbara Hyams Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Temple University Press, 1996), along with publishing articles on Italian Jewish authors such as Giorgio Bassani. Currently she is researching post-unification secular Judaism in Italy, including the work of criminologist Cesare Lombroso and his legacies, and the subsequent development of Jewish cultural identities. She directs the new major and minor in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies.
Jack “Yankl” Falk has been at the musical center of Yiddish cultural life in Portland and beyond for the past 40 years. Falk’s repertoire and performance reflects his long involvement with Hungary’s premier Yiddish ensemble, Di Naye Kapelye, with whom he recorded three acclaimed CDs of Carpathian Jewish roots music and performed at festivals across Europe. Falk’s quintet, The Carpathian-Pacific Express, features some of Portland’s finest indie musicians (3 Leg Torso, Blue Cranes, Klezmocracy) in an exciting new exploration that draws upon klezmer and Yiddish song, Romanian and Hungarian fiddle virtuosity, devotional Hasidic melody, Eastern European folk, American roots music, and much more. For more than 30 years, Falk produced and hosted the Sunday morning Yiddish Hour on Portland radio. A traditional singer of Jewish liturgy, he was recently featured in a New York Times article about itinerant High Holiday cantors.