Please Join us for a lecture with Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
"Exodus: Narrative or Anti-Narrative?"
Tuesday, April 24th at 7:30 PM
Click here to RSVP
The narratives underlying Sarah’s death and Rebecca’s marriage release a hidden midrashic theme. We will explore sources that suggest a common dynamic.
AVIVAH GOTTLIEB ZORNBERG is the author of The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, for which she won the National Jewish Book Award (JPS 1995, paper Schocken 2011), and The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus. (Doubleday 2001, paper Schocken 2011) Her latest book is: Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Hardcover–February 24, 2015). She was born in London and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, where her father was a Rabbi and the head of the Rabbinical Court. She studied with him from childhood; he was her most important teacher of Torah. She holds a BA and PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. After teaching English literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she turned to teaching Torah. For the past thirty years, she has taught Torah in Jerusalem. Dr. Zornberg holds a Visiting Lectureship at the London School of Jewish Studies. She travels widely, lecturing in Jewish, academic, and psychoanalytic settings.
Co-sponsored by: The New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) in Los Angeles
Lovingly sponsored in memory of Gloria D. Nimmer
FALL 2018
Concert: Ensemble for These Times - Émigrés & Exiles in the Film Industry and Los Angeles
Date: Sunday November 18th, 2:00 PM
Location: Hillel at UCLA
Free and open to the public
Website: http://www.e4tt.org/
Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is a Northern California-based new music chamber group whose mission is to bring new, nearly new, forbidden, and forgotten music to light, focusing on 20th and 21st century music that is relevant, engaging, original, and compelling: music that resonates today and will speak to tomorrow. E4TT’s “Jewish Music & Poetry Project” focuses on works by composers who were exiled or killed in the Holocaust, as well as music with texts by Jewish women poets or by women composers.
The Villa Aurora at 520 Paseo Miramar is located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and has been used as an artists residence since 1995. It is the former home and refuge of the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta after they fled from the Nazis in the 1940s. The Feuchtwangers bought this Spanish-style mansion in 1943 for only $9,000, the annual salary of a school teacher. The house was a popular meeting place for artists and the community of German-speaking émigrés. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote six of his historical novels in this house.
To RSVP: https://hillelatucla.wufoo.com/forms/rljf80l02s0c3p/
This event is co-sponsored by:
SPRING 2019
Wednesday, April 17 2019
ROYCE HALL AT UCLA
340 Royce Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Conductor Murry Sidlin, who created "Defiant Requiem" and has made it central to his musical life, has designed the evening as a complete performance of Verdi's masterpiece intertwined with narration, film clips and survivor testimony. In effect, the piece places Verdi's Requiem in tragic historical context, its musical sections alternating with recitations by Sidlin and two actors (Tovah Feldshuh and Peter Riegert), plus historical footage and video soliloquies from those who sang or listened in Terezin and miraculously lived to tell the story.
The sheer force of so many musicians delivering Verdi's quasi-operatic Mass very nearly overwhelmed the listener, as it was intended to do.
But add to this the sight of Terezin survivors on screen recalling what it was like to perform the Verdi Requiem when you didn't know if you would live to see another day, and the evening ceased to be merely a concert. Instead, it was by turns a statement of faith in the face of atrocity and a profound remembrance of those who were murdered for their identities.
-Howard Reich , Chicago Tribune. March 24, 2017
PAST EVENTS
theatre dybbuk in association with the Dortort Center
Presents
World Premiere of the play
lost tribes
Written and directed by artistic director of the theatre dybbuk
Aaron Henne
This event has reached maximum capacity
Click here to sign up for the wait list
Date: March 10th 2018, 8:00 PM
Location: Spiegel Auditorium at UCLA Hillel
574 Hilgard Ave. Los Angeles CA, 90024.
Inspired by the stories of the lost tribes of Israel, theatre dybbuk presents a full-length theatrical work, rich in movement, original music, and lyrical language that relates ancient mythological and tribal narratives to contemporary questions of integration, appropriation, and belonging.
In the early eighth century BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, from whence it has been said that ten of the twelve ancient tribes of Israel were deported and assimilated. These tribes are now lost to history, with a variety of folktales, legends, and theories about their fates having come about since that time. Some are told from the point of view of those who regard themselves as members of a lost tribe, while others are told from an outside perspective in order to make a case for self-serving outcomes.
Framed in the context of a gallery exhibition, lost tribes weaves together stories from the Assyrian conquest to the present day, tracing a world history of assimilation and dominance; of cultural conquest, annihilation, and survival. The performance incorporates choreography by Kai Hazelwood and a live percussion score composed by Michael Skloff, created in collaboration with Emilia Moscoso Borja and Alex Shaw. The production is written and directed by theatre dybbuk's artistic director, Aaron Henne, and was developed with the ensemble.
Admission: Free and open to the public
Hourly parking is available at Parking Lot #2 on the corner of Hilgard Ave and Westholme.
Learn more at: http://www.theatredybbuk.org/lost-tribes
Staged Reading: "Suddenly, a Knock at the Door" by Robin E. Goldfin, based on stories by Etgar Keret
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Monday November 20, 2017, 8:00 - 9:30 PM
Lenart Auditorium at the Fowler Museum at UCLA
Free and Open to the Public
“I can’t do it like this!” protests the writer EITAN KATZEN to the BEARDED MAN, the SURVEY TAKER and the PIZZA DELIVERY woman who have come knocking at his door. Brandishing weapons, they make the stakes clear: a story or your life! So the writer held hostage to these three strange muses begins to weave his tales, played out on the stage by the same characters that are holding him captive.
Suddenly, a Knock at the Door is a new play adapted by Robin Goldfin and directed by Jeff Maynard, with live instrumental music by Oren Neiman, based on stories by award winning Israeli author and filmmaker Etgar Keret. It is a celebration of storytelling and the magic of art—an ensemble piece written for six actors and two musicians playing some thirty different roles.
Playwright Robin Goldfin has chosen eight stories from the latest critically acclaimed anthology by Etgar Keret to create the comic drama of a modern writer weaving eight extra-ordinary tales in the middle of Tel Aviv. Here stories are the currency, a matter of life and death. Here, stories make us real and teach us (with a nod to Scheherazade) how to face the difficulties of life—from the absurd to the unbearable—without resorting to violence or abusing your power.
In “Suddenly, a Knock at the Door,” Mr. Goldfin’s innovative script, Mr. Keret’s unique imagination and Mr. Neiman’s original music combine to bring this play to vibrant life. Click here to read a review of the play by New York Times.
Left Image: From left to right: Antonio Minino, Alyssa Simon, Jeffrey Swan Jones, Kenneth Talberth, Gilad Ben-Zvi, Oren Neiman, Elanna White, Stephen Thornton. Right Image: From left to right: Elanna White, Kenneth Talberth, Jeffrey Swan Jones.
One of Israel's most celebrated writers, Etgar Keret is the author of six collections of stories that have been translated into more than 30 languages. In the U.S., his work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine and The Paris Review. He has also been a frequent contributor on NPR's This American Life.
This event is presented by The Dortort Center for Creativity inthe Arts at UCLA Hillel in collaboration with the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA, the Jewish Women's Theater, and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
For questions, please contact Perla Karney at 310-208-3081 x108 or perla@uclahillel.org