Co-sponsorships
Tea Arciszewska's Miryeml (1958/59) and Yiddish Plays by Women —
On Sept. 24, the Melton Center partnered with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures to host Sonia Gollance, lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. Dr. Gollance discussed playwright Tea Arciszewska's life and magnum opus Miryeml. Miryeml is a modernist masterpiece that deftly integrates 20th-century history and Jewish folklore into a narrative about children’s response to pogroms and the Holocaust. The playwright was a dazzling figure in the prewar Warsaw Yiddish culture scene – as an actress, dramaturge, salonnière and arts patron. She began writing Miryeml in Yiddish in the 1920s in response to the pogroms that followed World War I in Ukraine. By the time she published it in the 1950s, Miryeml was also understood to be about the Holocaust. Heralded by Yiddish critics as a powerful memorial to the million children murdered in the Holocaust, Miryeml received an I. L. Peretz Prize from the Congress for Jewish Culture for best Yiddish drama. Yet this play was not performed until 2024, when two staged readings of Dr. Gollance's English translation came at a time when depictions of children hiding in cellars had a startling new resonance. Dr. Gollance also addressed her broader project as managing editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama (the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project’s database of English-language synopses of Yiddish plays) to locate and include works by women.
Jewish Book Award Winner Ronald Balson in Conversation with Robin Judd —
On Nov. 12, the Melton Center partnered with Gramercy Books to present National Jewish Book Award winner Ronald Balson in conversation with Robin Judd, Professor of History at Ohio State. Ronald H. Balson is an attorney, professor and writer. He talked about his powerful and dramatic WWII novel, A Place to Hide, which explores the deeply-moving actions of an ordinary man who resolves, under perilous circumstances, to make a difference.
Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara —
On Nov. 14, the Melton Center partnered with the Columbus Jewish Film Festival to present a screening of Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara. This provocative period drama set in 19th-century Italy recounts the abduction and forced Christian conversion of a Jewish boy by Papal decree. In 1858 Bologna, young Edgardo is taken from his family and sent to Rome to become Catholic, despite his parents’ desperate pleas and public outrage.13 The struggle to reclaim their son echoes Italy’s burgeoning nationalism and challenges the Vatican’s power. This epic uncovers a dark chapter of tyranny in the Church, artfully contrasting clashes of faith with a nation teetering on revolution. Melton Center Director Hannah Kosstrin introduced the film.
The Ninth Circle —
On Nov. 14 and 17, the Melton Center partnered with the Wexner Center for the Arts for a screening of The Ninth Circle. When it came to dealing with recent history, Yugoslav filmmakers often had surprising angles that defied expectations. This poignant seventh feature by France Štiglic – known as the director of the first Slovenian feature made after World War II – deals with the subject of the Holocaust through direct representation of concentration camps for the first time in Yugoslav cinema. This was a new restoration of the 1960 film.
Righteous Anger as a Political Emotion: Jews, Arabs, and the Question of Palestine, 1947-1949 —
On Nov. 18, the Melton Center partnered with the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies to co-sponsor a lecture in the Department of History with Derek Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Dr. Penslar discussed how anger is an emotional response to an unmet desire, a protest against deprivation. Righteous anger, also known as indignation, asserts the right to that which has been denied to a person. Like other feelings, righteous anger can be scaled up from the realm of individual interaction to that of the collective. In domestic and international politics, the performance of righteous anger anchors an interest group and legitimizes its cause, especially when it is in conflict with other actors. His talk analyzed the role of righteous anger in Jewish and Arab discourse on the disposition of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. During the debates at the United Nations about the Palestine Question in 1947, both sides claimed to have been overlooked and betrayed by the international community. Their indignation was a protest against the indignity that had been visited upon them (by antisemitism and colonialism respectively) and an assertion of entitlement. The 1948 war only deepened each side’s grievances and belief in its own righteousness. As the subsequent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has demonstrated, righteous anger is a durable political emotion that can be transmitted across generations.
Music and Sounds Across Traditions: An Evening of Listening —
The Melton Center co-sponsored “Music and Sounds Across Traditions: An Evening of Listening,” presented by the Center for the Study of Religion on Feb. 27. This community-building event focused on religious sound and music and featured instrumental and vocal performances from individuals, community groups, religious organizations and additional friends, all sharing an example of musical or sonic practice from their tradition. Focusing on the role of sound and music in local religious practice, this event worked to build community relationships and showcase connections between sound and religion in Central Ohio. Performances included contemporary Jewish songwriting, Christian hip-hop, Theravada Buddhist chanting, Qur'anic recitation, Druid liturgy, Jazz saxophone and more. This event was supported by the Diane Cummins Community Education Fund and co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute and the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio.
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union —
On March 3, the Melton Center partnered with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures to present a talk with authors Harriet Murav and Sasha Senderovich, who presented their upcoming book, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, translated from Yiddish and Russian. The next day, they each presented their monographs. Harriet Murav’s book, As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine, is about poetry and catastrophe, violence and relief work, artistic literature and documentation, injury and care. Sasha Senderovich’s How the Soviet Jew Was Made is a close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film that recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity.
How Do You Draw a Jew? Ethnic Caricature in the Early 20th Century —
On March 6, the Melton Center partnered with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library to present a Zoom talk with Jeff Marx, author of Smoothing the Jew: Abie the Agent and Ethnic Caricature in the Progressive Era. Long before the crypto-Jew, Superman, was Abie Kabibble, who appeared in Abie the Agent, the first syndicated Jewish comic strip in America, and one of the longest running ethnic comics.8 Published in newspapers throughout the US from 1914 to 1940, Abie presented a very different image of the Jew than had previously appeared on the vaudeville stage, in novels and on phonograph records. Author Jeff Marx’s slide presentation and talk focused on anti-immigration sentiments by American nativists in the early 1900s and shared the challenges faced by Jewish graphic artists of that time who sought to present Jewish caricature in more positive ways.
Performative Reading of Simone Forti: improvising a life —
On March 19, the Melton Center partnered with the Department of Dance to present a performative reading of Simone Forti: improvising a life by Ann Cooper Albright, Professor of Dance at Oberlin College. Simone Forti is a groundbreaking dance improvisor of Italian Jewish heritage whose family escaped Italy in 1938. She has spent a lifetime weaving together the movement of her mind with the movement of her body to create a unique oeuvre situated at the intersection of dancing and art practices. Her seminal Dance Constructionsfrom the 1960s crafted a new approach to dance composition and helped inspire the investigations of Judson Dance Theater. In the 1970s, Forti's explorations of animal movements expanded that legacy to launch improvisation as a valuable artform in its own right. The event included Dr. Albright leading audience participants in Forti’s seminal movement score Huddle (1961).
SHTTL —
On March 20, the Melton Center partnered with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures to present a screening of the film SHTTL. Set in 1941, French filmmaker Ady Walter’s timely directorial debut presents a visually dynamic portrait of a Yiddish Ukrainian village at the border of Poland, just 24 hours before the Nazi invasion known as Operation Barbarossa. The film at once brims with the vitality, politics and romance of everyday life in a traditional shtetl and communicates a sense of imminent danger—a feeling that is perhaps heightened by our knowledge of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Filmed in contemporary Ukraine and using a single, unflinching shot, SHTTL presents a day in the life of a Jewish village before it disappears.
[Don’t] Look Now: Jews and Nakedness —
On April 3, the Melton Center partnered with the Metaphors of Reception, Reception as Metaphor working group to host a talk with Simon Goldhill, professor in Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Goldhill looked at how Jews responded to the question of public and private nakedness in and against the tradition of classical culture, with a particular focus on “grooming” and the body, and how this rhetoric of proper behavior changes repeatedly over time as different cultural norms frame Jewish life in different places and times. He asked when and how Jewish regulation either follows or resists the norms of the dominant culture in which they live, and thus opens the idea of Jewish tradition to a new form of analysis.
Author Karen Kirsten on WWII memoir with Robin Judd —
On April 15, the Melton Center partnered with Gramercy Books to present author Karen Kirsten with Robin Judd, Professor of History at Ohio State. Writer and Holocaust educator Karen Kirsten talked about her memoir, Irena’s Gift, an epic World War II memoir of sisters, secrets and survival, that was a finalist for the Zibby Book Award for Best Family Drama and Best Story of Overcoming. In this Holocaust Remembrance Day program, Kirsten was in conversation with noted Holocaust historian Dr. Judd.
Workshop on Religion, Work and Business —
On May 2 and 3, the Melton Center supported the Center for the Study of Religion (CSR) to host a gathering of scholars who study the intersections of religion, work and business. They discussed how to most effectively translate their scholarly work to stakeholders outside the academy, including corporate executives, HR professionals, workers and students. With a focus on Ohio-based companies, this initiative strives to address an array of issues including challenges faced at work by adherents of minority religions, barriers that prevent employees from coming forward with requests for religious accommodation and strategies adopted by companies for addressing those challenges.
Workshop: Other Europes: (Hi)stories from the Edges of the Old Continent —
On May 7, the Melton Center supported a workshop hosted by the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies presenting innovative historical interpretations on 20th-century European history by pushing the boundaries of geographical fields and the conventions of disciplinary methods. The contributions spanned studies of displacement, emigration and transnational solidarities; explorations of space, memory, trauma and identity; and analyses of protest, activism and human agency. They added to existing scholarship on political transitions, political violence, mobility, survival, resilience and remembrance. Methodologically, the papers engaged with transnational archival research, narrative nonfiction techniques, oral history interviews, visual analysis and participant observation to excavate and present both the histories of the old continent and the stories of its inhabitants. Based on the pre-circulation and discussion of unpublished work-in-progress, the workshop provided a forum to enrich our knowledge of Eastern European history, broadly defined, and facilitates the future publication of cutting-edge scholarly articles and books.
