On Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 7:30 p.m., Marci Shore, PhD, associate professor of history at Yale University and a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, will deliver the 2022 Joan and Henry Katz Lecture in Judaic Studies.

This lecture, presented by Fairfield University’s Bennett Center for Judaic Studies and co-sponsored by Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, is free and open to the public, and will be delivered in-person at Fairfield’s Kelley Center Presentation Room, and via Zoom webinar. Please register to attend at fairfield.edu/bennettprograms. 

A hundred years after Scholem Aleichem and Isaac Babel wrote of timid Jewish tailors and emasculated yeshiva boys, and Bruno Schulz painted hunched Jewish men — sometimes crawling — shunned by coldly enticing women, Jews are making the pilgrimage from the Pale of Settlement to Jerusalem in reverse. In her lecture, Dr. Shore will discuss how Israeli Defense Force veterans are training Ukrainian soldiers, Hasids are wearing vyshyvankas under their tefillin, and as Europe hovers on the edge of the third world war, a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian accused of being a Ukrainian Nazi has stepped into the role of Winston Churchill.

Dr. Shore's essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Eurozine, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current project, titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe.”

Reservations are requested for this lecture. For more information about other Bennett Center events, visit fairfield.edu/bennett.