Note from the Director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies

Greetings from Budapest! I received a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest where I will continue a research project on a group of Hungarian and Polish boys who were held at Auschwitz in the fall and winter of 1944. Although I am on sabbatical this semester, we still have had a lot of exciting programming this year. In the fall we hosted an Israeli Horror film festival and the annual Karen and Pace Robinson Lecture was delivered by Professor Olga Gershenson on Israeli Horror films. During end of October, in the days leading up to the presentation, a series of contemporary Israeli horror films were screened including the first feature length horror film, Rabies (2010); The Damned (Mekulalim, 2018); and JeruZalem (2015).   

This past spring we hosted "A Conversation with Art Spiegelman" which was funded by the Abraham and Rebecca Solomon and Ida Schwartz Distinguished Lecture on Judaic Studies endowment. The extremely well attended event arose in response to the banning of Spiegelman's Pultizer Prize winning work Maus by a local Tennessee school. 

We continue to offer a variety of classes in Jewish Studies ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew to classes on Judaism, Israeli Culture, Biblical Archeology, Ancient Judaism, and Hebrew bible. Last spring our course on Zionism which required students to do research projects, resulted in THREE students being awarded prizes at UT's annual Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement (EURēCA). I also was honored that my students nominated me for and I won a EURēCA mentor of the year award.  

This past summer I traveled to Israel to put together our new exciting class which will travel to Israel beginning in Spring 2024! 

 

Best Wishes, 

Helene Sinnreich