Carol Zemel, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at York University will present Critical Israel at CU Monday, April 16 at 7:00 pm.

Israel is a dynamic, complex, and challenging country to understand. The University of Colorado Boulder’s Hillel and the Program in Jewish Studies continue their Seeing Israel series with a look at the intersection of visual art, politics and social justice. The Seeing Israel series events are free and open to the public but RSVPs are appreciated. RSVP to Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call 303.492.7143. Additional information can be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

In its early days, Israeli art was largely described as utopian. Today, artists in Israel wrestle with critical social and political issues. Join us on Monday, April 16 at 7:00 pm for Critical Israel: Art by Yael Bartana and Roee Rosen on the CU Boulder Campus in University Memorial Center Room 235 for an evening with art historian, Carol Zemel who will focus on the acclaimed video installations Polish Trilogy…and Europe will be stunned by Yael Bartana, and Confessions of Roee Rosen by Roee Rosen. Her presentation will focus on questions of loss, rights of return, and conflicts of national identity raised by these two works by Israeli artists. Finally, she will also discuss the presentation of these artistic pieces and their meanings outside Israel for diasporic audiences.

Zemel is professor of Art History and Visual Culture at York University in Toronto. Her areas of research and publication include 19^th and 20^th century European art, the modern art market, feminism in the arts, Jewish visual culture and diaspora studies. She is an authority on the work of Vincent Van Gogh as well as the co-founder and co-director of Project Mosaica, a web-based exploration of Jewish cultural expression in the arts. Indiana University Press will publish her new book, “Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora” in late 2012. She is currently completing two books: Art in Dark Times, a study of images made by prisoners during the Holocaust, and “Right After: Chaos and Culture After World War II.”

These events have been made possible by generous donors to CU’s Hillel, the Program in Jewish Studies and the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

Ever wonder why everyone talks about You Tube all the time – or what they are talking about? Ever wonder how Judaism fits into this new craze? Now is your chance to find out!  Two of our tech savvy young  staff members have scoured the internet in order to bring the best of Jewish You Tube to you!

Join us on Thursday April 5 at noon at the Boulder JCC, to find out how YouTube, Facebook and the internet are being used as wildly creative expressions of Jewish identity and forms of cultural connection.

From Jon Stewart to the “Maccabeats,” there is a lot of humor as well as opportunities to learn about Jewish culture on the internet. If you have ever wondered about the internet and how it relates to Judaism, join us at the Boulder JCC for a lunch, viewing, and discussion about our sampling of these videos.

The program is on Thursday, April 5  at noon at the Boulder JCC and the cost is $8 for lunch and program.

Professor David Shneer, Singer Chair in Jewish History at CU. (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)

Although World War II is one of the most documented conflicts of the twentieth century, western audiences have had little exposure to Soviet photographs of that war. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, based on David Shneer’s critically acclaimed book of the same title, presents over sixty images that are about Soviet aesthetics and narratives of World War II as much as they are about the Soviet photojournalists who made those images. The majority of Soviet photojournalists were Jewish, coming from mid-sized towns in southern Russia, and raised on the cusp of modernity. In Russia, throughout the 19^th century, most Jews, unless granted special permits, were forced to live in prescribed regions of the Russian provinces, known as the pale of settlement, outside of major metropolitan centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. Photography was a new, risky, and entrepreneurial profession, which allowed Jews who came from afar to sustain themselves in St. Petersburg, the capital of tsarist Russia, and then in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union.  There, they thrived as artists and documentarians and entered an urban sphere of art, politics, and culture, previously unavailable to members of their socio-economic, cultural, and religious spheres.

Dmitrii Baltermants, Russian (1912-1990), Grief, 1942; gelatin silver print, circa 1990; 36 ½ x 43 5/8 inches; Loan from the Collection of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh; Image courtesy of Michael Mattis; © Estate of Dmitrii Baltermant

The exhibition presents 58 photographs, printed at numerous scales over six decades, by the most important Soviet photojournalists including Evgenii Khaldei, Georgii Zelma, and Dmitrii Baltermants. These photographers took aesthetically arresting war images and were also the first to document the liberation of Nazi atrocity sites, three years before better-known photographers like Margaret Bourke White and Lee Miller chronicled the liberation of concentration camps in Germany.

The photographs featured in the exhibition span the Nazi-Soviet war, from June 22, 1941 until V-Day on May 9, 1945, with an opening section that contextualizes the wartime images within the Constructivist and Socialist Realist traditions of Soviet photography in the 1920s and 1930s.  Canonical images appear side by side with photographs that have never before been exhibited.

The exhibition also highlights the central challenge to avant-garde aesthetics and to “art” itself that was posed by the war and by Soviet culture of the time. In this challenge, social and political purpose—as expressed through documentary photography, superseded or in some cases merged with avant-garde modernist sensibilities to create a new aesthetic—one that has continued to echo across art history and influenced future art movements of the 20^th century and beyond.

In addition, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes places canonical images side-by-side with photographs that the curators found in the photographers’ archives currently housed in private collections and that have never before been exhibited to the public. The exhibition also draws attention to the large number of Soviet photographers who were Jewish and explores aspects of what this religious and cultural identity might have meant for the photographers when confronting the war and Nazi atrocities through Soviet and Jewish eyes.

The exhibition also features three vitrines of archival materials, including contact sheets, glass negatives, scrap books, diaries, Soviet publications, and the photographers’ personal book maquettes.

THROUGH SOVIET JEWISH EYES: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

curated by David Shneer, Director, Program in Jewish Studies and Professor of History, University of Colorado and Lisa Tamiris Becker, Director, CU Art Museum

September 8-October 22, 2011

Opening Reception, September 7, 2011, 6 – 8 PM ∙ CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder

Lecture and presentation with Professor David Shneer

Thursday, September 8, 7:30 PM Colorado Photographic Art Center, Belmar Center, Lakewood, Colorado

Lecture and exhibition tour with Professor David Shneer

Thursday, September 15, 7 PM ∙ CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder

Film maker Amitai Gross, son of Reb Victor and Reb Nadya Gross of Pardes Levavot.

I attended an excellent movie the other night. It was filmed and produced by Amitai Gross, son of Reb Victor and Reb Nadya Gross, and a friend of mine from BBYO back in the day. It was funny seeing him again after a few years, and not just because I barely recognized him with the short hair and beard. It was because somehow I knew he’d find a way to blend music and Tikkun Olam.

His documentary “Music in the Key of Peace”, though rough around the edges, was an excellent film. In it Amitai captures four neutral organizations geared towards coexistence in Israel, all of them using music as their medium for bringing Jews and Arabs together.

Most of the time, when you hear about Middle East peace groups, their orientation is pretty clear: for Israel or for Palestine. They want to end the conflict but favor one side over the other. (That seems a bit pointless, don’t you think?)

Of course, there are also neutral groups, both here and abroad: groups whose aim is not for either side to win, but for both of them to just get along; an antidote to incitement on both sides. However, even in neutral groups there is a looming hurdle, and that hurdle is language. How can the two sides ever hope to coexist if there’s limited understanding between them?

This is where the ideas of people like Amitai are important. Music is the perfect bridge because it is something that is universally understood. For instance, I listen to a lot of Japanese music–while I don’t understand half the words, I can still connect to the feeling behind the music. That’s what makes Music in the Key of Peace and other similar projects so powerful. If the feeling is peace, then music is the best way to communicate that feeling because it can go outside of words and language to connect people on both sides of the divide.

“>

l-r: Morah Yehudis Fishman, Reb Zalman Shalomi-Shecter, Rabbi Marc Soloway, Reb Victor Gross, Rabbi Ori Har DeGenaro, Reb Nadya Gross, Amitai Gross, Rabbi Josh Rose.

Kudos, Amitai. I hope that someday your documentary has a wide audience and spreads the word that coexistence in the Middle East is possible.

More pictures of the event:

Related articles:

4 Questions for Filmmaker Amitai Gross

Music in the Key of Peace

But I digress, though not for long.

Comedy Central is looking less like comedy and more like central, as in left-winger. That is not a problem for me, though it may be for their ratings. But what is operative here is the term “extreme.” Not extreme left-winger, but just extreme.

Their latest antic is a new game they have posted on their site that goes by the name, “I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!” The word ISRAEL is an acronym for Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser Lady, a robot that is sent to wantonly destroy anyone in its path. Wouldn’t that normally be the territory of HAMAS (Humans Animated to Murder and Assault Subhumans) or Hezbollah (Humans easily Blowing Life and Limb from All other Humans)? I notice Comedy Central doesn’t pick on Hamas. Probably this is because someone from that fascist organization might actually kill or bomb Comedy Central and they know Israel is easy picking.

I can say this with more than idle speculation because they seem to have caved in to Islamist intimidation;  they pulled back from the brink when those “boys will be boys” Southpark creators decided to make fun of the image of Mohammed in a recent episode. Threatened directly by the aforementioned intimidation, the following episodes of Southpark showed distinctly more diffidence to the image of Mohammed.

Excuse me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it at least a bit cowardly to do this even though it is also being prudent? I mean, if humor is an ironic take on the truth, and your behavior in making fun of Israel and the Jews is itself motivated ironically with kowtowing to the anti-Israel lobby simply because your scared, then isn’t Comedy Central the butt of the joke here? Let me say this more directly: Is Comedy Central trying to show the radical Islamists that it is a good little Jew-hater? Is Comedy Central crying and shaking in its boots as it slaps around the Jews? If THAT isn’t funny, then what is?

You’re right if you say that isn’t really funny. It is sad, pathetic irony, though.

Apparently they remember the murder of Theo Van Gogh and others who didn’t back down from such threats. Did they just find a way to genuflect in the direction of Islamist Waziristan? At the expense of the Jews? So much for the search for irony and truth! Thanks for throwing us under the bus you little rascals, you.

There may be another explanation, maybe a co-attendant explanation with the one above. Those people at Comedy Central are very creative people. You see, maybe they just hate Jews, Judaism and Israel and have caught that particular virus going around. So this mainstream of channels just spouts what it sees as no longer a fringe idea.

If you don’t believe me, then go look for yourselves. A robot named I.S.R.A.E.L kills all women, animals and children in its path. Here is a breakdown of how the point rewards for the killings are doled out:

200 points :: Killing a Bird
400 points :: Killing an Older Civilian
500 points :: Killing a Cow
500 points :: Killing a Young Boy
700 points :: Killing a Little Girl

From such things are Third Reich’s created.

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/game_player/index.jhtml?game=271497

Below is an email from HonestReporting.com on the issue:

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/You_Lied_to_Me,_Jew_Producer_Comedy_Central_Shocker.asp

“You Lied to Me, Jew Producer”: Comedy Central Shocker
An offensive online game plays on an association of Israel as a child killer.

Recently, the Comedy Central TV network censored an episode of the popular South Park cartoon following threats from Islamic extremists offended at the show’s portrayal of the Prophet Mohammad. But while Comedy Central was perceived to have caved in on a matter of free speech, it appears that the network exercises double standards when it comes to producing genuinely offensive material.

Currently appearing on Comedy Central’s website is a game called “I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!”. The premise of this game has nothing to do with Israel and, as such, is nothing more than an insidious attempt at association. The game’s introduction begins with a character who states:

You lied to me, Jew Producer

referring to a character who has failed to carry out a mission to destroy other child-like cartoon characters. If this piece of anti-Semitism isn’t bad enough, a robot – the Intelligent Smart Robot Animation Eraser Lady – is sent to do the job that the Jew Producer failed to achieve.

The character openly calls the robot by its acronym – ISRAEL – and the association created by those behind this game is unmistakable – Israel the child killer.

The game then involves the robot destroying everything and everyone in its path, including children and animals.”

UPDATE: (from HonestReporting.com)

Comedy Central has removed the offensive phrase “You lied to me Jew Producer” from the game’s introduction. While the game no longer appears prominently on the website, it is still accessible and has not been removed.”

Elvis Shmelvis

Today is your last chance to get in on the fun!

All you need to do is submit your favorite photo of yourself for the Boulder JCC’s community photo exhibit. Just email the image or images you want included in the show, “Me, Myself and Eye,” to kathryn@boulderjcc.org. Send baby pictures, vintage pictures, funny or sweet pictures, any picture that captures your essence or shows you at your best. You know, the ones you dug up and posted on Facebook! The drop-dead deadline: Wednesday, April 28 at 5 pm.

Then come join us on Sunday, May 2 at 6 pm here at the Boulder JCC (3800 Kalmia) to find out how your friends once looked! And stay for the 7 pm screening of “Shmelvis: Searching for the King’s Jewish Roots.” This outrageous documentary follows an Orthodox Elvis impersonator and an unorthodox rabbi on their quest to discover the truth behind the rumors that Elvis was, according to halacha, Jewish, and that he strongly identified with that part of his heritage. Why did he donate $150,000 to Memphis Hebrew Academy? Why did he wear a diamond-studded Chai? Why did he place a Star of David on his mother’s grave?

We’ll be serving some of Elvis’ favorite foods at the reception. Apple pie? Yes! Peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwiches? No!

There will also be Elvis trivia. Is it true that Graceland receives more visitors than Hermitage, Monticello, Hearst Castle and the White House combined?

And, of course, we’ll play music by the King during the reception. So put on your blue suede shoes and join us at the Boulder JCC Sunday – or you ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

Subjects can be anything from street musicians to prime ministers, humble shopkeepers to intellectuals, teachers to activists to pro-bono giving doctors and lawyers. We want to hear from your grandmother and your little brother. We want to be moved, inspired, and touched by the full diversity of the contemporary Jewish experience.

We want you to share with us the Jewish people you find most inspiring. Perhaps we’ll find them inspiring too.

As opposed to all those “other” contests out there “Jews That Do” is Grass Roots, completely user generated and taps the web 2.0 community by utilizing new media and social networking.

He/she who enters the video Wins. That someone can be You. There is no age limit, but you do have to be at least Bar/Bat Mitzvah age. It can be someone you know well. Or someone you don’t. Maybe you’ve seen a stranger on the street, in the subway, or at your office who inspires you and are able to catch him/her on film. The only requirement is that all subjects be Jewish (as liberally defined by Taglit, Birthright).

And don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be professional! Use your cell phone, flip camera, digital camera, video camcorder, anything that takes video clips. In return, we’ll share your “Jew-Doer” with the world and give you the opportunity to win some fantastic prizes!

• GRAND PRIZE WINNER: 13″ MacBook Pro
• First & Second Runners-Up: Ipod Touch
• Third, Fourth and Fifth Runners-Up: 8G Ipod Nano

Important Contest Dates:  Accepting entries through January 31st, 2010!!  Voting Begins February 1st, 2010.

Winners Announced online and in person @ The Jewlicious Festival, February 21st, 2010.

If you enter – please send us the link!

Click here to read the Colorado Daily story from his appearance at CU in February, 2009. You’ll probably hear a lot of Matisyahu in the coming months: NBC is using his “One Day” as the music for some of their Winter Olympics advertising – first video:

Second Video – from Late Night on David Letterman, 12/18/09: