Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak

WEBINAR: Zygmunt Bauman was one of the great social thinkers of our time: the inventor of the idea of “liquid modernity.” Bauman transformed our thinking about the social conditions shaping our lives today. His own life was shaped by the great social forces that scarred the second half of the twentieth century – war, communism, antisemitism, and forced migration (exile from Poland). His work bears the traces of an outsider (Jew?) who knew all too well the enormous impact that social and political forces can have on individuals and whole societies.

WEBINAR: In the early twentieth century, when the dream of Jewish cultural nationalism in the Diaspora was growing among champions for Yiddish, its leading intellectuals included the “Yiddish historians” who helped to uncover the history of East-European Jews. Before the Holocaust, their mission was to discover and present the formative history of a living people to an audience of educated lay leaders, drawing, where possible, on Jewish sources, in order to help build and fortify a Yiddish-speaking nation. After the Holocaust, their mission became to console its surviving remnant with information about the struggle to survive under German occupation. This book makes Yiddish writings by these historians available in English for the first time, with translations by historian Mark L. Smith.

WEBINAR / March 8 at 10 am, Jewish Renewal in Poland’s webinar Freighted Legacies will interview Igor Golyak, the director of the enormously successful play “Our Class.” Igor Golyak is the founder and muse of Arlekin productions. Our webinar will focus on the genesis of this play in its American version. […]