Please join us on Wednesday, December 3, at 5:00 p.m. ET, for a book talk with IIJS’s own Professor Naama Harel. She will be joined by Professor Beth Berkowitz to discuss her recent book, The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction. This talk will be held in person at 617 Kent Hall.

Jews, women, and animals have been notoriously considered in Western thought as antithetical to the “civilized,” and therefore parallel. The trope of the womanized Jewish man has been widely recognized as a staple in otherizing portrayals of European Jews, as well as their self-perception. Similarly, ecofeminist critique has addressed the ubiquitous depiction of the animalized woman throughout history. Yet, the interconnection between the effeminization of Jews and the animalization of women has been overlooked.

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically explores the tangled interplay between Jewishness, gender, and animality and its manifestation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Through interdiscursive analysis and close readings, the effeminate Jew is examined vis-à-vis the animalized woman. Intertwining cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of posthumanism and animal studies with established scholarship of Hebrew literature, Jewish studies, and gender studies, Naama Harel offers new Hebrew literary historiography and innovative perspectives on canonical works by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Devorah Baron, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Yosef Haim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and David Vogel.

Naama Harel directs Columbia’s Hebrew program and co-chairs the University Seminar for Human-Animal Studies. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of Modern Jewish & Hebrew literature and Human-Animal Studies. She is the author of Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human/Animal Barrier (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She has authored books such as Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron Prize for Outstanding First Book in Jewish Studies), and is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include animal studies, Jewish difference, rabbinic legal authority, and Bible reception history.

*Guests must register by Monday, December 1 to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

To register, click here: https://www.iijs.columbia.edu/upcoming-events/2025/12/3/book-talk-the-jew-the-beauty-and-the-beast-gender-and-animality-in-modernist-hebrew-fiction

Join IIJS and MESAAS in welcoming Yitzhak Lewis on Wednesday, December 10, at noon ET. His book talk on Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship in Jorge Luis Borges will take place in person at 617 Kent Hall.

In his recent book, Yitzhak Lewis explores the thought of Argentine author and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on questions of authorship and literary tradition. The book focuses on Borges’ engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions, highlighting the role of this engagement in developing and expressing his views on these questions. The book argues that the primary relevance of Borges’ persistent reference to “the Judaic” is not for understanding his attitude towards Jews and Judaism but for understanding his position in contemporary Argentinian debates about nationalism and literature, empire and postcolonialism, populism and aesthetics. By broadening the frame of “Borges and the Judaic,” this book shifts the scholarly focus to the poetic utility of Borges’ engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions. This allows a better understanding of the nuance of his views on the issues that most animate his oeuvre: authorship and writing, literature and tradition.

Yitzhak Lewis is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2016. His research interests include comparative literature in Hebrew, Spanish, and Yiddish, literary and cultural theory, transnational writing, and world literature. His book, A Permanent Beginning: Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity (SUNY, 2020), explores the connections between the storytelling of Nachman of Braslav and imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 18th century. His book Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship, in the Writing of Jorge Luis Borges (Rutgers, 2025), explores the central role of Jewish literary and intellectual traditions in the writings of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. He has edited a volume on “Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America” for In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (2021) and is currently co-editing a collection titled One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature in China about the reception history of Jewish literature in China from World War I until today. His work has been published in Variaciones Borges, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, and Journal of Latin American Jewish Studies.

*Guests must register by Monday, December 8 to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.

To register click here: https://www.iijs.columbia.edu/upcoming-events/2025/12/10/games-of-inheritance-kabbalah-tradition-and-authorship-in-jorge-luis-borges-with-yitzhak-lewis