Memory, Madness, Messianism: Thinking with My Father, the Messiah

Presented by the Arts & Sciences Dean of Humanities, the Department of MESAAS, the Institute for Israeli and Jewish Studies, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Columbia Journalism School, the Middle East Institute, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Registration required Tickets open on March 13 at noon EST.

Seating is limited. First come, first seated. Ticket holders should arrive ten minutes prior to the start. Non-affiliate ticket holders must email issg@columbia.edu by April 6 for campus access.

This event will not be recorded.

April 2 – Artist Talk with Moad Musbahi
5:10-6:30 PM
403 Knox Hall

RSVP here: https://mehratmoadmusbahitalk.rsvpify.com/

The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy, co-edited by Hans-Lukas Kieser and Khatchig Mouradian, was published by Bloomsbury in November 2025. Bringing together contributions from fifty established and emerging scholars, the volume surveys the rich body of research produced in recent decades on the late Ottoman period and its enduring legacies. Organized into seven chronological sections and comprising thirty-four chapters and eight supplementary essays, the 792-page handbook guides readers from the late eighteenth century through the early twenty-first century.

For more information, click here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ib-tauris-handbook-of-the-late-ottoman-empire-9780755644490/

March 2 – Artist Talk with Wendimagegn Belete

5:10-7:00 PM
208 Knox Hall

RSVP here: https://wendimagegnbeletemesaas.rsvpify.com

Two centuries of Orientalist scholarship have denied that Islam has a constitutional concept. Premodern Islamic political practice has been subject to mistranslation, misinterpretation and condescension through the eyes of colonisers, and judged inferior to the norms of Western liberalism. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar of Islamic law, sets the record straight in this groundbreaking volume. Traumatised by the tyranny of absolute monarchies, Europe came to see in Islam everything that it despised about itself. By seeking to understand Islamic governance from within its own tradition of reason, Hallaq reveals premodern Islam to have a rich and distinctive constitutional tradition: starting from the individual as a political subject up to the power of executives.

For more information, click here: https://oneworld-publications.com/work/radical-separation-of-powers/

February 18 – Artist Talk with Keli Safia Maksud

5:10-6:30 PM
403 Knox Hall

RSVP here: 

A lecture by Armen Abkarian

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

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

Bahar Behbahani, Margaret And Donald, from Declassified series, 2023.

BAHAR BEHBAHANI

November 19, 2025

4.10 PM – 6.00 PM

403 KNOX HALL

Bahar Behbahani is an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose practice explores landscape as a metaphor for memory, exile, and resilience, revealing the parallels and tensions between historiography and contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. Through the principles of the Persian garden, she traces a historical maze of pragmatic and spiritual meanings, linking ancestral knowledge, the social history of plants, and the links between climate exile and water management.

RSVP: https://mesaasbaharbehbahani.rsvpify.com

Shrujana Shridhar, Water and Caste

SHRUJANA NIRANJANI SHRIDHAR

October 29, 2025

5.10 PM – 7.00 PM

403 KNOX HALL

Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar, an artist and illustrator from Mumbai, examines the intersections of caste, gender, and capitalism through her practice. Her work honors communities that have long resisted systemic oppression, reclaiming histories through visual and archival means. She runs the Dalit Panther Archive, digitizing Little Magazines and literature published by the Dalit Panther Movement, and is a co-founder of Mavelinadu collective, an anti-caste publication platform.

RSVP: https://shrujanashridharmesaas.rsvpify.com