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Lecture | Celia Applegate: Family Ties: How the Mendelssohns Understood Their Own History

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

In 1879, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s son Sebastian published “Die Familie Mendelssohn 1729-1847” as the “chronicle of a good German Bürger Family.” It carried an epigram from Goethe’s Iphigenie as its frontispiece, on the joy of recounting the deeds of one’s fathers. This lecture will work backwards in time from this 1879 family chronicle, using letters […]

Todd Gitlin | Chosen People? Jewish Identity

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

6 p.m. reception, 6:30 p.m. lecture Today, American Jews are in centrifugal motion, and the center does not hold. Sixty years ago, after the Holocaust, Jews overwhelmingly joined in the American celebration and in a common commitment to Israel. Redemptive spirit, old-country nostalgia, and successful assimilation came together. Today, the sense of commonality frays, perhaps to the breaking […]

PopUp Exhibition | Daniel Schifrin on Chess & Jewish Literature

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Daniel Schifrin’s fiction and essays have appeared, among other places, in McSweeney’s, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Westwind/UCLA’s Journal of the Arts, Jet Fuel Review, and em. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, writer-in-residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and a co-curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art […]

Music Performance | Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49 (1839) I. Molto Allegro agitato II. Andante con molto tranquillo III. Scherzo. Leggiero e vivace IV. Finale. Allegro assai appassionato   Left Coast Chamber EnsembleAnna Presler, violin Tanya Tomkins, cello Eric Zivian, piano   Erard Grand Piano, London, 1854     Founded in 1992, Left […]

Lunch Book Talk with Ingrid Carlberg

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Author and journalist Ingrid Carlberg will talk about her recently published book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust (MacLehose Press 2016). Read the Kirkus review here. Ingrid Carlberg's biography of Raoul Wallenberg was awarded the August Prize for nonfiction and the Swedish Academy's Axel Hirsch Prize. Carlberg's […]

PopUp Exhibition | The Inadvertent Archivist. Gary Handman’s Report From the Magnes Community Archives

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Gary Handman, Archivist and Public Services Coordinator at The Magnes Collection, is the former Director of the Media Resources Center, Moffitt Library, University of California Berkeley, one of the largest and most respected video collections in a U.S. academic library. Gary has taught, spoken and published widely on topics related to media librarianship, visual literacy, […]

Curating Culture, Making Memory: On the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Curating Culture, Making Memory: On the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews 11 a.m.-6 p.m., April 3 A day of film and lectures highlighting the Polin Museum located in Warszawa and Jewish history in Poland. 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. "Raise the Roof," 2015. 85 minutes. Landmark Shattuck Theater, 2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.  A documentary by […]

Depth of Field: Sephardic Identities on Screen | The Wedding Song

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

The Wedding Song  France-Tunisia, 2008. 100 min. The Nazi occupation of Tunisia strains the bonds of friendship between a Muslim and a Sephardic woman who are both preparing for their marriages.       About the Depth of Field Series The term "Sephardic" indicates the descendants of the Iberian Jews who were expelled from Spain […]

PopUp Exhibition | Lauren Cooper with Francesco Spagnolo on The Making of From Mendelssohn To Mendelssohn

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Lauren Cooper, a Comparative Literature major and Spanish and History minor (2016) at UC Berkeley, and the Managing Editor of the Berkeley Fiction Review, has been engaged as an Undergraduate Research Apprentice at The Magnes since 2014. She has collaborated in the making of multiple exhibitions, and helped creating an online companion to the Magnes […]

Reading Yehuda Amichai: Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld in Conversation

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Robert Alter is Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of twenty-six books and has received numerous awards, including the Robert Kirsch Award of the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American literature, the Charles Homer Haskins Prize […]

Lecture at The Piano & Film Screening | Nicholas McGegan in conversation with Francesco Spagnolo: The Mendelssohns and Their Worlds

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Erard Grand Piano, London, 1854 Nicholas McGegan is Music Director of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Pasadena Symphony and, beginning in 2014, Artist in Association with Australia’s Adelaide Symphony. Through 29 years as its music director, McGegan has established the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Philharmonia Chorale as one of the world’s […]

PopUp Exhibition | Yosef Rosen & Zoe Lewin on the Visual Power of Text

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Yosef Rosen, a Doctoral Candidate in Jewish Studies and Magnes Graduate Fellow (Fall 2015), and Zoe Lewin, an Art History and Rhetoric major (2016) at UC Berkeley, will present on the visual power of text expressed in the shiviti holdings in The Magnes Collection. Shivitis are devotional Hebrew manuscripts aimed at encouraging meditation and the contemplation of God’s name […]