Events

Silver Visiting Scholar Lecture with Philipp Nielsen.  More information to follow.

Alexander Colloquium: “The Scales of Suffering: Neo-Lachrymosity and the Writing of Jewish History.”  More information to follow.

Vocalist Shubha Mudgal is one of India’s acclaimed exponents of North Indian raag music and specializes in two vocal forms known as khayal and thumri-dadra, respectively. As a first generation professional woman musician, Mudgal is able to view the highly complex, nuanced world of North Indian art music, (often referred to as Hindustani music) as both an insider and outsider. The fact that she does not belong to a hereditary family or community of musicians makes her an outsider in a system that was nurtured and nourished by hereditary lineages of musicians. Simultaneously, her sustained and ongoing involvement in the world of Indian music as student, performer, composer, and teacher—spanning almost five decades—grants her the privilege of being an insider.

In her performance, she will present both of these forms and will be accompanied on the tabla by Dr. Aneesh Pradhan, and on the harmonium by Dr. Kedar Naphade, both highly accomplished and renowned artists in their own right.

Gruss Jewish Law Symposium featuring Christine Hayes, Simcha Gross.  More information is forthcoming.

According to Psychology Today, “Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one’s identity.” 

That simple question, “Who am I?” creates a variety of reactions, but let’s focus on disability and what has been unfolding in higher education since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A one-person disability office has evolved into an office of ten or more staff members who specialize in addressing accommodations for students to eliminate barriers and obstacles to programs and facilities. One course on the history of the disability movement evolves into a disability studies program. Disability cultural centers represent a space for students to meet with peers and professional staff and develop programming that creates community.

More students, faculty, and staff openly discuss their disabilities as part of their identities. Disability Studies serve as a way for students to learn and discuss disability through an academic lens. Disability cultural centers provide opportunities for students to have a space, to participate in disability programming, and to be part of the movement to educate others about disability issues.

Think about how we celebrate and promote disability identity through our everyday work on university campuses.

Third Annual Howard Jay Reiter Memorial Lecture, Featuring Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Beginning with the focal point of October 7, 2023, this lecture will address the challenges associated with the memory of difficult past events, especially when the aftermath is ongoing. Examining efforts to commemorate and construct a collective memory of that day, the talk will go on to look more broadly at what it takes to be remembered.

2025 MLK Symposium Events-At-A Glance (PDF of full schedule of events).

Jessica Ridgway, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases & Global Health, University of Chicago

Additional support by HIV Grand Rounds (Jointly Provided by Penn Medicine and ViralEd)

This talk explores how Jewish physicians in twentieth-century Poland were concerned with women’s health, mobilizing female bodies to ensure the future of the community. It compares the discourse and the medical practices before and after the Holocaust.

Healing Women in Jewish History

New histories of medicine and the body offer a more direct vantage on women’s experiences than traditional approaches mediated through the sources and concerns of men. This series explores what we know about women as both practitioners and patients throughout Jewish history, and what we stand to learn from such scholarship about women’s lives more generally.

Featuring Natalia Aleksiun, University of Florida

Renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at Penn, will read from her latest book, The Beauty of Choice, then sit down with Heather Love, Penn Professor of English, to discuss the ways in which taste, beauty, and pleasure intersect in defense of women’s freedom. In The Beauty of Choice, Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values. Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature — expressions of their taste — and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.