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Recently held Events Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 7 p.m. in Reuter Center UNC Asheville A Talk by Walter Ziffer
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Tourist
Season: A Reading by Enid Shomer
The
Creative Writing Program at UNCA
In Tourist Season, her most recently published book, award-winning author Enid Shomer offers ten brilliant, unforgettable stories of resilient women aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal point in her life. Their journeys cross distances of place and mind: A middle-aged Floridian who learns that she is the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint takes daring steps on her path to enlightenment; a long-buried secret forces one woman to leave the daughter she deeply loves; a Radcliffe student faces shocking family truths and taboos during the summer of 1966; an unexpected kinship forms between two women who land in a county jail after an excursion to Las Vegas. A widely published writer nearly as well known for her fiction as for her poetry, Enid Shomer is the author of four collections of poetry: Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), Black Drum (Arkansas, 1997), This Close to the Earth (Arkansas, 1992) and Stalking the Florida Panther (The Word Works), which won the Washington Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, etc. Her collection of stories, Imaginary Men, won the Iowa Fiction Prize as well as the LSU/Southern Review Prize, both given annually for the best first collection of short fiction by an American author. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including POETRY: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology. For
more information, please contact UNCA’s Department of
Literature and Language 251-6411
March 15 through 18, 2006 - Workshops by Wonders Cast March 27 - A talk by Rabbi Jill Jacobs April 6, 2006 7:30 p.m., Reuter Center Ilan Stavans, writer (fiction, non-fiction), translator, editor Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture and Five-College 40th Anniversary Distinguished Professor at Amherst College. He is also Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University. His books include the best-selling The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language, and Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion. He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, the 3-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, the 4-volume Encyclopedia Latina, Rubén Darío: Selected Writings, and Lengua Fresca. His book The Disappearance: Novella and Stories. will appear in June 2006. A feature film based on the later will be released internationally to coincide with the publication. Stavans has been called by the New York Times "the czar of Latino culture in the United States" and the Washington Post has described him as "Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast." The San Francisco Chronicle said: "Ilan Stavans may very well succeed in becoming the Octavio Paz of our age." The recipient of numerous honors—including an Emmy nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Literature Prize, the Antonia Pantoja Award, and Chile's Presidential Medal—he is the host of the PBS show La Plaza: Conversations with Ilan Stavans. (University of Arizona Press published a companion book.) He is also a regular contributor to newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. Routledge published The Essential Ilan Stavans in 2000 and the University of Wisconsin Press released Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations by Neal Sokol in 2004. As a descendant of Eastern European Jews who settled in Mexico, Stavans grew up in a multilingual environment. As he describes it in On Borrowed Words, Yiddish and Spanish were his first languages. He draws from his rich background in his decade-long study of Spanglish, the hybrid tongue spoken by millions of Latinos in the United States. Stavans has collected some 6,000 Spanglish terms and explored the socio-linguistic history of this vehicle of communication in his controversial book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, which has been at the heart of a heated debate in the Hispanic world. The volume was awarded the Latino Hall of Fame award in 2004 for best reference book. In the last chapter, Stavans offers a translation into Spanglish of the first chapter of Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. March 23, 2006 7:30 p.m.,
Christopher Browning, Holocaust Historian Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. Professor Browning specializes in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. His research has focused on two aspects of the Holocaust: the decision-making process that launched the Final Solution and the motivation of the perpetrators. He has published seven books in the field of Holocaust Studies, including two that have been awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (2004). March 28, 2006 7:30 p.m., Owen Conference Center
Gershom Gorenberg, non-fiction writer and editor
Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist and associate editor at The Jerusalem Report. He is the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount and co-author of Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, Ha’aretz, and Ma’ariv. Born in America and educated at the University of California and Hebrew University, Gorenberg lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children. His next book will be published on March 1, 2006. Its title: The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967 – 1977.
Remembering the Past Safeguarding the Future Two films and talks facilitated by Robert Novak, National Director of Development for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. UNC Asheville Humanities Lecture Hall. Free and Open to the Public.
Monday, Oct. 31, 2005 7:30 "The Long Way Home"
Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005 7:30 "Unlikely Heroes"
Robert Novak will speak to us both of the films themselves and, more broadly, of the work of the Wiesenthal Center, including its Museum of Tolerance, founded to challenge visitors to confront bigotry and racism, and to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts. In his position with the Wiesenthal Center, Novak travels extensively throughout the world. In 1996, he participated on a mission that included an historic meeting with King Hussein at the Royal Palace in Jordan. In 1997, he was a delegate to the Wiesenthal Center's International Conference titled "Property and Restitution, A Moral Responsibility to History," which was held in Geneva.
The Long Way Home and Unlikely Heroes are produced by Moriah Films, the Jack and Pearl Resnick film divison of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and UNC Asheville, in cooperation with the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Center for Diversity Education, with the generous support of Lawrence and Marcia Shantz and the Wiesenthal Center. October 9 - Sunday at 7 p.m.
Free and open to the public. For more information contact the Center for Jewish Studies at 828.251.6576
April 16 - Saturday at 8 p.m.
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"Only My Life: A
Survivor's Story" Louis De Wijze
Laurel Forum,
Karpen Hall.
Louis De
Wijze is a Dutch Jew who, in March 1944, was deported from
Westerbork, the transit camp in the Netherlands, to Monowitz, a
labor camp outside Auschwitz. He was 21 at the time and was
put to work in the synthetic oil and rubber factory known as Buna.
He faced hunger, brutality, bitter cold, and degradation, but he
also managed to join the camp's soccer team, smuggled vodka, and
traded tobacco for bread and soup. He eventually secured a
less arduous job tending rabbits. In January 1945, de Wijze
was forced to leave Monowitz ahead of advancing Russians. The
death march ended at Buchenwald concentration camp. On a
second death march, de Wijze escaped and was rescued by American
troops.
compose
Danny Maseng,
 Valerie Leff |
UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies will host a reading by Valerie Leff, author of the novel “Better Homes and Husbands” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 15, in UNC Asheville’s Laurel Forum, Karpen Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
“Better Homes and Husbands” was published by St. Martin’s Press last year. The book follows the lives of the residents of an exclusive prewar co-op building in New York City from the 1970s to the present. Those that live at 980 Park Avenue have little in common except for their prestigious address. From the building’s first Jewish resident to the granddaughter of a Latin dictator, the building’s residents and service people face battles of race, religion and ideology through the years.
Publisher’s Weekly calls the book a “cozy chronicle” and a “warmhearted, generously imagined New York story.” National Public Radio heralded the book, saying, “Novels that center on the lifestyles of the rich and fabulous, if not famous, have received renewed appreciation lately… In the middle of all this, there’s a serious contender…’Better Homes and Husbands.’ ”
Born in Los Angeles, Leff moved to Manhattan when she was a young girl and grew up at the glamorous Fifth Avenue. She shared her address with Jackie Onassis, the Rothschilds, and other members of the City’s elite, gaining an intimate knowledge of the kind of Upper East Side building that appears as the setting for “Better Homes and Gardens.” Leff studied the Italian Renaissance at Sarah Lawrence College, which lead to a career in fashion public relations in Milan. Having a change of heart, Leff abandoned her public relations career to work on a graduate degree in environmental science at UCLA. Upon joining a women writers’ group, however, she discovered a new passion and chose fiction writing over finishing her doctorate degree. In 1996, Leff moved to Asheville and later co-founded UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. She continues to serve as co-director and teacher for the program. She has published stories and essays in many journals, including “The Antioch Review,” “Carolina Quarterly” and “Chelsea.” “Better Homes and Husbands” is her first novel.
For more information, call UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies at 828/251-6411.
Media Contacts:
- Dr. Richard Chess, UNC Asheville literature and language professor, 828/251-6576
- Jill Yarnall, UNC Asheville Public Information Assistant Director, 828/251-6526
February 10, 2005 - 7:30 p.m.
UNC Asheville Hosts Lecture on Jewish Student Activism
UNC Asheville will host a talk and slide presentation on “From Black Power to Jewish Radicalism,” by Michael Staub, author and associate professor of English at Bowling Green State University, at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 10, at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center. He will discuss the impact of Jewish student activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the adaptation of Black Pride for a Jewish context. The event is free and open to the public.
Staub is the author of two books: “Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America” and “Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930s America.” He is also the editor of “The Jewish 1960’s: An American Sourcebook.” Articles in other publications include, “Negroes are not Jews’: Race, Holocaust Consciousness, and the Rise of Jewish Neoconservatism” and “Black Panthers, New Journalism, and the Rewriting of the Sixties”
For more information, call Richard Chess, UNC Asheville Center for Jewish Studies director, at 828/251-6576.