Jewish Studies Sunday Book & Discussion Group   Tags: jewish  

When you enter the campus from Lincoln Boulevard,  let the guard at the kiosk know that you are coming to the Hannon Library and he will instruct you to keep going up the road to the 3^rd stop sign. On the right is the entrance to the Drollinger parking structure.
At this point, if you look to your left, you will see the round-shaped Hannon Library.  Go into the structure and park anywhere you can. 

There is no charge for visitor parking on Sundays.

The driving instructions to campus are as follows:

From LAX:
Travel north on Sepulveda Blvd. Remain in either of the left two lanes and merge onto Lincoln Blvd. Follow Lincoln Blvd north past Manchester Blvd. Turn right onto LMU Drive.

From the South:
Travel on 405 North, exit on La Tijera, make a left onto La Tijera. Take La Tijera until Manchester Boulevard and make a right (traveling west).  Stay on Manchester until you reach Lincoln Boulevard and make a right.  On Lincoln Boulevard, proceed for approximately 3/4 of a mile until you arrive at our main entrance on the corner of Lincoln and LMU Drive. 

From the North:
Travel on 405 South, exit on Jefferson Blvd., and turn right. Head west and make a left onto Lincoln Blvd. Head south and turn left into the campus on LMU Drive. 

Sunday,  January 25, 2015,  2:00-3:30pm
Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism: a graphic history by Ronald Schecter
Facilitated by Dr. Elizabeth Drummond, Department of History

Mendoza the Jew combines a graphic history with primary documentation and contextual information to explore issues of nationalism, identity, culture, and historical methodology through the life story of Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza was a poor Sephardic Jew from East London who became the boxing champion of Britain in 1789. As a Jew with limited means and a foreign-sounding name, Mendoza was an unlikely symbol of what many Britons considered to be their very own "national" sport. Whereas their adversaries across the Channel reputedly settled private quarrels by dueling with swords or pistols - leaving widows and orphans in their wake - the British (according to supporters of boxing) tended to settle their disputes with their fists. Mendoza the Jew provides an exciting and lively alternative to conventional lessons on nationalism. Rather than studying learned treatises and political speeches, students can read a graphic history about an eighteenth-century British boxer that demonstrates how ideas and emotions regarding the "nation" permeated the practices of everyday life. Mendoza's story reveals the ambivalent attitudes of British society toward its minorities, who were allowed (sometimes grudgingly) to participate in national life by braving pain and injury in athletic contests, but whose social mobility was limited and precarious.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015,  3-4:30pm
A Replacement Life, by Boris Fishman
author, Boris Fishman will be here in person to discuss, sell and sign his book

A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has – as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”?

High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him – Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American – but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.

Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a lasting price from his family.

A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

Sunday, March 15, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
Facilitated by Dr. Stella Setka, University Advisor & Fellowship Coordinator

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, novelist Philip Roth imagines an alternate version of American history.
In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

Sunday, April 19, 2015,  2:00-3:30pm
The Short, Strange Life of Hershel Grynszpan: a Boy Avenger, A Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris, by Jonathan Kirsch
author, Jonathan Kirsch will be here in person to discuss, sell and sign his book

On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out "of love for my parents and for my people." Two days later, vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany's Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht. In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as "the first shot of the Jewish War."

The Sunday Book and Discussion is FREE. However, to make sure we have room, please contact Rhonda Rosen at rrosen@lmu.edu or 310-338-4584.  The bookgroup meets on Level 3 of the William H. Hannon Library.