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 26, 2014,  2:00-3:30pm
The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation by Louise Steinman
Facilitated by Dr. Holli Levitsky, Department of English and Director of Jewish Studies

In the winter of 2000, Louise Steinman set out to attend an international Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the invitation of her Zen rabbi, who felt the Poles had gotten a “bum rap.” A bum rap? Her own mother could not bear to utter the word “Poland,” a country, Steinman was taught, that allowed and perhaps abetted the genocide that decimated Europe’s Jewish population, including members of her own extended family.
As Steinman learns more about her lost ancestors, though, she finds that the history of Polish-Jewish relations is far more complex.  Returning time and again to Poland over the course of a decade, Steinman finds Poles who are seeking the truth about the past, however painful, and creating their own rituals to teach their towns about the history of their lost Jewish neighbors. This lyrical memoir chronicles her immersion in the exhilarating, discomforting, sometimes surreal, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation.

NOTE: LOUISE STEINMAN WILL BE AT LMU ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18TH @ 4:30-6PM IN THE HANNON LIBRARY.
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT HOLLI LEVITSKY AT hlevitsky@lmu.edu

Sunday, February 16, 2014,  2:00-3:30pm
--FILM SCREENING---Nicky's Family
Directed by Matej Minac (2014)
Discover the inspirational true story of "Britain's Schindler" Sir Nicholas Winton in the award-winning film "Nicky's Family". An ordinary British stockbroker, Nicholas Winton organized the rescue of 669 Czech and Slovak children just before the outbreak of World War II. Winton, now 103 years old, did not speak about these events with anyone for more than half a century. His heroism would have probably been forgotten if his wife, fifty years later, hadn't found a suitcase in the attic, full of documents and transport plans. Today the story of this rescue is known around the world, and thousands of descendants of 'Nicky's Family' continue to follow in his footsteps to do good. "Nicky's Family" has earned rave reviews from audiences and critics around the world, winning over 29 awards - including 13 audience awards from U.S. film festivals!  (100 minutes)

Sunday, March 23, 2014, 2:00-3:30pm
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
Special Guest: Akiva Potok
Facilitated by Dr. Audrey Thacker,  Department of English, CSUN

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy.In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.
Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

Sunday, April 27, 2:00-3:30pm
The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books, by Matti Friedman
Facilitated by Dr. Elaine Goodfriend
Department of Jewish Studies, Calif. State University, Northridge

A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex.

Journalist Matti Friedman’s true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity.

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.