Events at the Center for New Jewish Culture
Events at the Center for New Jewish Culture
The Center for New Jewish Culture produces events through our own curatorial initiatives including events from our signature program, The New Jewish Culture Fellowship. The Center also hosts events with Murmrr Theater as well as with other community partners, in its historic location at 17 Eastern Parkway.
The Center for New Jewish Culture also hosts weekly Kabbalat Shabbat gatherings, produced by local minyanim. Check each minyan’s website for more information.
| Altshul
New Jewish Culture Fellowship
Abundant, Rich Lives: Returning to the Lesbian Herstory Archives Slideshow
May 14, 2024, 7pm
A conversation between NJCF fellow, writer, curator, and photographer Ariel Goldberg, and longtime activists Alexis Danzig and Deborah Edel. As Lesbian Herstory Archives volunteers and community members, Deb and Alexis each worked closely with the slideshow in the late 1970s through the 1990s. The LHA slideshow was an ongoing project of the Archives that provided countless moments of education, connection, and personal transformation. The event will include a screening of a recently digitized version of Joan Nestle’s version of the LHA slideshow (thanks to Anj Hansen) as well as provide space for memory sharing about the slideshow and the Lesbian Herstory Archives community-building work. This event joins celebrations for the Lesbian Herstory Archives 50 year anniversary by spotlighting the tools and practices of the Archive’s community-building. Ariel, Deb, and Alexis, with special guests, will reflect on media production within lesbian/queer/trans grassroots organizing of the recent past and what it means for today's social movement struggles.
This is a hybrid event. If it's accessible for you, please come in person. All reserved tickets will receive a confirmation email including Zoom information for virtual attendance.
New Jewish Culture Fellowship
Dual Book Launch: Victory Parade by Leela Corman and Heavyweight by Soloman J. Brager with Arielle Angel
June 27, 2024, 7pm
On June 27th we will celebrate a dual book launch of NJCF fellows: Victory Parade by Leela Corman and Heavyweight by Soloman J. Brager, in conversation with Arielle Angel.
This event will take place at POWERHOUSE Arena, 28 Adams Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016), and Victory Parade (Schocken/Pantheon, 2024), a story about WWII, women’s wrestling, and the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Her short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Tablet Magazine, Nautilus, and The Nib.
Solomon Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York and author of the graphic memoir Heavyweight (William Morrow, 2024). Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.
Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.
Victory Parade is a heart-wrenching, phantasmagorical tale of love, loss, and trauma both personal and global, set during World War II in Brooklyn, New York, and in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.
One of a group of women working as welders in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rose Arensberg has fallen in love with a disabled veteran while awaiting the return of her husband, Sam, a soldier in the American army serving in Europe. As we follow the bittersweet, heartbreaking stories of Rose and her fellow Rosie-the-Riveters, we’re immersed in the day-to-day challenges of life on the home front as seen through the eyes of these resilient women, as well as through the eyes of Eleanor, Rose’s impressionable young daughter, and Ruth, the German Jewish refugee Rose has taken into their home.
Ruth’s desperate attempt to exorcise the nightmare of growing up in pre-war Nazi Germany takes her into the world of professional women wrestlers—with devastating consequences. And Sam’s encounters with the horrors of a liberated concentration camp follow him home to Brooklyn in the form of terrifying flashbacks that will leave him scarred forever. Victory Parade paints a deeply affecting portrait of how individuals and civilizations process mass trauma. Magnificently drawn by Leela Corman, it’s an Expressionist journey through the battlefields of the human heart and the mass graves of genocide.
Heavyweight is a moving and provocative graphic memoir exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream.
Solomon Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’ exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated.
Alongside the Levis’ propulsive journey across Europe and to the United States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and connected periods of colonial history. Heavyweight asks us to consider how the patterns of history emerge and reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers. Confronting the specters of violence as both historian and descendent, this book is an exploration of family mythology, intergenerational memory, and the mark the past makes on the present.
In conversation with works by Rebecca Hall, Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and Leela Corman, Heavyweight will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the chronicle of woven human stories.