Habitus

by Michael Sterling · 12/15/11

Discovery Times Square will display for two weeks one of the oldest and best-preserved manuscripts of the Ten Commandmants in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times, an exhibition located in Times Square. The manuscripts will only be available for viewing from December 16 to January 2. Due to their extreme sensitivity to light and humidity, it is unsafe to show them for a longer period of time. The leather scroll is dated from 30 B.C. to 1 B.C.; it was discovered in 1952 and has since been studied and displayed all around the the world.

The Scrolls exhibition is presented in partnership with the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Click here to see The Dead Sea Scrolls’ website. Click here to read a related article by Edward Rothstein of The New York Times and here to see a post by Randy Kennedy for The New York Times Arts Beat.

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by Michael Sterling · 09/13/11

The Brooklyn Book Festival will take place this Sunday, September 18^th, at Borough Hall in Brooklyn. The festival begins at 10 AM and ends at 6 PM. This is an event for book lovers of all ages!

Habitus will have a table at the festival where you can meet our editor, Joshua Ellison. You will also be able to purchase discounted back issues and subscriptions to Habitus.

Authors expected to attend include Terry McMillan, Joyce Carol Oates, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Jhumpa Lahiri and many more.

Visit the festival website to find directions to the event and other information.

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by Habitus · 05/17/11

We had a wonderful time hosting a panel as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

If you weren’t able to join us, the audio has been posted online at the PEN website. Please listen and tell us what you think!

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by Habitus · 04/26/11

This Thursday night, we will be co-presenting an exciting event at the JCC in Manhattan as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, the nation’s largest gathering of international literary talent. Join us!

Diaspora Capitals
New York City has always been a powerful attractor for migrants, transplants, and diverse communities of every imaginable type. But this city is only one of many that serves as a crossroad and meeting point, especially for writers. In this panel, we will discuss the special relationship between cities and diaspora communities, with writers and migrants from around the world.

With David Albahari, Arnon Grunberg, Doron Rabinovici, and Elif Shafak; moderated by Joshua Ellison.

Register Online
334 Amsterdam Avenue
April 28, 7pm
$10.00 Members
$15.00 Nonmembers

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by Habitus · 03/29/11

Our event at the JCC in Manhattan with James E. Young was a big success. Have a look at some images from the event and we hope you’ll consider joining us for our next program.

[Show as slideshow]

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by Habitus · 03/28/11

The next event in our series with the JCC in Manhattan will be on April 14th.

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky: Reinventing the fotonovela
The Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky have collaborated to re-imagine the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary. Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building.

Register for the event here.

Read some of the great press this project has received, in Tablet and the Forward.

We produced a short video about the project last year:

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky on Once 9:53 – a fotonovela from Habitus A Diaspora Journal on Vimeo.

JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Avenue
7pm
$7.00 Members
$10.00 Nonmembers

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by Habitus · 02/23/11

Habitus editor Joshua Ellison is honored to be presenting at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The talk is today—Wednesday, February 23rd—and is open to the public.

Thank you to Habitus advisory-board member Sidra Ezrahi for extending the invitation.

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by David Gutherz · 01/20/11

If you missed the acclaimed premiere of Mahler on the Couch, last Wednesday–don’t worry. The 20th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival still has plenty of great, thought-provoking, tangentially-Jewish movies on the way. Start tonight at six p.m. with Lily Rivlin’s loving homage to and memorial for the short story wizard Grace Paley. Upcoming highlights include “Singing in the Dark”–one of the first American dramatization of the Holocaust–at 1:30 p.m Sunday, “Lillith,” an Israeli documentary centered on the aftermath of a teenage suicide at 3:45 and 6 o’clock Monday, and a closing night screening of “The Matchmaker,” which was nominated for 7 Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture.

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by David Gutherz · 12/22/10

“From Caligari to Hitler”–with this apocalyptic abbreviation the great cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer pithily set the tone of his groundbreaking “psychological history of german film.” Since then, most interest in Weimar cinema has followed Kracauer’s lead, focusing primarily on films that foreshadow the rise of Nazism or directors who either worked for Hitler or were persecuted by him. Kracauer’s book was written during a stay at the N.Y. Museum of Modern Art, and so it seems fitting that a new exhibit at that same institution is filling in some gaps that have resulted from this (understandable) over-emphasis on the catastrophic end of the ‘golden era’ of German film. In addition to classics like “Three Penny Opera” (airing Dec. 27 at 4:30 p.m. and the 30th at 7:30 p.m. ) and Fritz Lang’s “Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler” (Jan. 3. @ 7:30 p.m. , Jan. 8@ 7 p.m.) MoMA has collected a number of popular films from the period, mostly cabaret musicals and romantic comedies, like the “Congress Dances”, airing tomorrow at 4:30, “a musical about the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), in which European ambassadors redrew the map of the continent.” For Habitus readers eagerly awaiting our upcoming Berlin issue, these MoMA screening are a great resource.; for the rest of you–a terrific chance to experience entertainment the way those weird Weimarians did.

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by David Gutherz · 12/13/10

If you’re looking for some light beach-reading to fend off Seasonal Affective Disorder, then now is not the time to read Timothy Snyder’s new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. But if you are one of those people–like me–who saves all your Shoah research for December because it makes a windy winter day in Brooklyn seem like a holiday in the Gstaat, then this text ought to be at the top of your list. As the author puts it in a recent interview on the Leonard Lopate show, “This is not  a history for everybody because this is a history about how things are actually darker than we understand…The concentration camps and the Gulag were horrible, but unfortunately they’re only the introduction to the horror.” Without at all minimizing the appalling nature of concentration camps, or slighting the significance of 6 million, Snyder focuses on the 14 million people who were deliberately killed “in a relatively small place–between the Baltic and Black Seas, between Berlin and Moscow–over a relatively short period of time between 1933 and 1945.”  Some of these died in more well-known places and ways, but many were exterminated through forced starvation or migration, shot in their homes or over mass graves in sites that remain forgotten.

In related news, Claude Lanzmann’s  564  minute documentary Shoah–the definitive film on the subject–has just been re-released to theaters. In New York, IFC and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas are currently carrying it. Wider distribution is expected in the new year.

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