Events at Davar or of Davar-like character.
Prof Ilan Stavans on Borges and the Jews
Professor Stavans will be speaking about “Borges and the Jews” over Zoom. Participants will be capped at 20.
Watch the Talk Here
About Professor Stavans
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College.
Stavans is an expert on, among other topics, Jorge Luis Borges and has written a short book titled "Borges, the Jew."
Stavans is also the publisher of Restless Books, the co-founder of Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, and Oxford, and the host of NPR's podcast In Contrast. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, his recent books include Quixote: The Novel and the World (2015), The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America (2019), How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020), and Selected Translations: Poems 2000-2020 (2021).
His work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted into film, radio, TV, and the theater.
Hillel Halkin on B'nei Menashe
Halkin will speak about the B’nei Menashe and the related NGO Degel Menashe in which Halkin is heavily involved.
Watch Talk Here
More About Hillel Halkin
Hillel Halkin is a writer, and translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature into English. He has translated Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman, and major Hebrew and Israeli novelists, among them Yosef Haim Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, Shulamith Hareven, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Meir Shalev.
Halkin won a National Jewish Book Award in 1978 for his first book Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist's Polemic (1977).
Halkin's second book, Across the Sabbath River (2002), is a work of travel literature in which he goes in search of B'nei Menashe and the mystery of the Ten Lost Tribes. As a result, he became increasingly interested in the B'nei Menashe, who began to immigrate to Israel from India in the late 20th century.
Since then he has written A Strange Death, a novel based on the local history of Zikhron Ya'akov, where he resides. His intellectual biography of Yehuda Halevi won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.
He has also written the novel Melisande! What Are Dreams? published in 2012 and then in 2014, Halkin published a new biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky for Jewish Lives by Yale University Press.
Halkin writes frequently on Israel and Jewish culture and politics. His articles have been published in Commentary, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post and other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books. He has spoken twice at Davar; once on his biography of Yehuda Halevi and the second on early and late Zionism.
Yossi Klein Halevi on the Israeli Election
Yossi spoke on Israeli politics, specifically on the election (the fourth in the last two years). The beginning of the video is a little shaky, but the connection clears up. Enjoy!
ABOUT YOSSI
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Institute's Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), which teaches emerging young Muslim American leaders about Judaism, Jewish identity and Israel.
Halevi’s 2013 book, Like Dreamers, won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Book of the Year Award. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. He writes for leading op-ed pages in the US, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a former contributing editor to the New Republic.