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One month after the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 record “Rapper’s Delight” introduced hip-hop to a national audience, three New York Jewish men under the moniker Steve Gordon & The Kosher Five recorded the first rap parody record, a Yiddish-accented humorous skit full of American Jewish cultural tropes set to a funky disco beat. This track may have been a one-off joke among friends, but it stands as the first in a long line of Jewish parody rap records that use hip-hop and humor to explore American Jewish identity and stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. This talk traces key moments in the history of Jewish parody rap and situates them in relation to broader contexts of historical Black-Jewish musical relations. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
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The twenty-first century understanding of Pan-Africanism remains exclusively tied to the African continent, specifically leaving out Afro-diasporic subjects, especially in Europe. Today, a new movement of Black European youths are fighting against racial discrimination and for an Afro-European political identity. Afro-European Pan-Africanism as marking new diasporic linkages and movements of Black Europeans of African and Afro-Caribbean descent. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
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Why does it seem like there are so many more transgender people today than there were ten years ago? Where were they before Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox became regular fixtures on TV? This lecture will take an historical approach to answering these questions, starting with an overview of what it means to be a member of the transgender community today then looking back through history at how that has shifted over time. From the stars of the 1870s vaudeville stage to multi-decade-long debates within the American Psychiatric Association to activists in the gay rights movement, the presentation will weave together stories of key figures in U.S. transgender history and the broader cultural and political shifts that paved the way for Caitlyn and Laverne to come into the national spotlight. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
The relationship between the oral and written Torahs – the Biblical text and the commentaries that came later – is a central concern of Jewish religious thought. The Talmudic text of Mishnah Hagiga 1:8 provides categories for conceptualizing this relationship. One of these categories is laws akin to “mountains hanging by a string”. Join us as we explore what this term means and what it tells us about rabbinic conception of the two Torahs.
The Week of Learning is generously sponsored by the Friends of Jewish Lifelong Learning Endowment Fund, Jewish Federation of Cleveland. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
One month after the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 record “Rapper’s Delight” introduced hip-hop to a national audience, three New York Jewish men under the moniker Steve Gordon & The Kosher Five recorded the first rap parody record, a Yiddish-accented humorous skit full of American Jewish cultural tropes set to a funky disco beat. This track may have been a one-off joke among friends, but it stands as the first in a long line of Jewish parody rap records that use hip-hop and humor to explore American Jewish identity and stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. This talk traces key moments in the history of Jewish parody rap and situates them in relation to broader contexts of historical Black-Jewish musical relations.
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SIEGAL LIFELONG LEARNING’S ANNUAL WEEK OF LEARNING WITH
MICHAL BAR-ASHER SIEGAL Horace Goldsmith Visiting Associate Professor in Judaic Studies, Yale University Associate Professor, The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben Gurion University of the Negev SUNDAY, MAY 21–THURSDAY, MAY 25, 2023 The Week of Learning is generously sponsored by the Friends of Jewish Lifelong Learning Endowment Fund, Jewish Federation of Cleveland. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
Leave it to Henry James and Oscar Wilde to bring something utterly fresh to the Gothic tale. At the time they were writing, the Gothic tale had been rattling castle chains in the popular imagination for 200 years. But what about late Victorian life finally led to the radically new approaches of James and Wilde? Was the classic Gothic tale finally worn out? Or in the immaterial material of spectral presences did James discover new ideas about human behavior, and Wilde an iconoclastic point of view? We will study two wonderful novellas that turn the time-honored ghost story right on its (severed) head.
Read: The Canterville Ghost, Oscar Wilde The Turn of the Screw, Henry James This course is offered with the generous support of the Association for Continuing Education. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
In this four-week session, we’ll read some of the most iconic and unforgettable Ukrainian-Jewish writers and poets including Isaac Babel, Der Nister, Lidiya Ginzburg, among others. Religious and secular, written in Russian or Yiddish, these works bring the old world roaring back with humor, wisdom, tragedy, dreams, eros, and above all, a rich Jewish history. Keeping Ukraine and its people in our hearts and minds will be both a balm and a tribute in this difficult time.
Readings will be distributed before class.
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This year's ACE Book Discussion Day will include a presentation and discussion on Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra. Marra's book takes us to 1940/50s Hollywood and southern Italy where a cast of characters cross lives in the whirlwind of World War II. Marra creates the texture of life as vividly as movies drawing us into the many-layered and complex matters of the times and heart. Join us for a discussion of this compelling work of fiction. More![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
The Association for Continuing Education is a volunteer organization dedicated to providing and supporting continuing education programs in cooperation with the Laura and Alvin Siegal Lifelong Learning Program at Case Western Reserve University.
Membership is open to those who love to learn. ACE independently provides the Grazella Shepherd Lecture Day, Discussion Day, Acclaimed Authors Luncheon and the Annual Book Sale, trips, a semi-annual newsletter and a summer luncheon series featuring local authors. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
The twenty-first century understanding of Pan-Africanism remains exclusively tied to the African continent, specifically leaving out Afro-diasporic subjects, especially in Europe. Today, a new movement of Black European youths are fighting against racial discrimination and for an Afro-European political identity. Afro-European Pan-Africanism as marking new diasporic linkages and movements of Black Europeans of African and Afro-Caribbean descent.
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This course analyzes significant events of the 1950s including the growth of the middle class, the move to suburbia, development of new industries, the emergence of television and creation of the national highway system. Racial events covered include the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Brown school decision and the anti-communist anxiety of the era reflected in the blacklist and McCarthyism. Internationally, we’ll review U.S. assumption of world leadership, the Cold War, the Korean War, nuclear policy, and covert CIA operations in other countries. The politics of the era include the Eisenhower-Stevenson and Kennedy- Nixon contests. Class discussion will compare the 1950s with life today and the impact of that decade on the world in which we live now.
Read: The Fifties, David Halberstam
This course is offered with the generous support of the Association for Continuing Education.
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The Gilded Age, which extended from about 1870 to 1900,
was a period of extraordinary growth and social transformation in America, which also produced some of the
superstars of American art—among them Winslow Homer,
Thomas Eakins, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer
Sargent and John La Farge. This class will survey the work
of these figures, and the ways in which they portrayed both
the triumphs and anxieties of this remarkable period.
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In this 3-part class, Dr. Ted Merwin will use clips from vaudeville, popular music, film, TV, and stand-up comedy routines to show how the basic needs of human existence became the central themes for Jewish American humor. Having struggled mightily throughout history, Jews arrived in America with both a boundless faith in the benefits of freedom and an underlying set of insecurities about what it meant to make it in a capitalist society. As they became more affluent as a group but still strove to retain their religious and ethnic distinctiveness, these tensions enabled Jews to rise to the top as pre-eminent creators of popular culture.
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ChamberFest Cleveland has presented engaging and innovative chamber music programs for more than a decade featuring well-known musicians, along with young Rising Star artists, for a three-week celebration of spectacular artistry. This course will prepare you for a deeper inside look at the music and the festival. The course also includes tickets to two ChamberFest concerts including insightful pre-concert talks. As part of this program, you’ll be invited to mingle with the artists after each performance.
THE ART OF CREATING A CHAMBER MUSIC EXPERIENCE
Thursday, June 22 | 11am ET
Landmark Centre Building - Beachwood
MAKING CHAMBER MUSIC ACCESSIBLE
Friday, June 23 | 11am ET
Landmark Centre Building - Beachwood
CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS CONCERT
Saturday, June 24 | 7:30pm ET (Preconcert talk at 6:30pm)
Mixon Hall, Cleveland Institute of Music
VORTEX CONCERT
Sunday, June 25 | 3pm ET (Preconcert talk at 2pm)
Harkness Chapel, Case Western Reserve University
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Upon reading the Versailles Treaty, French General Foch remarked that it was merely a 20-year
armistice.  From 1919 to 1939 Europe's nations struggled to keep the peace, rebuild their nations, cope with the Depression - all while fascism and communism inflamed passions.  Using articles, maps and some literature, we will explore this turbulent period that ended so tragically. This course is offered with the generous support of the Association for Continuing Education. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
This course will explore the different habitats available to migrating birds at the university farms. Students should be prepared to walk at a moderate pace over some hilly and possibly wet terrain. Binoculars are recommended. Meet in the Greenhouse parking lot. Listening devices available.
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The Chemistry prize was awarded to 3 scientists, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and K. Barry Sharpless, for developing a way of “snapping molecules together.” They found an ingenious and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that the Nobel panel said is “already benefiting humankind greatly.”
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Enjoy the current exhibit and learn about historical and innovative papermaking, book arts, and letterpress printing. A demonstration will be included. The Morgan Conservatory is the largest arts center in the United States dedicated to every facet of papermaking, book arts and letterpress printing and to cultivating the talents of established and emerging artists. The unique gift shop will be open so that paper-made gems can be purchased.
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Though most famous for Moby Dick, Herman Melville also wrote compelling sketches, short stories, and novels, including: the ten sketches that comprise The Encantadas, or The Enchanted Isles (1854), the novella Benito Cereno (1855), and the novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). As with his magnum opus, Melville’s shorter fiction draws not only on his eighteen-month voyage to the South Seas on whaling and trading vessels but also on historical sources. The mysterious desolation of the Galapagos Islands, the commandeering of a Spanish slave ship off the southern tip of Chile by its enslaved cargo, and the exotic sexual mores and cannibalism on Nuku Hiva are some of the provocative topics in Melville’s ethnographic, historical, and imaginative shorter works. All aboard for Herman Melville’s reconsideration of Romantic notions of the noble savage and the divinity of the natural world!
Read: The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, Benito Cereno, and select passages from the novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). All works are in the public domain and available at gutenberg.org. More ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
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