UPCOMING:

The Judaic Studies Program proudly announces the upcoming visit of author Etgar Keret,a second-generation Israeli writer. The B.G. Rudolph Lecture Series is sponsoring his visit to campus in October 2009.

Hailed as the voice of young Israel and one of its most radical and extraordinary writers, Etgar Keret is internationally acclaimed for his short stories. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family, his brother heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, and his sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children. Keret regards his family as a microcosm of Israel. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness of life in Israel today. Rarely extending beyond three or four pages, these stories fuse the banal with the surreal. Shot through with a dark, tragicomic sensibility and casual, comic-strip violence, he offers a window on a surreal world that is at once funny and sad.
As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was released in August 2007. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Keret, at present, teaches at Ben Guryon University.

http://www.blueflowerarts.com/contact.html

RECENT:

On February 13, 2009 a lecture was held entitled: Project on Democracy in the Middle East, Elections in Israel: Implications for the Jewish State and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The event was co-sponsored by the Judaic Studies Program and PARC. The highly attended lecture featured three well-known expert speakers: Miriam Ellman, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty Research Associate in the Program on the Analysis and Resoltuion of Conflicts at Syracuse University; Ken Frieden, Professor of English, Religion and Language, literatures and Linguistics; B.G. Rudolph Chair in Judaic Studies and Director of Judaic Studies at Syracuse University; and Ronnie Olesker, Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at St. Lawrence University. The program was mediated by Sevgi Saran, M.A. Candidate in International Relations and Research Assistant in the Program on Democracy in the Middle East at Syracuse University.

Read Professor Elman's essay "Back to the Future? Revisiting Israel's 2009 Elections."