New Lehrhaus

How did the butcher shop become a battleground for Jewish identity in Europe?

This coming Sunday, join us at beautiful Covenant Winery in Berkeley, where historian John Efron will discuss his latest research into the profound and often surprising relationship between meat and the Jewish experience.

From the social power of the medieval butcher to the meat-centered culinary traditions of German Jewry, Efron explores how dietary laws shaped both Jewish life and external perceptions.

In conversation with Deena Aranoff, he'll trace the history of kosher slaughter (shechita)—from 19th-century political bans to the defiance of maintaining kashrut under the N***s and its symbolic restoration in post-war Germany.

WHEN: Sunday, June 7 @ 4pm-5:30pm
WHERE: Covenant Winery, Berkeley

Register at the link in our bio!

What would one write if writing itself was an act of defiance?

In the Warsaw, Łódź, and Vilna ghettos, Jewish authors composed poetry, satire, and testimony in real time.

We think of the Holocaust through photographs and statistics. These writers wanted us to think about it differently: through literature written while the world was ending.

They hid manuscripts in milk cans. They buried archives underground. They created clandestine archives.

This work is what would become known as a ‘literature of atrocity' - urgent, real-time creative responses, serving as both historical documents and literary acts of defiance in the face of the completely unthinkable.

Professor Sven-Erik Rose (UC Davis) has spent his career inside these recovered manuscripts and archives. His new book, out from Brandeis University Press & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the culmination of that work. Now he brings it to you.

➡️ 3 sessions: Wednesdays, June 3, 10, 17 on Zoom
🕐 7pm-8:30pm Pacific

Registration: Open to anyone willing to bear witness.

🔗 Register via link in bio.

In 1290, King Edward I expelled every single Jew from England.

His Edict of Expulsion would remain in force for 366 years.

Shakespeare was born into that world.

A world with no visible Jewish life, no Jewish neighborhoods, no Jewish voices in public discourse. And yet Shakespeare put a Jewish character at the center of one of his most famous plays.

So what exactly was he doing?

Was he a writer of radical empathy or simply a man fluent in his era's prejudices? Or, more uncomfortably, both?

Shylock alone, from the Merchant of Venice, has kept scholars arguing for four centuries. The same character has been called a vicious antisemitic caricature and a radical act of human empathy, sometimes by people reading the exact same scene.

And then there's the mystery that refuses to go away.

A woman named Amelia Bassano, a poet of Venetian-Jewish heritage living in Elizabethan London, may have been the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare's "Dark Lady." The unnamed woman at the heart of his most personal love poems. It's a hypothesis, a controversial one. But the evidence is serious enough that scholars have been debating it for decades.

This Sunday, Dr. Aviva Dautch -- Oxford scholar, BBC broadcaster, and award-winning poet -- is teaching a live class called Shakespeare & the Jews. It's a serious, provocative, and genuinely fascinating excavation of one of the most enduring mysteries of Shakespeare's life.

Come learn with us.

📌 3 Sundays, starting May 31
🕰️ 10am Pacific / 6pm London
🌐 Held on Zoom

🔗 Registration link in the comments -- and share with your Shakespeare-loving friends!

On Tuesday, over 60 people gathered in Berkeley to hear Peter Gordon speak with Robby Adler Peckerar about Gordon's new biography of Walter Benjamin, who is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the 20th century.

Thank you to all who joined us and to the beautiful Hillside Club for hosting!

➡️ OUT NOW: "Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver" by Peter E. Gordon, published with the prizewinning Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press.

📚 Grab your copy at the link in the comments!

Tonight, join Peter E. Gordon for a talk on his new biography of Walter Benjamin for the Yale's Jewish Lives series.

Join us in person at The Hillside Club in Berkeley, Calif.

➡️ Register at the link in comments.

Freud insisted his whole life that he spoke no Yiddish.

Scholars now think he probably did.

Historian Naomi Seidman has spent years tracing what happened when Freud's ideas traveled into Yiddish and Hebrew -- the actual languages of the Jewish world he came from. And the further she looked, the stranger and richer the story got.

There was the translator who discovered that the obvious Yiddish word for "the unconscious" was subtly wrong, and had to go digging through centuries of the language to find a better one.

There was the Hasidic rebbe who arrived in Vienna with a mysterious paralysis, and the disciple Freud assigned to treat him -- almost certainly because he'd grown up near a Hasidic court and knew the right language.

There were Yiddish-speaking readers who devoured Freud's most anti-religious book as if it had been written just for them.

What did it mean to translate the unconscious into a language?

What gets lost, and what, unexpectedly, gets found?

Naomi Seidman is teaching a three-part course on exactly that, starting May 20.

Read the full interview with Seidman and register for her class at the link in our comments.

THIS Wednesday, join Naomi Seidman for the fascinating history of Sigmund Freud’s work in Hebrew and Yiddish.

We trace the journey of psychoanalytic theory from the clinical halls of Vienna to the bustling world of Eastern European Jewry.

By examining how Freud’s radical ideas were translated and transformed, we uncover a unique chapter of Jewish intellectual history where the "unconscious" met the "Holy Tongue" and the vernacular of the masses.

Three Wednesdays: May 20, 27 and June 3
6–7:30pm Pacific
on Zoom

Register at the link in comments!