Skip to content

Programs Search and Views Navigation

Program Views Navigation

Today

Depth of Field: Sephardic Identities on Screen | Toledo: El Secreto Oculto, Israel, 2008, 90 min.

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Toledo: El Secreto Oculto Dir. Jack Matitiahu, Documentary. Israel, 2008. 70 min. The city of Toledo was famous for its rich cultural and historical heritage; a city in which three major cultures met, intertwined and enriched each other. The movie Toledo - the Hidden Secret is a meeting of the past and the present and […]

PopUp Exhibition | Noa Bar Gabai on Orientalism in Israeli Culture

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Noa Bar Gabai is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her dissertation focuses on “Messianism and Masortiyut: The Poetics of Traditionalism in Mizrahi Hebrew”. In this PopUp Exhibition, Noa will put “orientalist” Jewish art and objects from Yemen and North Africa that are part of The Magnes Collection in conversation with her research. […]

PopUp Exhibition | Laurie Pearce on “By the Rivers of Babylon”

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Laurie E. Pearce is a Lecturer in Assyriology at Berkeley. Her areas of speciality include the economic and social history of Mesopotamia in the later part of the first millennium BCE. She studies legal texts written in Hellenistic Uruk: these texts form the basis of her project on  Hellenistic Babylonia: Texts, Images and Names, which can […]

PopUp Exhibition | Susanna Zaraysky on Ladino in Sarajevo

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Filmmaker Susanna Zaraysky co-directed the film, Saved by Language, which tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo whose knowledge of Ladino helped him survive the Holocaust. Susanna’s work aims to contextualize Ladino as an endangered Jewish language. The PopUp Exhibition will feature objects from The Magnes Collection including a Chumash (Pentateuch) […]

Book Talk | Michael Berkowitz on Jews and Photography in Britain

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

San Francisco State University, Jewish Studies & The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life present a book talk by Michael Berkowitz Jews and Photography in Britain Wednesday, October 21, 5:30 PM Reception to follow Michael Berkowitz is a Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College, London. His current work on the engagement of […]

Book Talk | Simon Goodman, The Orpheus Clock

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

The passionate, gripping, true story of one man’s single-minded quest to reclaim what the Nazis stole from his family, their beloved art collection, and to restore their legacy. Simon Goodman’s grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. And that’s almost all he knew about them—his father rarely spoke of their family […]

PopUp Exhibition | Jon Voss on the Power of Digital History

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Jon is the Strategic Partnerships Director at Shift (formerly We Are What We Do) , a non-profit that allows a global community of individuals to share historical documents that matter to them. HistoryPin was created with initial funding support from Google (2011) and consists of a “web platform and a series of local volunteer ­led […]

Depth of Field: Sephardic Identities on Screen | Saved by Language, USA, 2014, 53 min.

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Saved by Language Dir. Susanna Zaraysky and Bryan Kirschen. Documentary. USA, 2014. 53 min.   Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian colonel who helped him escape to […]

PopUp Exhibition | Mary Elings on Preserving Digital History

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Mary Elings is the Head of Digital Collections at The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on the nexus between preserving the past and also making it accessible to scholars and researchers in a plethora of digital platforms. Join us as she details exciting work being done by the Bancroft […]

PopUp Exhibition | Rabbi Yoel Kahn on External and Internal Censorship in Jewish Prayer

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Rabbi Yoel Kahn is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El in Berkeley. Kahn was ordained at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in 1985. He received his doctorate through the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, in 1999. Join Rabbi Kahn as he presents about the rare prayer books in The Magnes Collection.. […]

Depth of Field: Sephardic Identities on Screen | El Gusto, UK, 2011

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

El Gusto Dir. Safinez Bousbia. Documentary, UK, 2011. 88 min. Director Safinez Bousbia discovered the story of an orchestra of Jewish and Muslim musicians torn apart by war 50 years ago, and recently reunited for an exceptional concert. The musicians share a passion they never lost: the soul of Algiers, Chaabi music. After the Algerian […]

PopUp Exhibition | Focus on Undergraduate Research

Magnes Collection of Jewish Life and Art 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA, United States

Erin Faigin is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, and has been an Undergraduate Research Apprentice at the Magnes for two years since 2014. Through her knowledge of Yiddish she helped to create a flagship Digital Humanities project focusing on Yiddish books printed in California, held at The Magnes . Erin catalogued almost 100 volumes, […]