Celebrate the magic of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, at the Magnes Collection! Join Rabbi James Brandt for an exploration of the meaning of Hanukkah today. Rabbi Brandt is the CEO of the Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Foundation of the East Bay. He joined the Federation in 2003 and became its Executive Director […]
Jewish Nightlife is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the nexus between the ritual performance of Jewish texts and social changes across Jewish history, including Hebrew poetry, music, and synagogue liturgy in Europe, in North Africa, the Middle East, and present-day Israel. During the Fall Semester 2014, the project involved research, teaching, performance, and community participation. Thirty UC […]
Digital Humanities research tools allow us to find spatial relationships between objects and ideas that are impossible in an analogue context. In this first PopUp Exhibition of the Spring Semester, The Magnes Collection has the pleasure of welcoming John Fox — a self-described "software developer, traveler, snark-monster, foodie" — who is one of the creators of the […]
Special Guest: Danny Luzon, Graduate Student in Comparative Literature Come learn about Yiddish at the first meeting of the Working Group this semester, on Wednesday 28 January 2015, 4:30pm-6pm! This session will highlight the Magnes’s holdings of Western Yiddish Americana imprints, consisting of original Yiddish literature printed in California until the middle of the twentieth century. […]
The Magnes welcomes Professor Naomi Seidman, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, to its weekly series of PopUp Exhibitions! Professor Seidman is an expert on Yiddish literature, the poetics and politics of translation and the literature of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). She earned her doctorate at Berkeley in 1993 […]
THE AMERICAN JEWISH EXPERIENCE SPEAKER SERIES Professor Bruce Phillips, HUC-JIR (Los Angeles) Who is a Jew in 21st Century America? 6:30PM Reception 7PM Lecture Using the most recent data on American Jewry, Bruce Phillips will explore the complexities and ambiguities of Jewish identification in an age of intermarriage along with their implications for the Jewish […]
Beyond Hans Krása's children's opera Brundibár and the performances showcased for the Red Cross in Theresienstadt and memorialized in film, what about the other composers in Theresienstadt and in other Germany and Axis-occupied lands? Who were some of them and what was their musical legacy? The Exhibition will feature remarkable items in the Magnes Collection from Theresienstadt, […]
We search text all the time — why can't we search speech? This thought led Anne Wootton in 2012 to co-found Pop Up Archive, a Bay Area startup whose software allows users to automatically transcribe, index and tag sound files from anywhere on the web, making the sound searchable to the second. Pop Up Archive has processed over 700,000 […]
Digital Humanities at Berkeley & “The Future of Memory” Welcoming Reception Launching Digital Humanities at Berkeley A Project of the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Research IT & Opening The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age A New Exhibition of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life […]
Join CalPerformances at The Magnes for a symposium, food tasting, and community music event centering around the performance of The Nile Project (Thursday, February 19, Zellerbach Hall). In a historic first, more than a dozen instrumentalists and vocalists from Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda have collaborated to use the power of music to raise awareness of […]
Daniel Fisher (Magnes Graduate Fellow and PhD Candidate, Near Eastern Studies) specializes in the Hebrew Bible and its early reception history. At the Magnes, Daniel is working with Dr. Francesco Spagnolo to curate 'Biblical Lives,' an exhibition to open in fall 2015 highlighting materials from the collection that empowered Jews across history to engage with […]
Special Guest: Sarah Levin, Doctoral Candidate in Jewish Studies Jews have lived in Morocco for over two millennia, occupying a unique place in the North African environment for centuries as the only non-Muslim minority. This at times precarious social position fostered the development of a rich narrative tradition. Our guest Sarah Levin will share stories […]
