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Find the best history events and make the most of your time this month in Somerville. From music to trivia and more, we have the biggest event range and best discovery experience, there's something for everyone.
My great-uncle Benno had one rule while I was growing up: The moment the children learn to talk, they learn to sing. Azoy Mus Sein (“So it Must Be”). Benno learned this Yiddish song while he was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto. He brought it with him from the Ghetto to the Camp, to the Soviet Union, to Siberia, to Berlin, and finally to the United States. Hundreds of survivors like my great-uncle have attested that even in circumstances where every breath wasted precious energy, singing was essential. In this class we will listen to and read music composed by Jews during the Holocaust in different languages and genres. We will explore the possible functions of these songs as tools of dignity and resistance in the midst of horror.
Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa, a 57-minute documentary film, looks at filmmaker Marlene Booth's coming of age in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s, a time of great assimilation. The film explores what it meant to be Jewish and American in the mid-twentieth century and what that means now. Filmmaker Marlene Booth will be present for Q and A after the film.
Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir by Professor Shulamit Reinharz, who was born in Amsterdam to German Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis and started her career at the University of Michigan. She joined the Sociology Department at Brandeis and later directed the Women's Studies Program. She created several research centers and is a founding editor of the Israeli-American academic journal, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish and Gender Studies. She received 'Best Book of the Year' for Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford).
Facing our own national and international crises, we will screen and discuss the film 'At Home in Utopia,' which looks at intergenerational Jewish radicalism from the last century. In confronting the trifecta of racism, fascism, and economic ruin, the Jewish cooperative housing movement launched in New York in the 1920s helped shape Jewish activism and influenced New York's approach to housing for the unionized working class. We'll explore the movement’s core values and strategies: What can young Jews committed to social justice and economic transformation learn from these earlier experiments, their success and failure, and the then-young people who committed their lives to this transformative endeavor?