Torah on Tap:
Memory & Forgetting
Tuesday, June 28, 6:00pm
Archetype Brewery, 174 Broadway St.
We’ll discuss dementia and, more specifically,
Alzheimer’s, looking at the current
research and treatments and
emerging ideas on the subject.
Then we’ll explore how Judaism deals
with the topics of memory and forgetting.
Guest speaker (May 6): Alan S. Baumgarten: Mindfulness and Zen Judaism
“I have been in Asheville since 1983 and a member of Congregation Beth Israel for more than 20 years. I am a family doctor now working part-time as I move into retirement. I love my work, so I am proceeding slowly. I have been very active in our medical community, my practice at the Family Health Centers and social causes. I enjoy a spiritual life both Jewish and mindfulness, fitness and martial arts, gardening, woodworking, cooking and baking, travel (haha) and most of all my family.”
The Down Home Exhibit
The Down Home Exhibit is a traveling museum experience produced by Jewish Heritage of North Carolina.
The exhibit takes an experiential, values-oriented approach in telling the narrative of Jewish life in North Carolina. This traveling museum exhibition documented 400 years of Jewish presence. From its debut at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh in 2011, it traveled to the Cape Fear Museum in Wilmington, the Greensboro Historical Museum, and the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. The exhibit will now call Beth Israel home for the month of July.
An opening night reception will be held on Wednesday evening July 6th at 7:30pm and will feature historians Leonard Rogoff and Asheville’s own Sharon Fahrer. Leonard is the president and lead historian for Jewish Heritage of North Carolina and is the author of Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina. Both Leonard and Sharon are experienced experts on Jewish Life in the South.
Also on display will be several artifacts from the Beth Israel archives on loan from the Ramsey Library at UNCA.
To learn more about the exhibit visit www.jewishnc.org.
Friday, June 24 12-1
Last week our group addressed a number of issues brought up in Chapters 7 and 8 in Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Among them were
-
The fact that when it comes to anti-Semitic persecution in the world, thinking that America is somehow an exception is a delusion.
-
The role Jews played as a reminder that freedom (of ethnic and religious expression) is possible and that “freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.” It was pointed out that this role–in which Jews remain distinct, “despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else”–was certainly not exclusive to Jews alone.
-
The fact that in the role identified above, Jews represented a threat to those who fear real freedom and that “societies that accept Jews have flourished and societies that reject Jews have withered.”
-
Horn’s Chapter 8, “On Rescuing Jews and Others,” initially published as a stand-alone pamphlet, is dense; it is hard to find a dominant thesis in the author’s discussion of why she feels uncomfortable with the concept of “righteous gentiles.”
-
Despite Horn’s argument that the number of righteous gentiles is statistically insignificant, over 28,000 of them from 51 countries have been recognized.) Nonetheless, we tended to agree with Horn that there wasn’t much “kindness of strangers” reflected during the Holocaust.
-
Horn uses Varian Fry to illustrate some of her misgivings about how righteous gentiles functioned. She’s distressed by the elitism of his project (rescuing “special ones”–artists and intellectuals–while leaving other refugees (e.g. Hasidim and Mitnagdim) to “nearly inevitable murder.” She indicates that those who were rescued had questionable life-styles despite their “genius.”
This Friday, we will conclude our discussion of Chapter 8 and Horn’s attitudes towards Righteous Gentiles and Varian Fry–with special attention to what Horn identifies as their possible motivation. We’ll then move on to Chapters 9 (about a digital mapping program that permits viewers to visit lost Jewish Communities) and 10 (about an exhibition on Auschwitz at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage).
For supplementary material on Chapter 9, see https://diarna.org/
For supplementary material on Chapter 10, see https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/auschwitz/
There will be no Study Group on Friday, July 1
We will resume our discussions at Noon on Friday, July 8.
Now in its 23rd year, our informal discussion group meets in person from 12-1 in CBI’s small chapel (with an option on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person). All are welcome to attend regardless of their level of expertise. Copies of Horn’s collection should be available in local bookstores and through the internet. If you have questions, please contact Jay Jacoby at jbjacoby@uncc.edu.
Friday, June 24 12-1
Last week our group addressed a number of issues brought up in Chapters 7 and 8 in Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Among them were
-
The fact that when it comes to anti-Semitic persecution in the world, thinking that America is somehow an exception is a delusion.
-
The role Jews played as a reminder that freedom (of ethnic and religious expression) is possible and that “freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.” It was pointed out that this role–in which Jews remain distinct, “despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else”–was certainly not exclusive to Jews alone.
-
The fact that in the role identified above, Jews represented a threat to those who fear real freedom and that “societies that accept Jews have flourished and societies that reject Jews have withered.”
-
Horn’s Chapter 8, “On Rescuing Jews and Others,” initially published as a stand-alone pamphlet, is dense; it is hard to find a dominant thesis in the author’s discussion of why she feels uncomfortable with the concept of “righteous gentiles.”
-
Despite Horn’s argument that the number of righteous gentiles is statistically insignificant, over 28,000 of them from 51 countries have been recognized.) Nonetheless, we tended to agree with Horn that there wasn’t much “kindness of strangers” reflected during the Holocaust.
-
Horn uses Varian Fry to illustrate some of her misgivings about how righteous gentiles functioned. She’s distressed by the elitism of his project (rescuing “special ones”–artists and intellectuals–while leaving other refugees (e.g. Hasidim and Mitnagdim) to “nearly inevitable murder.” She indicates that those who were rescued had questionable life-styles despite their “genius.”
This Friday, we will conclude our discussion of Chapter 8 and Horn’s attitudes towards Righteous Gentiles and Varian Fry–with special attention to what Horn identifies as their possible motivation. We’ll then move on to Chapters 9 (about a digital mapping program that permits viewers to visit lost Jewish Communities) and 10 (about an exhibition on Auschwitz at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage).
For supplementary material on Chapter 9, see https://diarna.org/
For supplementary material on Chapter 10, see https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/auschwitz/
There will be no Study Group on Friday, July 1
We will resume our discussions at Noon on Friday, July 8.
Now in its 23rd year, our informal discussion group meets in person from 12-1 in CBI’s small chapel (with an option on Zoom for those who cannot attend in person). All are welcome to attend regardless of their level of expertise. Copies of Horn’s collection should be available in local bookstores and through the internet. If you have questions, please contact Jay Jacoby at jbjacoby@uncc.edu.