free things to do in New York City
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Free Events, Free Things to Do in New York City! Read More
New York attracts world's best minds to its shores: they come here to interact with each other at conferences and seminars, and while they are here they are often invited to give a talk, a lecture, to be a part of a public discussion. We at Club Free Time give you an opportunity to be a part of it: to watch how those best minds in the world work! Don't miss the opportunities that only New York City (NYC) provides!
Join the Club!
The quality and quantity of
free events,
free things to do
that happen in New York City
every day of the year
is truly amazing.
So don't miss the opportunities
that only New York provides:
stop wondering what to do;
start taking advantage of
free events to go to,
free things to do in NYC
today!
The quality and quantity of
free events,
free things to do
that happen in New York City
every day of the year
is truly amazing.
So don't miss the opportunities
that only New York provides:
stop wondering what to do;
start taking advantage of
free events to go to,
free things to do in NYC
today!
135 free talks, lectures, discussions in New York City (NYC) Tue, 03/25/2025 - and on...
In New York City, you can talk with and listen to the best minds in the world without spending a dime! Just take a look at free talks, lectures, discussion, seminars, conferences listed on this page below!
Forum | Dealing With the Mind
Join a discussion on different aspects of mental health. Discover resources to help your individual journey. Adults of all ages, backgrounds, identities, and ideas are welcome. This program is not intended to take the place of individual therapy or advice of a medical professional.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
10:30 am
Free
10:30 am
Free
Book Discussion | Saltwater: Thriller about Family's Criminal Secrets (online)
Katy Hays's novel is an electrifying thriller about an opulent family retreat to Italy that’s shattered by the resurfacing of a decades-old crime.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion
Author and fashion historian Nancy MacDonell will be discussing her new book with Deputy Director Patricia Mears. This will be an illuminating conversation about the extraordinary women who put American fashion on the international stage and created the template for modern style.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
5:30 pm
Free
5:30 pm
Free
Talk | "What Makes It Italian?": Respighi and... (online)
"What Makes It Italian?" is a music listening and discussion group led by Gina Crusco, who has acted as maestro del coro for opera in Italy; instructed music at The New School; and directed Underworld Productions. The encounter will focus on: Conosciuto: Ottorino Respighi (1879 – 1936) Sconosciuto: Giovanni Salviucci (1907 – 1937) Giovanni Salviucci’s star was rising when his career was cut short by death at age 29, just a year after the death of his teacher, Ottorino Respighi.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South
Walden Bello’s book is the story of a Filipino activist and intellectual, who went from Princeton PhD in sociology and anti-Vietnam War activist to pro-democracy activist against the Marcos Dictatorship, member of Congress and Vice-Presidential candidate, University Professor and intellectual.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Suggested in the Stars: Second Novel of a Trilogy
Internationally renowned writer Yoko Tawada discusses the second installment in her beloved Scattered trilogy, Suggested in the Stars, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Club | The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
An addictive psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | The Launch of Three Chapbooks by Jeffrey C. Wright, Bonny Finberg, and Barry Wallenstein
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright received his MFA after studying with Allen Ginsberg. A New Romantic poet, he is author of 20 books of verse, including Blue Lyre and Doppelangster; Self Portraits in a Funhouse Mirror. His graphic book of poems and artworks, Party Everywhere, resulted from a residency at eMediaLoft and was designed by Barbara Rosenthal and published by Xanadu Press. His work appears in New American Writing and Best American Poetry, 2023. He has received an Acker Award for both publishing and writing as well as a James Tate Award for poetry. Wright publishes Live Mag! You can see his puppet shows on Youtube. Bonny Finberg’s work has been published internationally, translated into four languages. Her photographs have appeared in various journals and galleries. Her books include Kali's Day; How the Discovery of Sugar Produced the Romantic Era; Deja Vu; Sitting Book, Xanadu Press. Her work is included in Evergreen Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Big Bridge, The Villager, Sensitive Skin, Best American Erotica, A Gathering of The Tribes, American Book Review, Live Mag!, Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Grand Journal. Barry Wallenstein is the author of eleven collections of poetry, the most recent being a chapbook Odd Men Out from Xanadu Press. Barry is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the City University of New York, an editor of the journal, American Book Review and advisory editor at BigCityLit.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | The Price of Peace: Money and Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (the father of macroeconomics)
Paul Krugman, one of today's leading economists, joins in a discussion with Zachary D. Carter, author of an award-winning biography of John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century thinker and father of macroeconomicsl. What can the life and ideas of Keynes, who traveled from Bloomsbury group parties to the halls of power on two continents, teach us about today's debates over government spending and inequality? Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, longtime former columnist for The New York Times, and distinguished professor of Economics, helps to illuminate Keynes' theories for today. He speaks with Carter, biographer, columnist at Slate, and a fellow at the Global Order at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Trauma Plot: The Cost of Survival
A brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir by Jamie Hood on trauma and the cost of survival
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Talk | The Triangle Fire: Impact and Reforms that Followed (online)
On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory claimed 146 lives, prompting the formation of the Factory Investigating Committee, which led to significant labor reforms. On this anniversary, Shaina Taub, creator of Suffs, brings to life the voices of Clara Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, and Frances Perkins, who fought for change. Join the historians Annelise Orleck, Annie Polland, and Margaret Chin, author of Sewing Women, to honor the victims and explore the labor movement and pivotal cross-class alliances, including the 1982 Chinatown Strike, that spurred lasting change.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | All the World Beside: Gay in Puritan New England
Garrard Conley presents his electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister's words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves which has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual. Set during the turbulent historical upheavals which shaped America's destiny and following in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, All the World Beside reveals the very human lives just beneath the surface of dogmatic belief. Bestselling author Garrard Conley has created a page-turning, vividly imagined historical tale that is both a love story and a crucible.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Talk | Photographer Talk: Picturing Fashion
A talk with fashion photographer Diane Allford. Born in Philadelphia, Allford grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She initially took photography classes to help with her work as a broadcast and print journalist. Soon after, she fell in love with photography. Allford’s style centers narrative. Her fashion photography is part of her journey starting out as an urban street-style photographer. Today, she is a professional fashion and advertising photographer. Allford shoots editorial and commercial imagery for marketing, eCommerce, and advertising. Through collaboration with fashion designers, wardrobe stylists, and hair and makeup artist professionals, she creates fashion images based on the aesthetics of the clothes, the locations, and the magic that happens when everyone comes together on set. There is a different approach in post-production where she creates surreal fashion-forward fine art digital collages that incorporate the fashion photos with additional visual elements that sometimes include social commentary.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Never a Dull Moment: The 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion in World War II (online)
Historian Ben Powers will speak on his latest book. Most modern books and films glamorize World War II airborne soldiers as troopers leaping into the night to descend by parachute into combat. Much less often considered is the role of glider forces. Glider troops lacked the panache and special distinctions of paratroopers, despite their critical role in airborne warfare. Likewise, World War II ground combat is characterized as a combined arms fight of infantry and armor, backed up with field artillery; by comparison the role played by specialized, supporting arms has received scant attention. The 80th AAA Battalion was a glider outfit, providing antiaircraft defense and antitank capability to the division’s three infantry regiments as battlefield conditions dictated. Elements of the battalion fought in Italy, Normandy, Holland and the Battle of the Bulge, making combat glider assaults during both Operation Neptune and Operation Market Garden. The exploits of the men of the 80th tend to be obscured as commanders maneuvered the batteries wherever their special skills were needed on the battlefield, with no regiment to call a permanent home. The 80th AAA battalion was a hybrid unit. While its members were considered Coast Artillery (the branch responsible for defending ground formations from air attack during WWII), they fought alongside parachute and glider infantry, most often providing direct fire, anti-armor support with 57mm/6 pounder cannons. While field artillery, both parachute and glider, established their gunlines some distance behind infantry units to provide indirect fire support, the men of the 80th fought face to face with the enemy, alongside their infantry brothers.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Mar 25
8:00 pm
Free
8:00 pm
Free
Lecture | "There is something mad about the art”: The German-Jewish Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim and His Heirs’ Fight for Restitution (online)
Journalist Michael Sontheimer will speak about Alfred Flechtheim, who was born in 1878 in Münster as the son of a wealthy German Jewish grain dealer. He was trained as a trader but did not want to stay in the family business. As he was fascinated with art, he left his hometown and moved to Düsseldorf, where he opened a gallery in 1913. After serving in the German Army during the First World War, in 1921 he opened a second gallery in Berlin, the place to be in the 1920s. He brought works from modern French artists like Picasso, Braque, Chagall, and others to Germany. He also made German painters like Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Paul Klee widely known.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Slide Lecture | Anna Hallprin who Redefined Dance in Postwar America: With Dance Historian (in-person and online)
Interdisciplinary scholar, Janice Ross, explores the connection between dance and cultural politics, examines how homes and landscape architecture shaped choreography through the work of California dancer Anna Halprin (1920-2021). Halprin played a key role in redefining dance in postwar America, pioneering the experimental art form of postmodern dance, and proudly saw herself as a rule-breaker of modern dance. Drawing on decades of research, interviews with the Halprins and their associates, and firsthand experiences in their homes, Ross provides a fresh perspective on Halprin’s career, enriched by archival films of her workshops, rehearsals, and outdoor studio, the dance deck.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy
A uniquely broad and fair-minded guide to making immigration policy ethical. Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration. Author Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Becoming Visible, Staying Visible: 50 Years of Taking a Stand
At a time when erasure is rampant, when stories are being lost and buried, it is all the more important to honor and recognize the overlooked contributions of women. “Igniting a revolution in knowing about women” is a charge all of us can support and sustain. One of the people taking action to reshape our knowledge of history now and into the future is Dr. Gina Luria Walker,\ professor of women’s history. Dr. Walker is founder and director of The New Historia, a research center dedicated to recovering women in history.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Discussion | On the Italian Stage: Solo Shows (online)
On the Italian Stage is a series of encounters conceived and led by Laura Caparrotti (Artistic Director, Kairos Italy Theater) that journeys into the history of Italian theater to explore its language, and its contribution to Italian society and world theater. Solo shows are increasingly becoming a cornerstone of Italian theater. Their affordability, ease of production, and flexibility for touring make them a practical choice for many artists and companies. Despite their simplicity, these performances are highly impactful, often delivering powerful narratives with minimal resources. In fact, solo shows may currently represent the heart of the Italian theatrical landscape, offering a genuine reflection of both the audience’s interests and the artists’ passions. They provide an intimate platform for storytelling, giving voice to personal, social, and cultural themes that resonate deeply in today’s Italy.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
5:00 pm
Free
5:00 pm
Free
Talk | 150 Years of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Tour of the New York Studio School
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was born on January 9, 1875. The life she chose for herself was nothing short of revolutionary, having a huge impact upon the art world, and the Village. Mark the 150th anniversary of Whitney's birth with a tour of the very place she created, the original Whitney Museum (now the New York Studio school), which contains many of her incredible artworks 2024 marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the New York Studio School in 1964 by Mercedes Matter and her students. Since its inception, the New York Studio School has been an innovator in arts education, prioritizing daily continuity of study for artists through work in the studio. In 1967, the School moved into what had been the original Whitney Museum of American Art on West 8th Street, where it continues today to offer its signature programming: MFA and Certificate programs, Evening Lecture Series, exhibitions, and internationally recognized Marathons. The tour will discuss the storied art career and patronage of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who was also a prominent sculptor in her time. Participants will walk through the historic spaces that have played a significant role in the history of American art for over a century, including the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Studio, decorated by Robert Winthrop Chanler. This tour will be guided by Lauren Allshouse, the Librarian at the New York Studio School. She received an Master of Library Science degree from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor of Arts in Painting from the University of Minnesota.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity: A Writer at a Historical Juncture
Author Karen Underhill discusses her book. In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like a number of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Belonging with Songs: Towards an Historical Anthropology of Medieval French Chansons
Why do we sing? How does singing shape how we see ourselves and how we relate to one another? Emma Dillon takes up these universal questions in the context of a medieval song community. Her talk explores Medieval French songs (trouvere songs) as a social practice, linked to specific people and families from Northern France and to other forms of social activity. She offers a case study of twelfth-century trouveres (using new recordings of their songs), and shows how songs, charters and seals foster a sense of belonging to a community. Her talk also introduces the UKRI-funded project, Musical Lives, which takes further the possibility of song-centred histories through interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars and performers.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | My Friends: Coming of Age in the Arab Spring
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him. With author Hisham Matar
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Book Discussion | Whatever Happened to Frankie King?: Brooklyn, Books, and Basketball
Come meet father-son duo, author-illustrator Eli Neugeboren and author Jay Neugeboren for an authors' talk for the new graphic memoir.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Talk | Artist Talk: My Mother and Eye
A public talk with artist Carmen Winant and Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress as they discuss My Mother and Eye, Winant’s Public Art Fund exhibition and her largest public art project to date. On view from February to April 2025, My Mother and Eye features 11 compositions assembled from over 1,200 film stills from works created by Winant and her mother as teenagers. The works will be displayed on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston. This exhibition explores themes of generational kinship, self-discovery, and agency, offering a reflection on the personal and cultural landscapes shared by mother and daughter. During the talk, Winant will offer a short experimental lecture, give insights into her creative process, the significance of public space for this project, and the ways in which photography can shape both personal narratives and collective histories. The conversation will delve into the powerful role of self-representation and the importance of bringing intimate, familial stories into public view.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Joan Didion: Exploring the Legacy of Legendary Journalist (in-person and online)
The New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's (1934-2021) lasting impact through the lens of American storytelling and mythmaking. Wilkinson's We Tell Ourselves Stories explores Joan Didion's impact on Hollywood and American culture, examining her 40-year screenwriting career with John Gregory Dunne. Wilkinson highlights how Didion both shaped and exposed the myths of postwar America, revealing the power and peril of the stories we tell.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Mar 26
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Israel on Our Minds with Ambassador Ido Aharoni (in-person and online)
Even those of us who follow the news from Israeli regularly are left with more questions than insight: How should we think about Israel security in the face of a rapidly changing Middle East? What is the government doing in response to the worldwide condemnation of the Jewish State . . . and what could it do? Has the Start-Up Nation sputtered out? Can the breach between the religious and the secular populations be healed -- and how? Does the Israeli government take the concerns and opinions of the Jewish diaspora seriously enough? Should it? With so many questions -- and so much confusion -- they have recruited the ideal person to pull back the curtain on the complicated situation: an Israel diplomat, university professor, writer and investor, Ido Aharoni.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Book Discussion | Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia
When the hammer and sickle came down in late 1991, Russia’s feverish new market opened for business. From banking to breweries, sectors emerged out of nowhere, in a country that had never had a functioning economy. For the next three turbulent decades, a wild, proto-capitalist free-for-all transformed Russian society. Then, in 2022, Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The market started to collapse; Western firms fled Moscow’s skyscrapers. No country this large had ever transformed itself as dizzyingly as 1990s Russia–now, just as dramatically, it was over. The intervening decades had seen phenomenal successes and crushing failures; the creation and destruction of enormous fortunes. How did it all happen? Charles Hecker's book brings to life the complex, vivid color of one of the greatest experiments in the history of global commerce. What have businesses learnt–or failed to learn–from this adventure, both about Russia and about dynamics between countries and companies in the face of relentless change?
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Emotions of Conflict: Israel 1949-1967 (online)
Author Orit Rozin explores the emotional toll of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the formative years of the state of Israel, with attention to policymakers and officials, as well as soldiers and civilians, all grappling with the challenges of their time.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
12:30 pm
Free
12:30 pm
Free
Gallery Talk | Dreaming of Home: Exhibition Talk on Belonging, Community, and Identity (online)
Brooke Wyatt and Gemma Rolls-Bentley explore the museum’s collection through the prism of belonging, community, and identity. The American Folk Art Museum's collection features many artists who have experienced disenfranchisement and faced brutal social and economic restrictions. Their artworks often complicate conventional representations of domesticity and protection, even as they materialize a sense of belonging and hold onto the “dream of home.” Curator Brooke Wyatt invites curator and writer Gemma Rolls-Bentley to present the curatorial framework behind Dreaming of Home, recently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. This project explores the idea of home beyond its physical space, considering the roles of community, family, spirituality, and the body in creating a safe and comfortable place. Through the works of twenty contemporary queer artists, Rolls-Bentley suggests that building a home is sometimes a hard-won process that requires faith, creativity, and imagination. Speakers will reflect on themes of self-care, queerness, artistic identity, and world-building, and will engage with artists featured in Somewhere to Roost, including works by Lee Godie, Thornton Dial, Sr., and a selection of hand-tinted vernacular photographs.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Lecture | A Trip into the Archive: The Case of Otto Schneid (online)
YIVO’s Museum of Jewish Art, Judaica, and Art History was initiated in the mid-1930s at YIVO’s Vilna headquarters. Those involved included the well-known artist Marc Chagall and the Austrian-Jewish art historian Otto Schneid. Before Schneid was tapped to spearhead this museum, he had dedicated years of his life to creating a kind of encyclopedia of contemporary Jewish artists, many of them contributors to L’Ecole de Paris and satellites of this avant-garde art movement in cities across Europe. Beginning in 1929, Schneid travelled to view the artwork of over one hundred a hundred Jewish artists such as Chana Orloff, Alfred Reth, Oscar Miestchaninoff, and Henryk Streng. He also corresponded with them by letter, and the artists sent him photographs of their work along with their biographies. Schneid submitted the manuscript of his encyclopedia to his publisher in 1937. Following the Anschluss of March 1938, the Nazis raided the publishing house and destroyed the manuscript. Schneid escaped Europe with the letters and photographs he had gathered with the hope of recreating the book. Based on her archival work at YIVO and at the University of Toronto’s Fisher Library, Alyssa Quint discusses the lives of Schneid and his artists and uses the case of Schneid to reflect on the allure of and impediments to archival research.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Talk | Artist Talk: Survival and Intimations of Immortality (online)
Curator Ori Z Soltes, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana in a conversation about Survival and Intimations of Immortality: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana moderated by Rachel Stern. This unique and powerful exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education explores the role of art and creativity, bringing the past into the present by focusing on three generations of artists from the same family. The artists and curatorial team will share their insights about the work in the exhibition, how the show was made, and the impact it had, and share more insight into the remarkable life and work of Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
1:30 pm
$5
1:30 pm
$5
Book Discussion | Reviving a Yiddish Masterpiece: A Conversation on Sons and Daughters (online)
Discover Chaim Grade’s literary treasure and the enduring legacy of Yiddish culture with translator Rose Waldman. Translator Rose Waldman and AJU’s Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson explore Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters, now available in its long-awaited English translation. Praised by Elie Wiesel as “one of the greatest contemporary Yiddish novelists,” Grade’s novel captures the decline of traditional Jewish life in 1930s Poland and Lithuania. Discover this literary treasure and the enduring legacy of Yiddish culture in this engaging conversation.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (in-person and online)
Editor Svitlana Biedarieva's volume traces the development of art practices in Ukraine from the 2004 Orange Revolution, through the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, to the ongoing Russian war of aggression. Contributors explore how transformations of identity, the emergence of participatory democracy, relevant changes to cultural institutions, and the realization of the necessity of decolonial release have influenced the focus and themes of contemporary art practices in Ukraine. The chapters analyze such important topics as the postcolonial retrieval of the past, the deconstruction of post-Soviet visualities, representations of violence and atrocities in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, and the notion of art as a mechanism of civic resistance and identity-building. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America
Jane Borden's colorful and enlightening pop history that explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today, contextualizes the current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, and proposes that the United States is the largest cult of all.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age (online)
Author Martha Moffitt Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age. From the beginnings of the new Republic, visual celebrations of famous heroines who crossed gender boundaries by fighting in the Revolt against Spain or by distinguishing themselves in arts and letters became an essential and significant cultural tradition that reverberated throughout the long seventeenth century. This collective memory of consequential heroines who equaled, or outshone, men is frequently reflected in empowering representations of other female archetypes: authoritative harpies and noble housewives. Such enabling imagery helped in the structuring of gender norms that positively advanced a powerful female identity in Dutch society.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Skulls, Sculptures and the Kaiser’s Museums
What can museums tell us about a nation’s self-image? How does Germany approach its colonial past in light of the Holocaust? Berlin’s national museums have become the focus of current debates around repatriation and colonial collections – most visibly those now housed inside the contested Humboldt Forum. But the Humboldt Forum is just the beginning.This talk moves beyond the ethnological collections inside the resurrected Prussian castle in the center of Berlin. It ties recent discussions to other, hitherto neglected sites, such as the seemingly unproblematic antiquity collections from the former Ottoman Empire on Berlin’s Museum Island, and collections of human remains from ‘German East Africa' held in the storage facilities on the city’s periphery. How were all these collections entangled not only with each other but also with global networks of trade, material extraction and exploitative labour? In the late nineteenth century, these collections were furthermore exploited to consolidate triumphalist narratives of 'Western civilization' and human history – not least by providing the raw materials for a new form of ‘scientific’ antisemitism and racism that developed around 1900 onwards: with fatal consequences in the twentieth century. In spite of these problematic legacies, however, Berlin’s urban center still reflects an imperial mindset in the wake of an affirmative monumentalization of the Wilhelmine era. This tells us as much about race and memory politics in Germany today. Following the lecture, Mirjam Brusius will be joined in conversation by Professor Avinoam Shalem, Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam. A reception will conclude the evening.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Club | Play Club: How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel
Play Club is like a book club, but for plays! Whether you are familiar with the art of reading plays, or looking to expand your appreciation for dramatic literature, this book club is an opportunity to read plays you have been meaning to explore or have never considered reading before. Learn about new works, discover new playwrights, and make friends! How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel is the story of a woman who learns the rules of the road and life from behind the wheel. Vogel’s play is a wildly funny, surprising and devastating tale of survival, a sexual coming of age through the 60s, 70s and 80s as seen through the provocative lens of a troubling relationship between a young girl and an older man. Registration required.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Discussion | Every Work Has Several Faces: Writing and Translation
International literary luminary Yoko Tawada, born in Tokyo, lives in Berlin and publishes novels, stories, essays, poems, and plays in both Japanese and German as well as translating between these languages. She has received dozens of literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Goethe Medal, the Kleist Prize, and the National Book Award. Some of her major works available in English include The Emissary and Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, and Memoirs of a Polar Bear and Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Mar 27
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Symposium | Wondrous Objects
Wondrous Objects is planned in conjunction with the exhibition Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities. Scholars, artists, and designers will examine how the study and collection of historically and personally meaningful objects have inspired their thinking, creativity, and curiosity.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Mar 28
10:00 am
Free
10:00 am
Free
Book Discussion | Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (online)
Simon Winchester's latest book explores how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion--from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Mar 28
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Binding Friendship: Writers Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich
This talk will feature Megan Behrent (Associate Professor of English, New York City College of Technology) in conversation with English Program student Ju Ly Ban. Behrent will discuss her current book project, which explores the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and reflects on their literary and historical contributions. This discussion will also explore the process of writing and publishing a scholarly book.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Mar 28
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Tasmania: Tipping Point in Climate Change
After losing the future he imagined for himself, a writer sets out in search of connection and purpose at a tipping point with climate change and global conflict, in this breathtaking novel from Paolo Giordano.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Mar 28
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Lecture | The Hungarian Campaign of 1527-28: Politics and Strategy in the High Renaissance (online)
Speaker: Cole Snedeker, US Air Force Officer and Historical Researcher
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Mar 28
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Talk | Invaded Forests: A Material Demonstration
A material demonstration using native, invasive, and farmed plant species to examine the land they shape and their industrial processes. The language of an “invaded land” obscures our role in creating what much of local land looks like. Invasive trees (invaders), native forests (invaded), industrial forests—which are both invading and now being invaded—, and urban growth that is constantly encroached: each of these plant types and locations for growth are layers of intention, adaptation, and resilience. Artist and designer Frank Dallas will lead participants in a material demonstration that examines how native, invasive, and farmed plant species shape the land they inhabit, their ties to industrial processes, and our evolving relationship to them. Natural materials will be explored through the parallels between the materials we grow and build with and how and where they grow. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with various materials while discussing their role in ecosystems, their material strengths and weaknesses, and how their use as commodities influence the land.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Sat, Mar 29
2:00 pm
Free
2:00 pm
Free
Lecture | "To Become a Soviet Fet": Unofficial Poetry and the Russian Nature Lyric Tradition
A key feature of post-WWII Soviet uncensored poetry is its complicated, often ironic relationship to the older lyrical traditions enshrined by official Soviet culture. One such tradition is Romantic nature poetry, with its emphasis on contemplation, rapture, and other forms of expressive subjectivity and authenticity. These forms, however, seem problematic in the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. This talk examines a body of work by poets associated with the Lianozovo group – Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov and Yan Satunovsky – that repeatedly evokes Afanasii Fet, the foremost practitioner of 19th-century lyric expressivity and attunement to nature. What motivates this unexpected connection? Fet emerges as shorthand for nature poetry and Naturgefühl more generally, and as a symbol of its irrelevance and unsustainable escapism. The lecture sets Lianozovo’s dialogue with Fet against the backdrop of his reception by earlier poets and contrasts it with references to Alexander Pushkin’s nature lyric in the work of Leonid Aronzon, an unofficial poet of a very different formation, whose allusions, by contrast, seek to re-enchant the contemporary world. Speaker Luba Golburt is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination(University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and has published articles on Enlightenment and Romanticism, as well as on modern Russian poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. She is currently working on a book-length study of the Russian nature lyric tradition and is co-editing, with Catherine Ciepiela and Stephanie Sandler, the Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects: Building in Place
Modern urban architecture by the renowned firm with a self-imposed mandate to further the common good.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out by Jennifer Ashley Tepper
In honor of Women’s History Month, author and theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper will celebrate her newly released book with a presentation and performance. Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out is the first-ever book about female musical theater writers. In this program, Tepper will give an inside look at some of the more than 300 inspiring women featured. Expect behind-the-scenes photos and stories about prolific and celebrated Broadway writers like Betty Comden and Jeanine Tesori, women who have written musicals but gained fame elsewhere like Dolly Parton and Sara Bareilles, and dramatists you may not have heard of—but definitely should have—from Micki Grant, whose mega-hit musical about the Black experience made her the first woman to write book, music, and lyrics for a Broadway show to María Grever, the first Mexican female composer to achieve international success—who made her Broadway debut at age 56. Tepper will also present guest performers sharing some fascinating songs written by women for musicals that will bring the book to life and make you look at theater in a whole new way. Registration required.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Making Truths Believable Again in an Age of Conspiracist Mythocracies (in-person and online)
In an age of rampant misinformation and disinformation, authors Yves Citton (Mythocracy, Verso 2025) and François Noudelmann (Director of La Maison Française, author Can We Make Truth Great Again? Max Milo, 2025) come together to discuss the nature of reality vs. myth, and whether truth has the capacity to endure in an environment in which facts have an alternative.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Boccaccio’s Anger: A Case in the Philology and Politics of Emotions
A lecture by Gur Zak, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Club | Graphic Novel Book Club: Bitch Planet Book One: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman's failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Discussion | Irish Immigration and Deportation in Early 19th Century, with Historians (online)
When Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in the early 19th century, they encountered prejudice due to their Catholic faith and poverty. Many Americans were not receptive to them. But what was the impact of this discrimination? How did the Irish immigrants respond? And what can we learn from this early wave of immigration that is relevant today? With historians Dr. Hidetaka Hirota and Dr. Kevin Kenny.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Talk | Surviving a Plague: Art & Activism in the Time of AIDS
Award-winning journalist, author and filmmaker David France speaks on the achievements, in the midst of terrible necessities, of AIDS activists in art and politics. Filmmaker David France is the director and co-writer of the Oscar-nominated and critically-acclaimed, How to Survive a Plague, the documentary and subsequent book about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The film earned him The John Schlesinger Award (given to a first-time documentary or narrative feature filmmaker) from the Provincetown International Film Festival and the PBS Independent Lens broadcast won the Peabody Award and was nominated for two Emmys. David is also a best-selling author and an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in national publications.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Mar 31
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Lecture | American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (online)
In this lecture, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, uncovers the untold history of U.S. economic warfare over the last two decades. He reveals how America, under leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping, and Khamenei, shifted from globalization to leveraging its dominance in finance and technology to confront global crises and rivals, reshaping the world order.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Talk | Artist Talk: Beatrice Glow
Beatrice Glow is a multidisciplinary American artist of Taiwanese heritage. Her practice spans sculpture, installations, textiles, olfactory experiences, virtual reality sculpting, and participatory performances. Bridging public history with just futures, she questions historical forms of visual and material culture, often in collaboration with culture bearers, researchers and museums to reinterpret collections through contemporary and community-based lenses.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Third Culture Cooking: Classic Recipes for a New Generation
Zaynab Issa launches a collection of everyday multicultural recipes that meld the old with the new and the familiar with the unfamiliar to create bold flavors and new classics for the next generation of cooks. In conversation with Christina Chaey, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Adventures in Italian Opera with Met Soprano Federica Lombardi
The sixth Adventure in Italian Opera with Fred Plotkin of this season features Italian soprano Federica Lombardi, who will be singing the role of Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at The Metropolitan Opera.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Trauma Plot: The Cost of Survival
A brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir by Jamie Hood on trauma and the cost of survival
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Paganism: A Lens for Understanding Modern Politics with Yale History Professor (in-person and online)
Are we living in an age of enlightenment or divination? A scholar of the history of Central Europe, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder suggests that our era—distracted by the new yet shaped by ancient patterns—resembles a political religion rooted in something older than Christianity, perhaps even pagan. Social media and extreme wealth inequality have fostered behaviors that feel mythical but may instead reflect recurring historical cycles.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 1
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel of Love, Identity, and Belonging (online)
Author Zeeva Bukai explores forbidden love, identity, and exile in Israel and America in her gripping novel The Anatomy of Exile. This is a thought-provoking conversation with author Zeeva Bukai and AJU’s Rabbi Gail Labovitz about Bukai’s powerful debut novel, The Anatomy of Exile. They will discuss the themes of this gripping family saga that unfolds in the wake of the Six-Day War, following Tamar Abadi as she struggles to preserve her Jewish Israeli identity in America while confronting painful truths about love, loss, and belonging. When her daughter falls for the son of their Palestinian neighbors, Tamar fears history will repeat itself, setting off a chain of events that threaten to unravel her family. Through this poignant exploration of exile, identity, and forbidden love, Bukai invites us to examine the personal and political forces that shape our lives.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Fashion at the 1925 Art Deco Exhibition
Deputy Director Patricia Mears, Swann Gallery owner Nicho Lowry, and jewelry specialist Virginia Salem in a panel moderated by Couture Council member Gordon Kendall in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Paris' 1925 Art Deco Exhibition. Speakers will discuss the exhibition's continuing influences on fashion and design at this important event.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
5:30 pm
Free
5:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Lonnie Holley: Artist's Monograph
A conversation and signing with Lonnie Holley, the widely admired visual artist and performer who is finally receiving his due as a creative visionary.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Talk | Artist Talk: Harmonia Rosales (in-person and online)
Renowned Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales in an in-depth exploration of her artistic journey. In this talk, Rosales will delve into the significance of her visual storytelling, the role of spirituality in art, and cultural reclamation in both academic and artistic spheres. Following the talk, there will be a conversation with Dr. Akissi Britton, a scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, African diasporic religions, and Black feminism. Together, Rosales and Britton will engage in a dynamic discussion about the how visual culture can empower the reclamation of narratives that have been historically erased.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Of Orpheus, Eurydice, Vivaldi, and More
Last year, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo captivated audiences at the Metropolitan Opera with his moving portrayal of Orpheus in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. This spring, Sarah Ruhl’s celebrated play Eurydice returns to New York City, following the success of its operatic adaptation. Now, the two artists are collaborating on The Seasons, a “new Baroque opera about the weather,” with music by Antonio Vivaldi and an original libretto by Ruhl, running this March at Boston Lyric Opera. Who better to explore the art of adaptation, the echoes of the past in the present and future, and the transformative power of performance and voice? How do they illuminate memory, loss, nature, and trauma? Join us for an evening of insight and artistry, where music and words come together to explore timeless human questions. Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has performed across opera, concert, film, and Broadway since his professional debut at age 11. In June 2024, he became General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia. He has performed with major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and English National Opera, and appeared with top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra. His recordings include Only an Octave Apart and the GRAMMY-winning Akhnaten. A champion of new music, he has premiered works by leading composers and curated productions for institutions like the BBC Proms and the New York Philharmonic. Costanzo has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Beverly Sills Award and Operalia. A Princeton and Manhattan School of Music graduate, he now serves on multiple boards and has held fellowships at Oxford and Harvard. His artistic vision continues to push boundaries in classical music. Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning playwright, author, librettist, and professor. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her acclaimed plays include The Oldest Boy, Dear Elizabeth, Stage Kiss, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer finalist, 2005; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play (Pen American Award, Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (nine NAACP Image Award nominations); Scenes From Court Life; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday; Eurydice; Orlando; and Late: a cowboy song. Her work has been produced on Broadway, across the U.S., and internationally. She has received numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN Center Award, and a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. Ruhl earned her M.F.A. from Brown University. She teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Heartwood: Lost Hiker Struggles to Survive
Author Amity Gaige in conversation with Jennifer Egan. In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Book Discussion | When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (in-person and online)
Manhattan historian Robert Snyder preserves the pandemic experiences of frontline New Yorkers in a new book When the City Stopped tells story of the COVID-19 lockdown in the words of ordinary New Yorkers, illuminating the fear and uncertainty of life in the early days of the pandemic, as well as the solidarity that sustained the city. Through oral histories compiled by Manhattan Borough Historian Robert Snyder, we see that while many worked from home, others knowingly exposed themselves to danger as they drove buses, ran subways, answered 911 calls, tended to the sick, and made and delivered meals. As we mark the fifth anniversary of the crisis, Snyder speaks about this deeply moving new book with S. Mitra Kalita, a journalist, media executive, and author, who co-founded Epicenter-NYC, a newsletter to help New Yorkers get through the pandemic.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Lecture | Sinking Cities: Scientists on Effects of Climate Change
An important talk on land subsidence - the gradual or sudden sinking of the Earth's surface, caused by natural events like earthquakes and erosion, or human activities like mining and pumping. Join associate professor of geophysics and remote sensing at Virginia Tech, Manoochehr Shirzaei and postdoctoral research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at the Columbia Climate School Leonard Ohenhen discussing how land subsidence and rising sea levels are reshaping communities worldwide, with case studies from global, U.S., and NYC perspectives. For ages 21+.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 2
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth's Past and Will Shape Our Future (in-person and online)
It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future. Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes. He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future. Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life’s essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 3
4:15 pm
Free
4:15 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Realistic Fiction: Startingly Unique Stories
Author Anton Solomonik in conversation with Cat Fitzpatrick. Finally, a book for men. Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like: Stealing porn magazines? Hooking up with guys on Grindr? Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience? Crossdressing as a woman? Attending Gnostic Mass? Running for government office? Then this is a book for you! It is definitely not a deeply felt collection of transsexual short stories, engaged in dissident metaphysical investigation of the normative tenets of gender in our society. Bro, how could you say that? It is very dramatic and exciting, yes, but it is not metaphysical at all. In fact, it is Realistic Fiction. As if Charlie Chaplin re-wrote the works of Kafka, and he was a Russian trans man, Anton Solomonik brings a funny, heartbreaking, and startlingly unique new voice to contemporary short fiction.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 3
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Lecture | Artwork and the Dialectics of Truth Content
This talk deals with Professor Seta B. Dadoyan’s aesthetic philosophy and artworks in terms of encounters and convergences in her experiences. Her theories focus on the autonomy of art, its cognitive importance, social-historical embeddedness, the “culture industry,” “truth-content,” and “concretization” as criteria for aesthetic judgments.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 3
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Yiddish Studies in the Digital Age: 10 Years of In geveb (in-person and online)
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies published its first articles, essays, translations, and teacher resources in August of 2015. In the intervening decade, it has to a large degree achieved its founding goal, to become “a central address for the study of all things Yiddish.” A generation of students, culture producers, and emerging scholars of Yiddish have now come of age with In geveb as a place to publish, to keep abreast of current research around the world, to find new translations to teach, and read reviews of everything from the latest scholarly publications to new Yiddish music, theater, and film. This roundtable brings together a group of scholars who have all been involved with In geveb in a range of roles to reflect on what this “born digital” journal has contributed to the field of Yiddish studies. This panel will also reflect on the state of Yiddish studies more broadly over the past decade. The panel will conclude by asking what the next 10 years will hold for the field of Yiddish studies, and how scholarly and cultural spaces like In geveb will need to adapt to be ready to serve a changing academic and cultural landscape. Panelists include former Peer Review Associate for In geveb Elena Hoffenberg, founding co-editor of In geveb and past president of In geveb’s board of directors Eitan Kensky, and members of In geveb’s board of directors Eddy Portnoy and Rachel Rubinstein. The evening will be introduced and moderated by chief editor of In geveb Jessica Kirzane and president of In geveb’s board of directors Madeleine Cohen.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 3
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism
Bradley Gorski's book explores Russian literature’s eager embrace of capitalism in the post-Soviet era. When the Soviet Union fell, books were suddenly bought and sold as commodities. Russia’s first bestseller lists brought attention and prestige. Even literary prizes turned to the market for legitimacy. The rise of capitalism entirely transformed both the economics and the aesthetics of Russian literature. By reconstructing the market’s influence on everything from late-Soviet paper shortages to the prose of neoimperialism, Cultural Capitalism reveals Russian literature’s exuberant hopes for and deep disappointments in capitalism. Only a free market, it was hoped, could cure endemic book deficits and liberate literature from ideological constraints. But as the market came to dominate literature, it imposed an ideology of its own, one that directed literary development for decades.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 4
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Artist Talk: Steve McQueen (online)
A conversation with artist Steve McQueen and scholar Paul Gilroy to mark two concurrent exhibitions of McQueen’s work at Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea. Over many years, McQueen and Gilroy have sustained an ongoing dialogue about the political and cultural dimensions of what Gilroy terms the Black Atlantic, particularly as it relates to visual art and music. Gilroy has also written extensively on and in response to McQueen’s work, including most recently for the catalog Steve McQueen: Bass, published in conjunction with McQueen’s commission for Dia Beacon and documenting the immersive light-and-sound installation. In this conversation, they will focus on their shared interest in music, taking the complex musical idioms associated with Bass (2024) and the Black Atlantic as points of departure.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 4
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Symposium | Fresh, Bold & So Def Symposium Spotlights Unsung Heroines of Hip-Hop
The second annual Fresh, Bold & So Def Symposium spotlights the achievements of the often-unsung heroines of Hip-Hop who set the standard and continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the culture. The conference showcases the rich tapestry of talent from women trailblazers innovating in a male-dominated industry with a roster of presenters featuring artists, scholars, and creative professionals. Through powerful stories, cultural insights, and a collective commitment to honoring Hip-Hop's past, present, and future, this intergenerational and transnational gathering is a vital celebration of the transformative impact of women at the vanguard of the global Hip-Hop movement!
New York City, NY; NYC
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Sat, Apr 5
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Talk | Holocaust Survivor Leo Ullman in Conversation
Leo Ullman survived the Holocaust in hiding with strangers as a toddler—in Amsterdam, the same city where Anne Frank and her family hid and were later discovered. His parents, who also went into hiding in a separate location, were told nothing about his caretakers or his location in order to help keep him safe. Only after the war did Leo realize that the loving couple who had raised him for years were not his biological parents. He later learned just how many of the Dutch families nearby knew about the young Jewish boy in hiding and chose to protect him. Ullman came to the United States in 1947, served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and practiced law for more than 30 years. He also served as a Director of the Anne Frank Center USA for two decades and as its Chairman for 7 years. At this program, Leo Ullman will share his memories, in conversation with Kyra Schuster, Lead Acquisitions Curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. On the Museum's staff since 1994, Schuster acquires new materials for the Museum's permanent collection and has worked on numerous special exhibitions, Museum publications, and online programs. This program is suitable for families with children ages 11 and above.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Sun, Apr 6
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | How to Solve Your Own Murder: Waiting for the Killer (online)
In Kristen Perrin's thrilling page-turner, a woman who spends her entire life trying to prevent her foretold murder only to be proven right sixty years later, is found dead in her sprawling country estate.... Now it's up to her great-niece to catch the killer.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 7
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Gallery Talk | Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibition Discussion
This show explores the fascinating connections between fashion and cabinets of curiosities. Nearly 200 garments and accessories from The museum collection--many of which have never before been on view--are selected to pique curiosity through their rarity, beauty, or originality.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 7
5:30 pm
Free
5:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | French at Heart: Recipes That Bring France Home
This gorgeous cookbook about living well the French way comes from mother-daughter duo Marjorie Taylor and Kendall Smith Franchini, expats and founders of the cooking school The Cook's Atelier in Burgundy, France. The authors in conversation, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 7
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850 (online)
An agunah, literally a “chained woman,” is a woman unable to secure a rabbinic divorce because her husband has disappeared or is unwilling to sign the divorce papers. Author Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the Jewish legal rulings of rabbis, which determined the fate of these marginalized agunot. How did Jewish society deal with the danger of women becoming agunot? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves as agunot, and what could they do to extricate themselves from their plight? How did rabbinic decisors discharge their task during this period, and what were the outcomes given that the agunot were dependent on the male rabbinic establishment? Shashar reexamines the halakhic activity concerning agunot in the early modern period and proposes a new assessment of the attitude that decisors displayed toward the freeing of these women. This study also fills a void in the scholarship on agunot by describing the lives of these women and of the men who brought this about.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 8
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Popular Culture, Politics, and Biography: Susan Morrison and Maureen Dowd in Conversation (in-person and online)
The authors discuss their new books, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live and Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech. In a special two-handed biography event, Susan Morrison, the author of a groundbreaking biography of Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, joins in conversation with Maureen Dowd, columnist at The New York Times and author of Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech. Morrison and Dowd will interview each other, delving into the power of satire and celebrity in our current political culture. Morrison’s book reveals the real Lorne Michaels, who, while at the helm of SNL for 50 years, has been a tastemaker, mogul, genius talent spotter, shrewd businessman, and a mystery. Dowd’s book shines a white-hot spotlight on influential cultural elites — Greta Gerwig, Idris Elba, Jane Fonda, and Elon Musk, to name a few — with her signature wit and incisive commentary.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 8
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Talk | Photographer Talk: Jai Lennard
A talk with New York-based portrait photographer Jai Lennard. Through his photography, Lennard tells stories about perseverance, triumph, legacy, love, and strength is the common thread throughout his diverse body of work. With a background as a performing artist, Lennard’s deep respect for all art forms offers him a way to connect with his subjects and work seamlessly with them from behind the camera. He grew up in the Bay Area of northern California with family roots in Texas and Louisiana and participated in performing arts throughout his youth, including dance, music, and theatre. Lennard studied at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA, where he started taking photos more seriously, then London, where he took his first photo course, and finally, New York, where he received his BA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts. Since then, Lennard has lived in Brooklyn.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 8
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s (online)
Kateryna Zarembo's book offers a nuanced exploration of Donetsk and Luhansk regions prior to the 2014 Russian invasion. While the region, collectively known as Donbas, frequently appears in news headlines, it remains under-researched by scholars, and myths about it abound. Combining rigorous research and captivating narration, Kateryna Zarembo debunks common myths about the region, such as its long-standing gravitation towards Russia and its rejection of everything Ukrainian.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Book Discussion | Tikkun Ha'am / Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism (online)
How does the Exodus story guide how we respond to current moral and spiritual challenges? Explore the powerful themes of Tikkun Ha’am/Repairing Our People with Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin through the lens of Passover, a holiday that celebrates liberation, resilience, and communal responsibility.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
3:00 pm
Free
3:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
Author Alice Driver will discuss her new book.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
5:30 pm
Free
5:30 pm
Free
Lecture | The Unseen Revelers: A Brief History of Female Nightlife Activists in the Village (online)
A virtual lecture that delves into the vibrant history of female nightlife activists in the iconic Greenwich & East Village neighborhoods of New York City. This program will explore the remarkable contributions of women who took up space in taverns, bars, lounges, speakeasies and clubs to advance political ideas; highlight emerging subcultures & artforms; gathered people of classes/races/ethnicities, and shift the zeitgeist. The Unseen Revelers features iconic dames and pivotal moments, like Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit'; Norma Miller doing the Lindy, Sylvia Robinson introducing Hip Hop to new audiences at Webster Hall; and Patti Astor gathering New Wave artists and graffiti writers in one space.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
5:30 pm
Free
5:30 pm
Free
Discussion | "Arts for Living”: Can Artists Survive in New York City?
Panelists will discuss whether New York City can remain a magnet and incubator for creativity across the visual and performing arts at a time when affordable living/working space and access to resources continue to shrink in the city. Panelists will look back at the history of the Lower East Side, and NYC more generally, as a haven for artists, address how and why this city has nurtured artist communities for so long, and discuss what is needed to sustain a culture of creativity today. Panelists - Maura Cuffie-Peterson, director of strategic initiatives, guaranteed income, Creatives Rebuild New York - Anne del Castillo, senior policy advisor, creative sector strategy, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs - Ashley Ferro-Murray, arts program director, Doris Duke Foundation - Nile Harris, 2022–23 Abrons Arts Center Performance AIRspace resident - Sharon Zukin, sociologist Moderated by Valentina Di Liscia, news editor, Hyperallergic
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC's Landmark LGBTQ+ Places
This sprawling, unique visual history of New York City's queer spaces documents the evolution of LGBTQ+ culture, community, and activism within Manhattan's dynamic landscape over the course of a century, spanning from 1920 to 2020. Author Mark Zinaman in conversation with queer performers and icons Peppermint and Linda Simpson, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe
Author Jamieson Webster in conversation with Alissa Bennett A gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe. A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother. The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 9
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Talk | Meet Me in the Kitchen: Making Healthy Choices
Nutritionist Lauren C. Kelly offers creative twists on classic recipes, food prep and cooking trends. From appetizers, to entrees, to dessert, learn how to design menus using helpful tips and current research findings for better health and eating.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Book Discussion | Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia
When the hammer and sickle came down in late 1991, Russia’s feverish new market opened for business. From banking to breweries, sectors emerged out of nowhere, in a country that had never had a functioning economy. For the next three turbulent decades, a wild, proto-capitalist free-for-all transformed Russian society. Then, in 2022, Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The market started to collapse; Western firms fled Moscow’s skyscrapers. No country this large had ever transformed itself as dizzyingly as 1990s Russia–now, just as dramatically, it was over. The intervening decades had seen phenomenal successes and crushing failures; the creation and destruction of enormous fortunes. How did it all happen? Charles Hecker's book brings to life the complex, vivid color of one of the greatest experiments in the history of global commerce. What have businesses learnt–or failed to learn–from this adventure, both about Russia and about dynamics between countries and companies in the face of relentless change?
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Covert Joy: Gems of Short Fiction
Covert Joy gathers the most glittering gems of Clarice Lispector's short fiction. Translator Katrina Dodson in conversation with Creative Writing and Criticism Professor Merve Emre, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Toxic Tropics: A Horror Story of Environmental Injustice
Jessica Oublie presents her graphic novel, an in-depth work of comics journalism that explores the devastating legacy of chlordecone, a toxic chemical used in banana farming in Martinique and Guadeloupe. In 1975, the pesticide manufacturer LifeSciences shut down its plant after numerous employees were poisoned, and a local river was contaminated. Despite this, farmers in the French Antilles continued to use chlordecone, and even after it was officially banned in 1993, illegal imports and usage persisted. The chemical became so widespread that it contaminated nearly every aspect of daily life on the islands, with its presence in food and water. Today, 95% of the population in Guadeloupe and 92% in Martinique are affected by the chemical, contributing to one of the highest cancer rates in the world.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Mapping Malcolm: The Radical Imagination and Black Aesthetics
The Radical Imagination and Black Aesthetics: A World Building Exercise, we'll bring together artist Awol Erizku, designer Curry Hackett, architect Jerome Haferd, and artist Helina Metaferia to discuss Black aesthetics as a site for radical world-building. Drawing from the themes of Mapping Malcolm, the conversation will examine how Black spatial practices, historical iconography, and transnationalism shapes contemporary art, design, and architecture. Together, we will consider how Malcolm X’s vision continues to reverberate across disciplines, not only as a historical blueprint but also as an evolving, creative force that shapes public space, cultural production, and the future of Black radical thought. At a time when the built environment remains a contested site of power, exclusion, and erasure, this discussion insists on the necessity of art and the radical imagination as a liberatory tool. The program will be followed by a soulful DJ set by Tara, blending music and history to close out the evening.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Discussion | Blackface in Conversation: Racial Geographies and Transatlantic Entanglements
A compelling evening that examines the persistence of blackface and racial impersonation across cultures and historical contexts. This event brings together prominent scholars and artists to discuss the enduring legacy of these practices and how they shape ideologies of race-making. This roundtable will feature: Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), author of the award-winning Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Penn Press, 2022). Danielle Roper (University of Chicago), author of the forthcoming Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas (Duke UP, 2025). Silvia Albert Sopale, Spanish Afrodescendant actress and writer, and Spring 2025 KJC Chair at Espacio de Culturas @KJCC. Moderated by Jill Lane (NYU), the discussion will explore themes central to Albert Sopale’s critically acclaimed play Blackface y otras vergüenzas, which interrogates blackface in contemporary Spain and its global resonances. The conversation will situate these practices within broader historical and geographical frameworks, from early modern Europe to the contemporary Americas.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Talk | On the Desire to Wake (in-person and online)
What do we want, when we want to wake up? A key part of Freud’s theory of “secondary revision” in dreams concerns the peculiarity of the dream in which one believes oneself to have woken. Such moments, he thinks, are effects of the preconscious censor exerting a sort of belated force on the dream’s manifest content as it emerges, repressive effects whose character is therefore not libidinal in the usual sense in which psychoanalysis understands the content of a dream. Yet it is not hard to see a desire to wake up as possessed, at least in principle, of its own libidinal motivation: in the fantasy of the red pill, the retcon, the “darkest timeline,” and in many other scenes across the landscape of ecocidal crisis and post-liberal institutional collapse through which we move, urging ourselves and each other towards a transformation of consciousness, analogous to waking, that would constitute us as a revolutionary class in revolutionary times. This talk will leaf through some of these contemporary fantasies of waking, precisely those whose libidinal character uncovers a history that psychoanalysis, for once, declines to name, but which exposes a drive beyond the reality principle. Tripping quickly across the wake-space of contemporary narrative, this lecture will briefly consider the prestige H. B. O. dramas The Leftovers and Westworld; Ye’s 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; and the Estonian Marxist computer role-playing game Disco Elysium (2019). Speaker Grace Lavery is the author of three scholarly monographs and one autocritical memoir, each of which explores the affordances of particular literary and cultural genres for transcriptions of sexual embodiment.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Soil to Sky to Sea : Plastics, Pollution, Realities and Other Possibilities (online)
Plastic, the New Coal will host a virtual conversation with artists, curators, lawyer Pam Spees from the Center for Constitutional Rights and others to discuss the realities of the plastics industry, the consequential sideeffects, the environmental consequences, and work to reimagine creative possibilities, from the Gulf south to the globe
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 10
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Fascinating Rhythms: Play Between Dance and Music in George Balanchine's Ballets
Speaker Dr. Kara Yoo Leaman is a distinguished scholar in the study of dance and music. Her research appears in numerous scholarly journals. For her work, Dr. Leaman received an Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory and an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, and was a fellow at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. Dr. Leaman is a former faculty member in music theory at Oberlin Conservatory.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 11
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Gallery Talk | Peter van Ham: Tabo Gods of Light: Exhibition Walkthrough
Photographer Peter van Ham gives a captivating lecture and guided tour of the exhibition, where he will share his firsthand experiences and insights into the challenges and rewards of accessing the extraordinary Tabo Monastery.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 11
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Author Vauhini Vara presents in conversation with Tony Tulathimutte A personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection. When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation? Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral. The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 11
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Symposium | I Can See It All Even with My Eyes Closed: The Life and Art of Madalena Santos Reinbolt (online)
A one-day virtual seminar showcasing new research into Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice. A day of talks and presentations held in both English and Portuguese, is the first large-scale program exploring the life, art, influences, and creative processes of Madalena Santos Reinbolt (Vitória da Conquista, Brazil, 1912–1976, Petrópolis, Brazil). The program will focus on the trajectory of Santos Reinbolt, an Afro-Brazilian painter and embroiderer who migrated in search of employment from rural Northeastern Brazil, where she grew up, to the larger cities of Salvador, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Petrópolis in the second half of the 20th century. She chronicled local landscapes, people, and rituals from both her past and present while witnessing the rapid industrialization of her country in the second half of the 20th century. Looking at Santos Reinbolt’s vibrant depictions of her social, natural, and spiritual environment, speakers will contextualize her practice as an expression of creative freedom and resistance within the complex climate of post-war Brazil.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Sun, Apr 13
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Lecture | Yan Satunovsky and the Politics of Multilingualism (in-person and online)
The poet Yan Satunovsky (1913-1982) was born to a Jewish family in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro in Ukraine), in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. He began writing just before the onset of WWII; the war, in which he served in the Red Army and which drove his family from their hometown (by then Dnepropetrovsk) forever, emerged as a fixed topic in his poetry while he was fighting and for the rest of his life. Living outside Moscow in the post-war decades, Satunovsky connected with the unofficial poets of Lianozovo, whose poetics curiously dovetailed with his own: their proclivity for minimalism and simple, often crude language expressed a fundamental skepticism toward the high-flown rhetoric and empty signification of official Soviet discourse, literary and otherwise. Nowadays Satunovsky is usually read in their company, but Ainsley Morse proposes to discuss an aspect of Satunovsky’s poetics that diverges from, or intensifies, the Lianozovo tendencies. Most significantly, his work shows a persistent tension in relation to the Russian language in which it is written. In addition to his unflinching engagement with wartime and postwar trauma, his verse-level negotiations with cultural, linguistic, political and individual identity resonate with pressing questions of our time as well. Speaker Ainsley Morse teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 14
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Soviet Yogis – Who Were They? (in-person and online)
The history of yoga’s metamorphoses from marginalized spiritual-militaristic tradition in India to commercialized mega-business associated with neoliberal notions of personal wellness has received a lot of scholarly attention in the West. But the 20 th century transformation of yoga into an exportable mind-body practice took a different route into the Soviet Union, where yoga was alternately banned, and officially embraced at the highest levels. In this talk, I use the framework of contemporary ecological economics and Degrowth theory to show how in the post-war period, Soviet authorities could accommodate yoga as technology of growth and expansion (for instance, to help the cosmonauts conquer space), but not as a rejection of the fundamental imperative of extraction-based growth and ‘progress’ pursued by both sides of the Cold War. In the time provided, I will try to highlight a few case studies, as well as encourage us to think about the connection between yoga as a practice to regulate individual metabolism and yoga as a commentary on the Marx-inspired notion of ‘metabolic rift.’ Speaker Yvonne Howell is Professor of Russian and Global Studies at the University of Richmond.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 15
2:00 pm
Free
2:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Beyond Architecture: The NEW New York
A volume of essays that commemorate the 60th anniversary of the passage of the New York City Landmarks Law, which established the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and initiated the era of historic preservation in New York City. Commissioned by the NYC Landmarks60 Alliance, the book's contributors are architects and engineers, critics, and preservationists who have moved "beyond architecture" to explore varied aspects of the impact, legacy, and current and future status of historic preservation in New York City. Two contributing authors, Justin Davidson and Nat Oppenheimer, will discuss the themes of their essays, "The Long View: Building for Rebuilding" and "Engineering Landmarks."
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 15
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Artist Talk: Mitch Epstein
A live recording of Person Place Thing, featuring host Randy Cohen in conversation with artist Mitch Epstein NA. Musical performance by guest composer and guitarist Steph Jenkins. Included in both parts of Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment, Epstein’s photographs offer a subtle and contemplative approach to a range of critical societal issues within the United States, continuously questioning what it means to be American.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 15
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Thinking About Absence in Museums
In this talk, Benedicte Savoy will look at the emptiness that art and cult objects leave in their place of origin when, in the course of history, through armed conflict, colonial occupation or economic asymmetries, they have been moved to be displayed in (mostly Western) museums - with all the political, economic and epistemological implications that this entails. Bénédicte Savoy is Professor of Modern Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 15
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography
Presenting the life's work of one of the most important photojournalists of our time, Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography covers major events in American history from the 1960s to present. Stephen Shames in conversation with co-writer Jeffrey Henson Scales, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 16
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Talk | Meet the Beekeeper
A presentation and talk led by Alveole beekeepers. Learn more about the importance of urban beekeeping and it’s benefits to sustainability efforts in BPC and throughout the city.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 17
1:30 pm
Free
1:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Tales of a Not So Tiny House: Small-Space Living
Sumptuously designed and illustrated, this book is a wildly original story of small-space living: a lavish custom steampunk caravan in the wilds of New England, built by Chloe Barcelou and Brandon Batchelder almost entirely from their recycled film sets, thrift, flea market, and junkyard finds.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 17
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Thrilled to Death: Audacious Short Stories
Author Lynne Tillman in conversation with Whitney Mallett A collection of selected stories across the career of America's most audacious writer. Among the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman's work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career--a singular body of work that both redefined and reimagined the short story form entirely.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 17
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Book Discussion | Trauma and Truth: PTSD, Trauma Theory, and Literature on the Chechen Wars (in-person and online)
The dissolution of the USSR was relatively bloodless. The Chechen wars were not. Between 1994 and 2009 two violent civil wars took place between Chechen separatist forces and Russian federal troops. By the end of this period, Moscow had been rocked by multiple terrorist attacks and Grozny was declared “the most destroyed city on earth.” While the Chechen wars were unique in some ways to the former USSR, they were also part of a more general “Global War on Terror” that pitted regular military forces from large, powerful countries such as the US and Russia against insurgents, frequently with Islamist ties. This created a new trend in war literature, one focused on the trauma and alienation of the GWOT combatants, who experienced the uncertainty of the asymmetrical battlefield in combat and then the difficulty of integrating with a largely ignorant and indifferent civilian populace once they returned home. This trend, Elena Pedigo Clark argues, is visible Russophone as well as Anglophone literature from this period. Clark's book examines works by four significant authors of literature about the Chechen wars through the lens of trauma theory. Using Kalí Tal’s concept of “the literature of trauma,” it focuses on works that were created in order to share the author’s personal experience of trauma with the world.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 21
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Anne Frank's Diary: The Making of an Urtext of the Holocaust (in-person and online)
Historian Raphael Gross, Director of the German Historical Museum and editor of a history of the worldwide reception of Anne Frank’s diaries, discusses the making of and response to a unique document in literary history. Neither a true diary that chronologically records the daily life and thoughts of its author, nor a work of fiction, Diary of a Young Girl is an unfinished manuscript. Adapted from diary entries in multiple stages by the young author herself – and posthumously by her father – it made Anne Frank into perhaps the most famous German- Jewish writer of the 20th century. Today, it is an unparalleled urtext of the Holocaust. Against this background, the lecture will focus on the worldwide reception of the diary over almost eight decades. How was the edition of the text authorized by Otto Frank received in countries as diverse as Holland, Israel, the USA, Japan, Hungary, Spain, and the GDR? Which aspects of her notes were included? Which faded into the background? And what did the icon “Anne Frank” stand for in all these contexts?
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 21
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Walking New York: Manhattan History on Foot
A presentation with Keith Taillon as he speaks about his newly published book with a special focus on our neighborhoods. His book explores his most popular walking tour routes, examining in depth the various neighborhoods of Manhattan, their history, and the intricacies of their formation. He traces the evolution of the Big Apple back to some of its early seeds, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries—a window in which New York City transformed from a small provincial port town into a global metropolis. Keith covers everything from the completion of the Erie Canal and Croton Aqueduct to some of the notorious characters behind the city’s Gilded Age. Each chapter of the book features a suggested walking route, with a detailed map and notes on the route’s length and time. Throughout each walk, readers are encouraged to pause and absorb the streetscape. Filled with interesting facts and timelines, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of why the city looks and feels the way it does.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 22
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Adventures in Italian Opera with Met Mezzo-Soprano Isabel Leonard
The seventh Adventure in Italian Opera with Fred Plotkin of this season features New Yorker mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who will be singing the role of Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia at The Metropolitan Opera.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 22
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Box Girls: What Happens on the Brink of Collapse
For nearly twenty years, the events behind the Strasbourg hotel's closure have remained a mystery known only by the few who frequent the back alleys of Hollywood Boulevard. There are whispers there, of girls in glass boxes, legendary art installations wiped from the record, after one of the performers was found dead in her box. The Box Girls are a myth or a memory that only few can recall, until now. From the detritus, a transcript emerges and, with it, an intimate narrative, the definitive record of what really happened that summer to the Box Girls of the Strasbourg hotel. Over one hundred and twenty-eight interviews, and hundreds of hours of recordings, a frenzied tapestry of voices reveals answers to the mystery few knew existed, and explores visibility, identity, and the boundaries of perception in a world teetering on the brink of collapse.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 23
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Fallingwater: Living With and In Art
Fallingwater is a total work of art, seen in this new monograph for the first time in its fullness. Featuring a conversation with Justin Gunther, Director of Fallingwater; Scott W. Perkins, Senior Director of Preservation and Collections; and architectural and interior design photographer Dave Bryce, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 23
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (in-person and online)
When Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of being a secret Communist spy in the 1930s, the subsequent perjury trials were some of the most sensational and politically significant trials of the century. Although Hiss was convicted, he maintained his innocence until his death, and historians have taken sides ever since. In this groundbreaking and revelatory book, Jeff Kisseloff brings new perspective, evidence, and accusations to this historical controversy.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 23
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Lecture | Bridging Generations, Disciplines, and the Atlantic: The Leo Baeck Institute at 70
As they began their salvage of the material and intellectual legacy of European Jewry, the Leo Baeck Institute's founders hoped to assemble a narrative of the German-Jewish past that was comprehensive, synthetic, and "free from apologetic or tendentious coloring." Today, the collections of the LBI inform a corpus of scholarship that surely surpassed the founders' wildest expectations in scope, but whose "coloring" has also changed as much as society and the academy. The 66th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture will assemble a panel of scholars to discuss the evolution of the field of German-Jewish history over seven decades and its prospects for the future. At the center of their discussion will be the LBI as an institution that has both shaped and been shaped by the many turns of intellectual history. Featuring Michael Brenner (American University / University of Munich), Elisheva Carlebach(Columbia), Raphael Gross (German Historical Museum, Berlin), Marion Kaplan (NYU), and Helmut Walser-Smith (Vanderbilt). After the lecture, visitors will have the opportunity to view LBI's anniversary exhibit, 70 Years of LBI: Bridging Generations.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 23
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Discussion | Israel on Our Minds with Ambassador Ido Aharoni (in-person and online)
Even those of us who follow the news from Israeli regularly are left with more questions than insight: How should we think about Israel security in the face of a rapidly changing Middle East? What is the government doing in response to the worldwide condemnation of the Jewish State . . . and what could it do? Has the Start-Up Nation sputtered out? Can the breach between the religious and the secular populations be healed — and how? Does the Israeli government take the concerns and opinions of the Jewish diaspora seriously enough? Should it? With so many questions — and so much confusion — they have recruited the ideal person to pull back the curtain on the complicated situation: an Israel diplomat, university professor, writer and investor, Ido Aharoni.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 24
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Book Discussion | Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination
Louis Porter's book investigates Soviet relations with UNESCO to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN’s bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body’s importance for a group of Soviet “one-worlders,” who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 24
12:00 pm
Free
12:00 pm
Free
Talk | A Talk with Retired Harvard President Lawrence Bacow (online)
Julie Salamon sits down with retired Harvard President Lawrence Bacow. Bacow served as the 29th President of Harvard University from 2018 until 2023. Widely recognized as one of higher education’s most respected leaders, Bacow’s tenure at Harvard was marked by the creation of a range of academic initiatives, advocacy for public service and immigration, diversity and access to opportunity, and steady leadership of the university through the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2011 to 2014, he served as President- in-Residence in the Higher Education Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 24
12:30 pm
Free
12:30 pm
Free
Lecture | Say It with Flowers – Oriental Style: Semiotics, Botany and Affection in 19th Century Germany
No Valentine’s Day goes by without countless billboards and online ads from floral companies urging us – and with the same success every year – to ‘say it with flowers’. Apparently, we still attribute to flowers a latent ability to ‘say’ things felt to defy verbal articulation on account of their coming ‘straight from the heart’. The lecture traces our persistent trust in flowers as a medium for expressing the ineffable back to what was known in the 19 th century as the “Oriental Language of Flowers”, a then ubiquitous practice of communicating through ‘talking’ bouquets. Analysis shows that the principles underlying this practice (and the wealth of popular writings on the subject) were largely the result of the workings of a contemporary dispositif that combined botany, semiotics and hermeneutics with concepts of eroticism and affect poetics in an attempt to overcome a veritable language crisis. The Language of Flowers not only played an important part in the shaping of the still prevalent idea that the ‘flowery language’ of lyrical poetry was the natural vehicle of implied, hidden meanings, and the genre itself practically tantamount to oblique speech, but also inspired the notion that “symbols” could act as somehow universal signs. The lecture aims to explore the interconnections between these phenomena and to shed light on the vital role played by oriental topoi, scenarios, and export products in this particular context. Light reception to follow
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, Apr 24
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Symposium | Early Modern Women on the Move: Space, Materiality, and Transnationalism
This symposium will address the question of how we approach the study of early modern women in the 21st century. It will focus on women of the Low Countries to ask and answer larger questions about the dynamic position of early modern women in a changing, increasingly global environment. Keynote: Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) Gendered Paths and Spaces in the Early Modern World Roundtable: Chair: Martine van Elk, California State University, Long Beach Participants: Lieke van Deinsen, KU Leuven / Columbia University Adam Eaker, Metropolitan Museum of Art Karen Hollewand, University of Groningen Martha Howell, Columbia University Nina Lamal, Huygens Institute
New York City, NY; NYC
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Fri, Apr 25
2:00 pm
Free
2:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Caught in the Imperial Trap: Nikolay Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer and Russia’s Colonial Ambitions (in-person and online)
An adept storyteller given to literary experimentation, Leskov is famous for his skaz artistry and highly stylized prose that playfully engages with a mixture of archaic genres. Exemplifying these distinctive qualities, The Enchanted Wanderer (1873) has another important dimension, which reveals a less recognized, but equally significant aspect of Leskov’s craft. As this talk seeks to show, the story is ideologically loaded. It captures the political challenges of its day and addresses them in a satirical mode. This tale of a roaming peasant depicts the Russian empire as a place of nonstop violence, abuse, and subjugation. Shot through with cruel conflicts of all sorts, The Enchanted Wanderer particularly foregrounds the tensions between colonizers and colonized. It portrays the “barbarous Asiatics” as a danger to the civilized world – and in this way the tale, written in the midst of the tsarist army’s conquest of Central Asia (1860s-1880s), seems to justify colonial war. Demeaning Orientalist tropes that figure in the chapters set in the Kazakh steppe seem to support this impression. And yet, as the tale unfolds, it increasingly reverses those tropes to Orientalize Russia and expose its politics of empire. This talk argues that Leskov utilized the skaz technique to compose a complex, multi-layered narrative that ultimately renders colonial ambition as a trap for the Russian nation. Reading The Enchanted Wanderer in the context of the brutal war on the empire’s periphery makes it possible to capture a moment when Russian literature, deeply implicated in the colonial pursuit, began to confront it. As the talk shows, this story marks a turning point in Leskov’s intellectual trajectory: over the two subsequent decades, he would denounce the abuse of subjugated nationalities, speak from their perspective, and rebuke Alexander III’s Russification policies. Speaker Olga Maiorova is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and History at the University of Michigan.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 28
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | To Go On Living: Short Stories on the Irreversible Impact of War on Humans
Wars affect human life in the profoundest and most irreversible ways. How does one reconcile the pain of witnessing, survival, and loss? Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan’s short story collection sets out to explore potential answers. Unfolding in an Armenian mountain village in the immediate aftermath of the 1990s Nagorno-Karabakh War, the thirty-one short stories trace the interconnected lives and struggles of villagers who tend to their everyday tasks, engage in quotidian squabbles, and celebrate small joys against a breathtaking landscape.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 28
5:00 pm
Free
5:00 pm
Free
Lecture | Two Revolutionary Jews: Leon Trotsky and Chaim Zhitlowsky (in-person and online)
What role should Jews play in revolutionary movements? Should they act collectively on their own behalf or as indistinct individuals within majority populations in the interest of universalistic ideals? Or was this a false dichotomy? These questions have defined the basis of left-wing Jewish politics since the 19th century. In this lecture, Tony Michels will discuss two different approaches to revolutionary Jewish politics, as defined by Leon Trotsky and Chaim Zhitlowsky. Both were Russian-born Jews who played seminal roles in the Russian revolutionary movement. Both also came to be seen as embodiments of the modern Jewish experience. However, they gave radically different answers to the predicament of modern Jewry.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Mon, Apr 28
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Lecture | The Intolerance of Monotheism: Towards a Religious History of Antisemitism (in-person and online)
Because of their minority status in Medieval Islamic and Christian societies, Jews became the persecuted other who justified Christian and Muslim belief in their own supersession or replacement theology. Even in the modern, more secular era, baked-in religious prejudices informed the dynamics of racial antisemitism. The Nazis freely drew upon Christian imagery in their propaganda. Similarly post-Holocaust Islamic and Western antisemitism today still rely on these notions of religious superiority. Perhaps the only hope for an end to this 2500-year hatred is for each monotheism to renounce the intolerance inherent in their religious traditions and truly appreciate each other's value. Speaker Bruce Ruben was raised in Portland Oregon. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Music (1975) and a Master's in Religion (1978) from Indiana University. He went on to the Jewish Theological Seminary where he became a cantor in 1981. A year later he began a twenty-four-year tenure at Temple Shaaray Tefila in New York City. While serving as the congregation's cantor, Cantor Ruben earned a Ph.D. in history from thae Graduate School of City University. He has taught Jewish history at Hunter College from the early 1990s. He continues to teach Jewish history at Hunter and serves as the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Am in Parsippany New Jersey.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 29
1:00 pm
Free
1:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (in-person and online)
A book talk by Danielle Leavitt. In February 2022, after years of saving money, Vitaly opened a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb. But his dreams of owning a coffeeshop came to naught when, three weeks later, a convoy of Russian tanks plowed through town and rockets destroyed the coffee bar and split his apartment building in two. Meanwhile, across the country, eighteen-year-old Anna drops out of police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she met online. Nearby, a family copes with the aftermath of a brutal train station bombing. Across the world, Polina abandons her career in fashion and returns home to Ukraine to organize relief efforts. Over the past three years, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shaken the world order. But Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years has also affected countless individual lives. Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. As battle lines shift, her subjects’ relationships, livelihoods, and loyalties are put to new and dramatic tests. How do you keep living when your home is destroyed, when your family is separated, when your body is wounded, or when the enemy lives a few doors down? Can you believe in the future while destruction rages on? To illuminate the complex and contested resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who led a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 29
4:00 pm
Free
4:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Adventures in Italian Opera with Conductor Corrado Rovaris
The eighth and final Adventure in Italian Opera with Fred Plotkin of this season features the conductor and Music Director of Opera Philadelphia Corrado Rovaris.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 29
6:30 pm
Free
6:30 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Love, Money, Duty: Stories of Care in Our Times
Rachel E. Adams presents her new book. From birth to death, we care and are cared for by others. Yet we rarely acknowledge care except when it fails. In Love, Money, Duty, Rachel Adams examines the stories we tell about care, those who do the work, and those who depend on it. These narratives, she argues, help us better understand our complicated feelings about care and the obligations that come with it.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 29
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Warsaw Testament: Memoir of a Yiddish Literary Community Before the Holocaust (in-person and online)
Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, author Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join his top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. This is a lecture by historian Samuel Kassow about Auerbach’s memoir, Warsaw Testament, which paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, Apr 29
7:00 pm
Free
7:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
Featuring new houses, many additional photographs and a new afterword, Fire Island Modernist offers a fascinating look at the history and culture of this "gay paradise" through the life and work of Horace Gifford. Author Christopher Rawlins in conversation with Charles Renfro, followed by a signing.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 30
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | The Rachel Incident: Comic Novel Set in Ireland
Author Caroline O’Donoghue in conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Wed, Apr 30
6:30 pm
$5
6:30 pm
$5
Talk | Etymology of Modern Hebrew: Hebrew Roots and History (online)
Explore Hebrew’s deep Semitic roots and uncover how its ancient origins shaped the language we speak today. Join Elon Gilad and Hebrew at AJU for a special Yom Haatzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) program exploring the roots of modern Hebrew! Gilad will take you on an exploration of Hebrew etymology, tracing the fascinating evolution of the Hebrew language from its ancient Semitic roots to contemporary Israeli slang. Through carefully chosen examples, we’ll uncover the hidden stories behind everyday Hebrew words and discover how they reflect the rich cultural and historical journey of the Jewish people.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Thu, May 1
2:00 pm
Free
2:00 pm
Free
Book Discussion | Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism
In the interwar decades, American architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women. But as architectural historians Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy recount in their book, professional success did not come easily. Focusing on the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts and several coeducational architecture schools, Hunting and Murphy profile women designers who pursued careers in architecture, describing how these innovative practitioners leveraged social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and address social concerns. Some joined women-led architectural firms, while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists. With stunning illustrations, Women Architects at Work offers new histories of recognized figures, while recovering the stories of previously unsung women, all of whom contributed to the modernization of American architecture and design.
New York City, NY; NYC
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Tue, May 13
6:00 pm
Free
6:00 pm
Free
Discussion | Israel on Our Minds with Ambassador Ido Aharoni (in-person and online)
Even those of us who follow the news from Israeli regularly are left with more questions than insight: How should we think about Israel security in the face of a rapidly changing Middle East? What is the government doing in response to the worldwide condemnation of the Jewish State . . . and what could it do? Has the Start-Up Nation sputtered out? Can the breach between the religious and the secular populations be healed — and how? Does the Israeli government take the concerns and opinions of the Jewish diaspora seriously enough? Should it? With so many questions — and so much confusion — they have recruited the ideal person to pull back the curtain on the complicated situation: an Israel diplomat, university professor, writer and investor, Ido Aharoni.
New York City, NY; NYC
Join the Club!
Thu, May 29
11:00 am
Free
11:00 am
Free
Complimentary Tickets
to shows, concerts ... (CFT Deals!)
Musical | A Musical with Broadway Actors and Choreographer
Regular Price: $101CFT Member Price: $0.00
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