BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Drupal//recurring_events_ical//2.0//EN
X-WR-CALNAME:2026 Jewish Heritage Fund Annual Presentation -- Figuring Jeru
 salem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:ece2a36e-a00a-45a7-9155-3729dae349bb@events.louisville.edu
DTSTAMP:20261016T020939Z
DTSTART:20261018T060000Z
DTEND:20261018T073000Z
SUMMARY:2026 Jewish Heritage Fund Annual Presentation -- Figuring Jerusalem
 : Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center
CONTACT:Randall Sherman\, 3054315961\, email:ranen.omersherman@louisville.e
 du
DESCRIPTION:Figuring Jerusalem explores how Hebrew writers have imagined J
 erusalem, both from the distance of exile and from within its sacred walls
 . For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy La
 nd as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jeru
 salem is this: how did such writers bring their imagination “home” in
  the 20th century? Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that H
 ebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained in the first half of the 
 twentieth century. Even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded b
 ut East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusale
 m continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. Only in
  the aftermath of the 1967 War did the temptations and dilemmas of proximi
 ty to the sacred become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture
 . Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through t
 wo thousand years of exile, as expressed in their literary imagination, mu
 st be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.
 \n\nAbout Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi:\n\nSidra DeKoven Ezrahi grew up in suburb
 an Chicago, and matriculated at Wellesley College, Hebrew University and B
 randeis University. She taught at several universities in the U.S. and Can
 ada, but her home base is Jerusalem, where she is Professor Emerita of Gen
 eral and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She
  has written on subjects ranging from representations of the Holocaust in 
 postwar Israeli, European and American culture to the configurations of ex
 ile and diasporic compensations in classical, premodern and contemporary J
 ewish literature. Her critically acclaimed books include By Words Alone: 
 The Holocaust in Literature, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the
  Modern Jewish Imagination, and two books in Hebrew. DeKoven Ezrahi became
  a Guggenheim Fellow for her project on Jerusalem. She was awarded an hono
 rary doctorate in Jerusalem from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of 
 Religion. Figuring Jerusalem won the National Jewish Book Award.\n\n 
GEO:38.2169;-85.7605
LOCATION:Ekstrom Library
URL:https://events.louisville.edu/events/2026-jewish-heritage-fund-annual-p
 resentation-figuring-jerusalem-politics-and-poetics-0
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR