Hoffman was widely respected at Fordham for her interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative spirit. 

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., a professor of English, said that despite their different fields of study, they grew to be fast friends.

“I always knew we spoke the same language. Decade after decade, our conversations about one another’s work were immensely gratifying,” she said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, called Hoffman “a beloved member of Fordham’s Jewish Studies community” and said her work was marked by “great erudition and disciplinary depth.” 

“In her 1991 work on the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, she deployed a wide range of theoretical tools, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminist theory,” Teter said.

“She placed Agnon in conversation with other writers, such as James Joyce, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. … She was able to handle, with equal care and knowledge, traditional Jewish text and modern philosophy.

Hoffman was born on June 19, 1946, in New York City and grew up, along with her younger brother, David, in Brooklyn. She earned a bachelor’s in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She was a special member of Columbia’s Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

She joined Fordham in 1979 and taught courses in Israeli literature and film as part of Fordham’s Middle East Studies program. In 1992, she created the annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue series, which brought together Jewish and Christian scholars to address questions pertinent to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. In 2002, she also helped found Fordham’s Jewish Texts Reading Group, which still meets today. 

Hoffman was an accomplished painter. In 2015, she opened up about her creative process in a lecture at the Walsh Library. Last November, her art was displayed at Fordham’s Butler Gallery. 

Hoffman was known at Fordham as a skilled instructor and generous mentor. Fordham professor of biology Jason Morris, Ph.D., said she taught him how to be a better teacher.

“I learned so much from teaching with Anne. She appreciated nuance: she had a deep mistrust of facile answers and sharply drawn lines,” he wrote in an email.

“Her integrity and her empathy (and despite what she said, her expertise) came across in everything she said and did.”

In 2003, she was honored with Fordham’s Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities Award, and in 2019, she was recognized for 40 years of service at Fordham. She retired in 2023 and was named professor emerita.

Nikolas Oktaba, a 2015 graduate, took a class with Hoffman, and like many students, he kept in touch with her after graduation. He called her a “fount of tranquil wisdom.” 

“Not only did she put her students first, but she did so in a way that allowed them to see the perseverance, resilience, and strength that they already held within them,” he said. 

At the time of her death, in addition to her painting, she was teaching writing skills at the Fortune Society, teaching Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and conducting friendship-focused writing groups at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh via Zoom.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Anne’s husband of 57 years, said that he would forever hold onto a memory of the two of them walking together when she was an undergraduate and he was attending medical school.

“We had one of those adolescent discussions of the time: would we marry someone who was not Jewish? I responded very quickly, ‘That is an academic discussion because I am going to marry you.’ She was shocked, but the rest is history,” he said.

“We were not tied at the hip, but we were tied with our brains and our love.”

In an interview last year, Hoffman recalled what her late father-in-law said when she received her first summer grant to travel to Israel to explore Agnon’s archive. 

“He observed that it truly is the ‘goldeneh medineh’ (a Yiddish term referring to the U.S. as the golden land) when a Catholic university gives a Jewish girl money to go to Israel to work on Agnon,” she said. 

“Even more than the material support, his remark captures something of the openness and generosity that have been my experience of this university, my academic home for over 40 years.” 

Hoffman is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen.

A memorial service open to the University community will be announced at a later date.

Today, the program, which is jointly run by Fordham, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the New York Public Library, continues to support these scholars, many of whom had to flee their homeland.

When the program was conceived, Fordham offered a year-long fellowship to a student pursuing master’s level studies in the area of Jewish and Slavic studies. The others, a mix of Ph.D. students and scholars working in the same area, were provided stipends, access to electronic resources at Fordham and the library, and invitations to five remote workshops.

Magda Teter, Fordham’s Shvider Chair in Judaic Studies and an administrator of the program, said the program will help scholars document this period in history. She said a source of inspiration for the project was the work of Samuel Kassow, who wrote about the efforts to document the experience of living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust in his 2007 book Who Will Write our History? (Indiana University Press, 2007).

“I think it is important for the moment to gather, to collect, to preserve, to remember,” she said.

“It is our duty to help these scholars in any way we can. Even small stipends mean a lot to them when their institutions have been bombed or are inaccessible.”

Working Even When the Lights Go Out

When Tetyana Batanova delivered the lecture “Yiddish Sources and Resources: My Personal Path to Jewish and Yiddish Studies” virtually from her apartment in Kyiv in the lecture series “Scholars at War” on April 8, it was a welcome splinter of normalcy. Russian armed forces, which had occupied her Kyiv suburb of Bucha in the opening month of the war, had only retreated from the area a week earlier.

Batanova, the acting head of the Judaica Department at the V. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, had been conducting research for her dissertation about the five Jewish political parties that participated in Ukraine’s national government in 1917-1918. At the time, Yiddish was one of four officially recognized languages in the country. Today only Ukrainian is officially recognized by the government.

With her country facing an existential crisis, Batanova said she had serious doubts about the importance of her research. The fellowship has helped restore her faith.

“Seven months later, I’m more confident in what we do, and that we should continue,” she said.

“But in April, it was not that obvious for me at all. When I was invited to give my lecture, it was good that it was in April, because in March I was not able to speak at all.”

Historical research is only as good as the original sources one can acquire, and having worked at the New York Public Library in 2006, Batanova knew what kinds of archival documents and journal articles she’d need. As a result of the fellowship program workshops, she was able to access new books from Fordham University Library online resources providing the context for her research, such as Stephen Velychenko’s book  Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine : Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917-1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

Her research focuses a great deal on Yiddish, a language intrinsically tied to the Holocaust and its victims. It was also the primary language of the 30,000 to 70,000 killed in anti-Jewish pogroms that swept Ukraine in 1919.

Although it is still spoken in pockets around the world, its importance is not widely known, making it an ideal path for the average citizen to learn about Ukrainian history, Batanova said.

“The story of Yiddish is quite similar to the story of Ukraine in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.”

Fleeing War for NYC

Andrii Pykalo was just beginning his graduate studies when the war began. He attended V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city just 25 miles from the Russian border. Feb. 24, the day that Russia attacked, will forever be cemented in his mind.

“I will never forget the sky over my neighborhood. It was yellow, because of all the Russian rockets,” he said.

“It was very, very noisy, and I remember the panic. It was a horrible surprise for all.”

Continued study in Kharkiv was never an option; for starters, the university library was hit by a Russian missile. Pykalo said he tried to help save some of the books from the collapsed structure.

He had to jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops to leave, but he was granted permission in May, and he arrived in New York City to attend Fordham on Aug. 23. He has been living in an off-campus apartment in Harlem and attending classes, such as one on antisemitism with Teter and another one about advanced research methods by history professor Grace Chen, Ph.D.

For his research project, “Soviet Jews and the History and Memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine,” he’s been able to use his time in New York to locate documents that show how Americans viewed Jews in the Soviet Union at that time.

Apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp have made it possible for Pykalo to stay in touch with his friends and family, and he’s also connected with the Ukrainian diaspora in the East Village. But the decision to leave Ukraine was a fraught one.

“I understood that I should have been in Ukraine defending my country. I should be with my family, I should be with my friends,” he said.

“I was really afraid for my family, but they all told me that I must go because it’s my profession. This is my task.”

Seeking Safety in Michigan

Yurii Kaparulin, Ph.D., an associate professor of history and legal scholar at Kherson State University in southern Ukraine, found himself on the wrong side of the border when war broke out. While his wife and son were home in the city of Kherson, he was in Bucharest, Romania. His family spent a month in Kherson while it was occupied by Russian forces before they were able to evacuate and reunite. In August, they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Kaparulin received a separate, “scholars at risk” fellowship from the University of Michigan’s Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia.

For Kaparulin, the Fordham fellowship, which he was offered after moving to Ann Arbor, has been invaluable for the completion of his book, “Between Soviet Modernization and the Holocaust: Jewish Agrarian Settlements in the Southern Ukraine (1924-1948),” which he began seven years ago.

The war forced him to leave behind some of his own research, but more importantly, he lost access to his own university’s archives.

“Before Russian troops left Kherson, they looted the biggest part of the Kherson State archive. So I needed to figure out where I would look for sources and get some of the newest articles and books,” he said.

Through the Fordham fellowship, he’s been able to access resources such as the article Farming the red land: Jewish agricultural colonization and local Soviet power, 1924-1941 Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen, (Yale University Press, 2015), and “Men inspecting foals at an artel supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Kherson, Ukraine” a black and white photo from 1924.

His project addresses mass violence and wartime collaborators from the past–both of which have ties to the present. One of the reasons why Russian President Vladimir Putin has smeared Ukrainians as Nazis, he said, is because there were, in fact, Ukraine citizens who collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II.

However,  Russian propaganda effectively ignores the contribution of millions of Ukrainians to the victory over Nazism, he said. That is, when it comes to examples of collaborationism, the Ukrainian origin of the accused is emphasized, he said, and when it comes to heroism and victory, “Soviet heroes” are mentioned without ethnic context.

The phenomenon of collaborationism has also been observed during Russia’s current war against Ukraine. For example, during the occupation of Kherson from March to November 2022, some residents cooperated with the Russian occupiers.

“Their motives are currently being established by law enforcement agencies. However, in general, we see that the majority of the city’s residents have maintained the Ukrainian position despite various risks, including to their lives,” he said.

Providing Tools for Research

To help the scholars with their research, Shawn Hill, an instructional technologist in Fordham’s department of informational technology, delivered a workshop in November that walked participants through the reference tool Zotero. The bibliographic and citation tool makes it easier for scholars to organize papers, monographs, books, and articles.

He also demonstrated Art Steps, a tool used by interior designers, art historians, and gallery managers to create virtual exhibits.

“You may have a painting in Kyiv, a sculpture in Kharkiv, and something in Odesa. You can’t bring them together in the real world for obvious reasons, but you can create an Art Steps exhibition space and give the URL to a guest or a friend or the public as a whole.”

My Soul Is Still There

Lyudmila Sholokhova, Ph.D., Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at the New York Public Library, grew up in Kyiv, and like Batanova, she worked at the V. Vernadsky National Library before moving to the United States.
In 1997, she was the recipient of a fellowship and spent time at the United States Library of Congress. Now she’s the point person for the fellows in the program working with New York Public Library.

The fact that she’s able to now help other scholars from Ukraine moves her deeply. “My soul is still there. I want to help my people in any way possible. I want to support them,” she said.

“I know the value of access to all these enormous resources that these libraries can provide. When I was in Ukraine, I had access to the primary sources, but I didn’t have access to scholarship on the documents,” she said.

“When you work on this subject, you really need the context. You really need access to a much larger corpus of resources.”

This was the challenge that a panel of experts—together with one Holocaust survivor—addressed at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Jan. 26.

The event, “Remembering: Talking About the Holocaust in the 21st Century,” took place on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

Fred de Sam Lazaro, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour and director of the University of St. Thomas’ Under-Told Stories Project, moderated the evening, along with Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs Books.

The discussion began with a screening of de Sam Lazaro’s 2022 PBS NewsHour segment on Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued (Norton Young Readers, 2021). Written and illustrated by Peter Sís, who was in the audience at the Jan. 26 event, it tells the story of Nicholas Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” who helped 669 children escape from Czechoslovakia just before the Nazi occupation.

One of ‘Winton’s Children’ Shares Her Story

One of those escapees, Eva Paddock, was interviewed by de Sam Lazaro at the event. She spoke just before the panel of experts addressed diminishing public awareness of the Holocaust amid a rise in disinformation and revisionism. In 1939, when she was 4, Paddock and her sister were placed by their parents on the last Kindertransport train leaving Prague and taken in by a foster family in England. Unlike the majority of “Winton’s children,” as they came to be known, Paddock was reunited with her parents in 1940.

Because she was so young, she needed people like her parents to help her fill in the gaps in her memory, she said. When they talked about their experiences, they did not dwell on the evil that drove them from their home, but on the gratitude they felt toward the British people.

She also shared the harrowing details of her father’s escape, which was made possible only because of the altruism of individuals, from an S.S. officer who looked the other way when he encountered him, to a stranger who paid for his flight from Brussels to London when he was told his Czechoslovakian money was no good with the country in enemy hands.

Educating Young People About the Holocaust

Holocaust education, which is mandated in schools in only 27 U.S. states, is due for a change, and her and her father’s stories should be a part of that change, Paddock said. Both stories show how even a single person has the potential to do enormous good.

“It has to come out of the history books and be made relevant to today’s generation, and I believe the way to do that is to reframe the way it’s taught,” she said.

“Certainly, it’s important to teach [people] to honor the millions lost, but I think it needs to be reframed to demonstrate the power of altruism and the power of one. Because of course, I look at Nicholas Winton, and here’s a prime example of the power of one.”

The panel that followed featured Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent, PBS NewsHour; Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham; James Loeffler, Ph.D., the Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia; and Linda Kinstler, author of Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (PublicAffairs, 2022).

Their wide-ranging conversation touched on everything from the war in Ukraine and the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia to the challenges faced by U.S. news organizations when newsworthy politicians use extreme rhetoric that was once beyond the pale.

Building a Framework for Memories

Loeffler said that when it comes to sustaining the memory of the Holocaust, it helps to remember that many people are involved—each with a different memory. This partly explains why Russian president Vladimir Putin could make the preposterous statement that Russia was invading Ukraine to fight Nazis and fascism, he said.

“One of our challenges is to build a frame so we can build an ethical response that takes the memory and brings people back together to understand what it was and what it wasn’t,” he said, noting that Paddock’s experience is instructive.

“When she was describing her own experience … she also talked about how her memory had been nursed and supplemented by people explaining to her her experience, describing things that had happened to her family and to her when she didn’t even remember,” he said.

“Memory is not just an individual flame that we nourish. It’s a social endeavor, and one of our challenges today is to figure out how we can rebuild that frame to make Holocaust memory relevant, and also build a common understanding of the past.”

Teaching About Events Leading to the Holocaust

Teter said that discussions with her students have convinced her that it might be better to place more emphasis than in the past on the lead-up to the events of the Holocaust. It’s something she does already and feels strongly about its value.

“That is what makes it relevant because they can see the processes, they can see the mental frameworks, they can see the media environment, the propaganda work that resonates with them, and the world that they are living in,” she said.

“It doesn’t just spring up in 1933. This is an outcome of a longer process. We need to recalibrate that story to include that longer story too.”

Unreliable News Sources with a Platform

Complicating the effort to recalibrate the way that the Holocaust is taught is the fact that those who would muddy the waters with obfuscation and ambiguity have access to more communications tools than in the past. Woodruff said journalists at NewsHour have had to come up with a new construct over the last several years to cope with the shattering of the traditional news delivery model.

“How do you both cover the news, be fair, cover it all, and call out something that is not the truth, that is a lie? I will tell you flat out, I’ve had difficulty with that,” she said, because she believes you cannot call someone a liar unless you know what’s in their heart and mind, an admittedly tricky endeavor.

She and her colleagues have adjusted by explicitly labeling false information as such. But given the plethora of news sources available online now, more responsibility has fallen on us as individual consumers.

“There’s a much larger burden placed on news consumers to figure out, ‘Can I trust this, can I believe this? How do I know?’ she said.

“We’re living in a much more complex, complicated moment when it comes to understanding what to believe.”

The event, which was livestreamed, can be viewed in its entirety below.

“I don’t want to leave Kyiv. I was born here. I love Kyiv. Kyiv is the most beautiful city in the world,” said Vitaly Chernoivanenko, Ph.D., a Ukrainian scholar who spoke at a Fordham virtual panel on March 17. “I’m not afraid of Putin and his military forces.”

The panel is part of a new Fordham initiative designed to help Ukrainians during the Russia-Ukraine war. Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies is co-hosting a virtual lecture series that discusses how the current crisis is affecting academia and co-sponsoring a fellowship program for Ukrainian scholars. The center is collaborating with three organizations: the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, and the Lviv Center for Urban History in Ukraine. 

“With people in war zones and in exile from their homes and in need of basic supplies, it may not seem urgent to give attention to scholarship. Nevertheless, society also depends on those who create and preserve knowledge through their scholarship, work, and institutions devoted to research and culture,” said Magda Teter, Ph.D., Fordham’s Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and a professor of history who is moderating the lecture series. 

The first lecture featured two Ukrainian scholars: Chernoivanenko, a senior research fellow at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and president of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies, and Sofia Dyak, Ph.D., a historian and director of the Lviv Center for Urban History. The panel was moderated by Teter and Iryna Klymenko, Ph.D., a European history scholar from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 

‘We Don’t Think About the Office or Our Laptops. We Think About People’

Chernoivanenko reflected on how the past three weeks have affected his professional and personal life. As a scholar who specializes in Jewish studies, preserving the work of his predecessors and colleagues is important, he said, especially in Ukraine, where his scholarship was once banned under Soviet rule. 

“It’s a miracle that for these 30 years since our independence was proclaimed in 1991, we have a very prospective field … All these scholars sincerely want to research Jewish heritage of Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” said Chernoivanenko, who established the first Ukrainian peer-reviewed journal in Jewish studies and the first master’s degree program in Jewish studies in Ukraine. “It’s very important to preserve this heritage, especially now during the war.” 

Chernoivanenko said many of his colleagues are still in Ukraine, where they are doing what they can to help with the war effort.

“We don’t think about the office or our laptops. We think about people, our colleagues,” said Chernoivanenko, speaking from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. 

Chernoivanenko said he has been assisting local defense forces and strangers in the streets, including the homeless population. He added that he is thankful for his colleagues across the world who invited him to flee Ukraine by taking scholarship positions in their schools, but he said he wanted to stay home and help. His father and mother, who are 74 and 73, respectively, aren’t fleeing either, he said. 

“My parents are very brave,” he said. “They said no, never. We believe in our military forces.” 

Protecting Heritage and New Priorities

Scholars in Ukraine and those who have fled the country both need support, said Teter and Klymenko. There are opportunities that can help scholars who live anywhere, like the new fellowship co-sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies and the American Academy for Jewish Research, said Teter, which consists of a $5,000 stipend, remote access to library resources, and networking with faculty members from both institutions. Klymenko added that her own university’s history department has been providing financial aid and refuge for displaced Ukrainian scholars in Germany. Most of the refugees are women with children and elderly parents, she said. 

“These are people, mainly scholars, who are basically trying to save their children from being further traumatized,” said Klymenko, who is affiliated with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. 

The war has also changed people’s views on the preservation of heritage, said Dyak, director of a research institution in Lviv, Ukraine. Her colleagues have been wondering whether or not their artifacts should be wrapped, hidden, or moved. They have also accommodated their facilities to the realities of wartime, she said. 

“We turned our conference room and cafe into shelters … We are discussing [playing]cartoons and classic films for kids, but not home movies because that would be very painful. The shelter is for people who lost their homes or probably can’t go back to their homes,” Dyak said.

A Silver Lining and Hope

There is a silver lining within the chaos of the current crisis, said Teter. 

“It is terrible that a war had to happen, but it puts your voices out there and makes the world discover the amazing scholarship that is being produced in Ukraine and your centers and institutions,” Teter said, directly addressing the panelists. 

It is unclear when Ukrainian scholars will continue their partnerships with Russian scholars and institutions, said Dyak. She added that the path to collaboration will require much introspection on Russia’s part. 

“Cultural arrogance can lead to violence,” Dyak said. “I am hopeful that in the future, from our shared experiences, we will be able to revisit, in a new way, conversations that are painful and hard … Right now we probably are not able to pick up these conversations, but I do hope that these shared experiences will create a space of trust.” 

The second lecture will be held this Thursday, March 24, at 10 a.m. EST. Watch a full recording of the first lecture below: 

Ayelet Brinn, Ph.D., Rabin-Shvidler Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, posed these questions to the audience in her lecture about the American Yiddish press at Lincoln Center on Feb. 13.

Brinn, who was introduced by Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and professor of history Magda Teter, Ph.D., said that before talking about the significance of advice columns in Yiddish newspapers, it was important that the audience “think about the various ways people read and interact with advice columns and the fact that this is a media that is set up to be read by different readers in different ways.”

The Rise of the Yiddish Press in America

Yiddish speakers in the United States increased significantly in the second half of the 19th century with a wave of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, and by the 1920s, Yiddish newspapers were a popular option for immigrants seeking guidance in their new home. Many Jewish immigrants never read newspapers before coming to America, said Brinn, but they began to see them as an indispensable part of their lives for three reasons.

First, they helped acclimate readers to American life. Second, they created a sense of community by binding Yiddish readers to each other based on what they read. Lastly, they taught people who didn’t normally read newspapers that they could be informational and provide guidance on how to navigate their daily lives.

A good example, she said, is A Bintel Brief, which was one of the most popular advice columns of its time. Abraham Cahan, the longtime editor of the Forward, the most popular Yiddish daily, introduced A Bintel Brief to the paper in 1906, after asking readers to write to the paper with stories from their lives in the hopes of encouraging their relationship with the newspaper.

One letter in particular peaked Cahan’s interest, Brinn said. Written by a housewife, the letter sought the paper’s advice on how to confront her neighbor, who she suspected had stolen and pawned her husband’s watch. Interestingly, the woman was not upset, but “described her empathy for the poverty that drove her neighbor to steal, recognizing that this neighbor was also a poor worker,” she said.

Cahan was excited by this letter because it was written by an underserved demographic that he wanted to attract to the paper, and the emotional aspect of it was exactly the type of content he was looking for to better model his paper after American papers.

Success Brings Controversy

As A Bintel Brief began to increase in popularity, the authenticity of its letters was called into question. “Many Yiddish journalists, especially his loudest critics, assumed that the improvements editors made to Bintel submissions went beyond the correction of language and extended either to rewriting submissions or even fabricating letters when the Forward did not receive letters that fit the themes Cahan or his staff wanted to explore,” Brinn explained.

Since not all submissions were printed and the submissions were never kept in records by the Forward, there isn’t enough evidence to support either claim that the letters were real or fake.

“I’m inclined to believe that the truth lies somewhere between these extremes,” Brinn said. “Some letters were fabricated, some were real, and most letters that were real were significantly edited by the Forward staff.”

During a Q&A session after the presentation, an audience member confirmed that they had friends who actually read columns such as A Bintel Brief, and noted that “it didn’t really matter to those people if the letters were true or if they weren’t true. The advice didn’t matter either. It was really entertainment.”

Brinn heartily agreed.

“I think that one of the really important things about advice columns is that people could read them in all of these different ways,” she said.

“They did offer people advice that they could use in their lives, but other people could read these same columns for entertainment purposes.”

“In so little room as the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, there is entirely too much hatred,” said Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. “Notice that I call all three of these territories the Holy Land. We must keep in mind that all three of these territorial divisions are holy for Jews, holy for Christians, and holy for Muslims, but holy for each faith community in a different way.”

The history of religious ties to the area and how they impact the present-day conflicts were the central themes of the fall McGinley lecture titled, “Faith and Conflict in the Holy Land: Peacemaking Among Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

The lecture and panel discussion, which took place on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13 at the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses, respectively, featured a keynote speech from Father Ryan followed by two respondents—Ebru Turan, Ph.D., history professor at Fordham, and Abraham Unger, Ph.D., GSAS ’92, ’07, campus rabbi and associate professor of government and politics at Wagner College.

‘Perpetual Migrants’

Father Ryan highlighted in his lecture that “nobody comes from nowhere” and that “all of us are both native and immigrant.”

Unger, who delivered the Jewish response, emphasized the fact that Jewish people, in particular, have been considered “perpetual migrants” and that this view of their history needs to be taken into account when thinking about present-day Israel and Palestine.

“I suggest the conflict reaches into the existential nature of the Jewish people itself, both for Jews and for the rest of the world when thinking about Jews,” Unger said.

The Jewish identity, according to Unger, has always included a sense of being a “marginalized outsider” or watching for the next wave of oppression. That’s why the desire for a homeland is so essential, he said.

If the conflict is looked at under that lens, Unger said, it can be seen as bigger than simply “how much area Jews and Arabs ought to respectively get out of the Holy Land.”

Sacred Sites of Significance

For Christians, the Holy Land is not “a major theme in Christian scriptural sources,” Father Ryan said, although Christians as early as the second century took an interest in the area, and that interest grew following the reign of Constantine.

“To Constantine we owe the location of the place in Jerusalem where Jesus died, was buried, and rose again—now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” Ryan said, noting that the Roman emperor commissioned the church. “Helena [Constantine’s mother] is said to have built the original Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and an oratory on the Mount of Olives, marking the locale where the disciples witnessed the ascension of Jesus.”

In the Islamic tradition, the “sanctity of the Holy Land in Islam is concentrated in one particular spot in Jerusalem called the Noble Sanctuary,” said Turan, who delivered the Islamic response.

“The Noble Sanctuary houses two of the most sanctified and majestic monuments of Islam—the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque,” she said, identified by Islamic authorities as the site of the Prophet Mohammad’s night journey and heavenly ascension.

Present-Day Challenges

Understanding these diverse religious ties to the Holy Land can help people better understand the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, according to the speakers. Still, they said there were no easy solutions.

“How can we have a safe Israel within its borders? On the other hand, how can we have a sovereign Palestine state with its own government and arms—these two are not compatible.” Turan said, stating that she still wished for peace. “That’s why it is not that easy, because the space is very, very tight.”

Unger highlighted another challenge: The area has seen its Christian population, which had oftentimes eased tensions between the Jewish and Muslim populations, decrease rapidly.

“There’s a tremendous Palestinian-Christian diaspora emerging,” he said. “This is a great loss for the majority Jewish population because the Christian-Arab population sometimes has been and also can be a bridge between the Muslim majority within the Arab sector…as well as a bridge to the West itself and to the Jewish majority.”

A Dream of Peace

Father Ryan, however, encouraged the next generation to look to history and then try to find a way forward.

“I have shared with you this evening my dream—an old man’s dream—in the hope that some young people here will see visions, visions of peacemaking in the Holy Land, peacemaking in every land,” Father Ryan said.

The exhibition, which was unveiled at an open house on April 16 in the O’Hare Special Collections Library, will run through the end of May. A second open house will be held on May 7 at 6 p.m.

Teter has been growing Fordham’s collection of Hebrew texts for some time now, and the Haggadot (plural of Haggadah) reflect an overall curatorial vision of mixing the common household texts with high-quality facsimiles of The Barcelona Haggadah and from the Rothschild Miscellany, donated by longtime library patron James Leach, M.D. As in years past, the Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah, a common sight in many a middle-class Jewish home, sits near rare 18th-century versions.

The exhibit was co-curated with Rose Hill seniors Emma Fingleton and Zowie Kemery, both Jewish studies minors, and sophomore Margaret Keiley. The project began at the start of the semester in early February. The students met with Teter to see and, more importantly, handle the texts.

“It’s not behind a glass plane; it’s right in front of you and you can touch it,” Fingleton said of one of the texts at the time.

Indeed, as Fingleton and Keiley grazed their hands across the paper, they remarked on the impressions left behind by an 18th-century letterpress.

“People actually use these objects, it’s very different from reading it online on a PDF,” said Keiley.

This year’s exhibition differs from the 2016 show, which expanded on Jewish-Christian relations. Instead, this show takes visitors on a world tour through nations and time. There were plenty of texts to choose from. The collection includes Haggadot from Egypt, Ethiopia, Sweden, Germany, and Holland. There is a vegetarian-focused Haggadah called The Liberated Lamb. There are Haggadot that were distributed at displacement camps just after World War II. And there are two from the same publisher that seem exactly the same except for one detail on the title page: One was printed in Palestine in 1948, just before the State of Israel was created; the other was printed in the exact same geographical place in 1953, when it was Israel.

“It’s a global story told in different languages, but the same culture,” said Teter.

Some of the pages come alive with past use. In particular, there are the pages with wine stains, which represent a moment during the Seder when the plagues are mentioned and “you put a finger in the glass of wine and sprinkle it on the text,” said Teter. It was a particularly moving gesture to the students.

“It all resonates in ways that remind me of archeology. It brings you to their perspective, even if it’s something as simple as a wine stain,” said Fingleton. “I feel more open towards the value these things have. It really impacts your view.”

This conversation is more critical than ever, said keynote speaker, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. In the wake of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, it is important to recognize that sexuality has a sacred meaning in each religion.

“I want to draw your attention to how very human forces, male and female, interact with each other in the imaginative creation of worlds of faith, worlds of spirituality,” Father Ryan said. “How, in particular, do our understandings of human sexuality color how those of us who are Jews, Christians, and Muslims think about God?”

The Bible says that God created Adam, the first human being, as both male and female. (Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs.) This duality continues to be found in all aspects of life, including marriage, Father Ryan said. It can also be seen in male and female images in the Book of Genesis and the Song of Songs. But one of the most important texts in Judaism, the Zohar, takes a step further and suggests that humanity itself “mirrors and magnifies the Lord God,” he said.  

In the same vein, Christian texts show spirituality through sexuality. For example, an autobiography by Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Christian mystic and writer, portrays the soul and God as passionate lovers, Father Ryan said. She uses graphic imagery to show the angelic piercing of her heart with the spear of God’s love: “When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them  [her entrails]out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God.”

The Quran also denotes spirituality through sexual language, he said. The basmalah blessing, which begins every chapter of the Quran but one, uses words that associate “the mercy of God” with a mother’s womb.

“To connect the mercy of God with a feminine physical characteristic is to understand God’s perfection as including all that is most tender in created reality, including the generative and loving characteristics of others,” Father Ryan said.

Although much of the main lecture focused on heterosexual love, respondent Amir Hussain, Ph.D., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, took a detour from the night’s discourse to reflect on the dangers faced by the LGBTQ community.

“I think of Islamic psychologists from Los Angeles, where I live, who worry about losing their license if they are anything but heteronormative,” he said. “And I wonder how we got to that place where we can hate people for the love that God has put between them.”

For Hussain, it’s a personal issue, as he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto during the “plague years” of the ’80s, when he said he attended one too many funerals for his friends who died of HIV and AIDS.

“We have to speak out when our gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and bisexual brothers and sisters are threatened,” Hussain said. “We have to lift up the work and voices of LGBTQ scholars and activists, such as Scott Kugle at Emory University, who remind us of the inherent dignity of all of us—regardless of our sexuality.”

The scholar who delivered the Jewish response, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, compared two Biblical texts from the Old Testament: Song of Songs and Ezekiel 16. Both stories use the metaphor of a romantic partnership to show God’s relationship with Israel, she said. Only one relationship is healthy though, while the other is marred by manipulation and abuse.

Gribetz’s juxtapositions were often stark. In Song of Songs, the narrator portrays a romantic relationship between a man (God) and a woman (Jerusalem as the spouse of the Lord). Gribetz described the scenes that unfold between the lovers: “A series of kisses, love described as sweeter than wine, fragrant oils, and secluded chambers.”

Ezekiel 16, by contrast, takes a tragic turn. In it, God (a man) saves the people of Jerusalem (a woman) from slavery in Egypt, but is betrayed by the very people he rescues. The text is fraught with dark imagery: an unbathed newborn lying in the blood of her after-birth, nakedness, suffering, and violent threats.

But in these two texts, there is something to be said about humanity, Gribetz said. The stories paint a realistic portrait of the possible intersections among sexuality, spirituality, and love of God—both positive and negative.

“I chose to share with you this evening not only the positive but also the negative, not only the benevolent but also the malevolent, to highlight the empowering dimensions of religious texts, but also to acknowledge those parts of our traditions that are most problematic,” Gribetz said.

“So that we can imagine and construct together models of partnership—human and divine—that are based on mutual love and consent, rather than abuse of power and violation of dignity.”

In a remarkable departure from the lecture’s usual scholarly tone, Father Ryan included in his presentation a personal narrative that was poignant and relevant to the evening’s topic. He spoke of his father, Paddy Ryan Lacken (1898-1944), who had been arrested and sentenced to death during the civil war that broke out after the failure of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty. Mistakenly sent to a very large prison camp in the Curragh of Kildare, he managed to escape execution by disguising himself and going on the run within the prison camp.

“Oral tradition in the family says that my father, less than 25 years of age at the time, shaved off his hair and grew a mustache, even using actor’s makeup to disguise himself,” said Father Ryan. “I am glad he did escape capital punishment in 1923. I would not be here tonight had he not.”

Father Ryan also culled from his experience as a scholar in North and West Africa for the semi-annual ‘trialogue,’ which presents viewpoints from the world’s three great monotheistic faith traditions on a contemporary topic

Personalizing capital punishment is often an innate part of the debate on the topic, said Pierre M. Gentin, the evening’s respondent from the Jewish perspective and a partner at the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP.

He noted that Jews across the spectrum, from Reform to Conservative to Orthodox, generally find capital punishment anathema because of their shared history of violence, from the crusades to the pogroms to the Holocaust.

“We have an acute awareness of how easily the powerful can put people to death,” he said.

However, Gentin said that it’s easy to ponder the dignity of life and forgiveness in the abstract; it’s another matter when a family member is killed.

“It’s another thing when it’s your child, your parent, or your brother and sister that’s getting stabbed or shot or blown up in a bus,” he said. “The question of capital punishment is not so easily dismissed.”

Gentin said that giving and taking life are “God-like actions” that require serious contemplation.

“It’s absolutely final,” he said of execution. “Human beings have a place in this world that’s a unique place: We are a form of animal that can actually refrain from punishing each other in this final way … I think it has to give one pause as a religious person, but I don’t think it’s a simple question.”

Delivering the response from the Muslim perspective, Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham, blamed the reintroduction of capital punishment in Muslim majority nations on the “growing pressure of political Islam.”

“This trend is the fundamental issue that underlies the acts of jihadi violence perpetrated against those who have allegedly insulted or blasphemed Islam in recent years,” she said.

Turan said that Shari‘a-based criminal law replaced European-inspired statutes in the later decades of the 20th century. But Shari‘a laws had rarely been used for capital punishment in the pre-colonial past.

Starting in the 1970s, she said, the pressure of political Islamization brought back harsh disciplines known as “hudud” punishments. She agreed with a statement made by Father Ryan that contemporary advocates of Shari‘a law often disregard the stringent restrictions on capital punishment that were traditionally observed.

“Several verses of the Quran underline the importance of showing clemency and forgiveness for the believers,” she said.

Likewise, Father Ryan said that the “eye for an eye” passage so frequently quoted from the Book of Exodus and used in defense of capital punishment was never meant to have a by-the-book application.

“This law of retaliation was not interpreted literally in ancient Israel, but was understood metaphorically, designating monetary compensation to be paid to a victim by a perpetrator,” he said.

Turan said that the Quran also “strongly urges” that family members of murder victims accept “blood money and not demand the execution of the killer.” And while the Torah also indicates that a Jewish court can impose the death penalty, the Talmud elaborates that the court, known as a Sanhedrin, must be composed of 23 judges.

“In a seemingly counterintuitive ruling—and yet one emblematic of Judaism’s concerns about the death penalty—if all of the Sanhedrin’s judges were unanimous in imposing a death sentence, the accused was set free on the theory that if not a single judge could side with the accused, there was something wrong with that court,” he said.

Father Ryan argued that for Christians, there is no room for strict retaliation in light of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

If any doubt existed that Catholics could still support capital punishment, Father Ryan said that Pope Francis’ recent revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares it inadmissible in all circumstances.

“It is better by far to judge not lest you be judged, as Jesus warns us, and especially when judgment leads to capital punishment,” said Father Ryan. “Reversing capital punishment at a later time is never possible. To use some West African pidgin English—the most expressive language I know—it is better to ‘Lef’ am for God.’ Leave it up to God.”

Imitation can take on many forms—behavior, manner of prayer, and even dress, said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham. He cited several traditional and conservative aspects of imitation that eschew modernity.

‘A Clear Path of God’s Command’

He noted that the dress and appearance of Hasidic Jews mirrors that of past rabbis, “mystical masters” known as zaddikim. And while their dress may look different from modern street clothes to an outsider, he said, it is through “their very difference that they demonstrate their imitation of past rabbis and their fidelity to God.”

“To imitate one’s zaddik, to walk in the paths of ancestors in the faith, lies close to the heart of what the faith of Israel has meant for nearly four millennia,” he said.

Likewise, in Islam, accounts of what Muhammad said and did were written down to guide “requirements of ritual purity” that validate worship and all other aspects of life.

“We have put you on a clear path of God’s command. Follow it and do not follow the vagaries of those who know nothing,” Father Ryan said, quoting the Qur’an (45:18).

“Muslims have taken [this]divinely guided way of proceeding in every aspect of life more seriously and more literally than have Christians; in this they more closely resemble Orthodox Jews,” he said.

Each religion varies on the degree to which the followers adhere to such imitations, he said. In the case of Christianity, he cited St. Paul: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).

He noted that the monastic movements in first-millennium Christianity withdrew from the “corrupting secular world” while “Carmelites Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, most prominently, sometimes engaged with the secular world but also withdrew from it into their convents from time to time.” In the late 14th century, however, starting in the eastern Netherlands, the Devotio Moderna movement appealed to laity and the lower ranks of the clergy, urging them to engage with the world but to eschew its corrupting standards, imitating the poverty and simplicity of Christ. The movement began with popular Catholic preacher Geert Grote, who died in 1384, but was most famously memorialized by Thomas à Kempis and his devotional book Imitation of Christ.

Father Ryan noted that in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the one making the exercise asks to “to imitate [Jesus] in enduring every outrage and all contempt, and utter poverty, both actual and spiritual.”

Imitation in the Age of Smartphones

Following the lecture, the conversation took a contemporary turn when the evening’s moderator, William F. Kuntz Jr., a judge of the Second Federal Court in the Eastern District Court of New York, reflected on whether it was possible—in this age of smartphones—to turn away from modernity and imitate God and the prophets in a traditional manner.

“What would each of the faith traditions say about the innovations of Facebook and the internet?” he asked.

“There’s a strand with every religion that has a problem with any innovation,” said Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, one of the lecture’s respondents. “There’s a tension between those that refuse to adapt and early adapters.”

Father Ryan agreed. “There were condemnations of the railroad in the 19th century by the papacy,” he said.

Yet times change and technology moves forward. So how is one to adapt to modern times and yet remain faithful?

Zaki Saritoprak, who holds the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies of John Carroll University and was also a respondent, said that like any technology, its value depends on how it’s used.

“You have a car; you can drive to a good place or bad place,” he said. “If [technology]prevents you from your major duties, like your responsibility to pray, then it becomes problematic.”

And yet, the same innovations can help with prayer, said Rabbi Polish, noting how many religious texts are now available online.

“The extreme Orthodox have made use of cell phones to access vast storehouses of information,” he said.

He recalled a recent service within the Hasidic community. “When it comes time to pray, they all pull out the cell phone and open to the appropriate app,” he said. “We were praying literally off our phones.”

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