Join us for lunch and a presentation by Dr. Ofri Ilany of NYU Tel Aviv.
Kosher lunch will be served from 12:30 PM to 1:00 PM in the KJCC Dining Room and is open to students only. Presentation with start at 1:00 PM in the KJCC Library.
The queer history of Palestine / Eretz Israel during the British Mandate period has hardly been explored until recently. The lecture will present a new study on the lives of Jewish queer people in Mandatory Palestine, mainly Jews from Germany. I will focus on the diaries of Yedidiah (Edward) Havkin – an astrologer and musician who emigrated from Munich to Jerusalem in the early 1920s and expressed in his writings an extraordinary awareness of his sexual identity. Among other things, Havkin has developed an unusual theory of the link between Judaism and homosexuality.
Dr. Ofri Ilany is a historian, teaching at NYU Tel Aviv. He is also a post-doctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. His book, In Search of the Hebrew People: Bible and Nation in the German Enlightenment has been published in 2018 at Indiana University Press. Ilany's research interests include the history of Orientalism and Bible research and the history of sexuality. His column, "Under the Sun", is published at Haaretz Weekly Supplement.
