Agency for Jewish Education sets lecture series at Coronado Library

CORONADO, California (Press Release)–The Agency for Jewish Education continues its Coronado lecture series this month with Professor Steven Cassedy of UCSD. Cassedy’s lecture will take place in the Winn Room of the Coronado Library (640 Orange Avenue, Coronado) on Jan. 20 at 10:30 am. His lecture is titled, “A Bintel Brief: Abe Cahan as the Lower East Side’s Ann Landers.”

 In 1906, Abraham Cahan, who edited the Jewish Daily Forward from 1902 till 1951, introduced a new column that would shortly become a veritable Lower East Side institution—in fact, an institution first for immigrant Jews throughout the United States and later for the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of those immigrant Jews. It was called A Bintel Brief  (“A Bundle of Letters”). Drawing his inspiration from popular women’s advice columns in the American press, Cahan encouraged fellow Yiddish-speaking immigrants to write letters about the issues that mattered to them. For each letter, the Forward published a response from “the editor” (though Cahan himself probably wrote very few of the responses). A Bintel Brief is a chronicle of Jewish immigrant life in America in the early twentieth century, presenting the drama of economic hardship, assimilation, intermarriage, and the clash of orthodoxy with secularism and popular culture.

Steve Cassedy received his undergraduate degree in comparative literature at the University of Michigan in 1974 and his Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton University in 1979. He has been a member of the Department of Literature since 1980. He is currently Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, Director of Eleanor Roosevelt College’s Making of the Modern World (a core sequence in world civilization), and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. His teaching and research interests include Russian literature, other Western European literatures, intellectual history of the West, and Russian-Jewish and American-Jewish cultural history.

Future lectures will feature brilliant professors speaking on their own areas of research. In February Professor Chanan Naveh or Sapir College & Hebrew University will discuss “The Palestinian-Israeli Web War.” Other speakers include professors Risa Levitt Kohn and Ghada Osman.

The Mandelbaum Family Lecture Series is a program of the Agency for Jewish Education and is free and open to the public.

For more information on this or future talks in the series, contact the Agency for Jewish Education, (858) 268-9200 ext.102 or www.ajesd.org

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Preceding provided by Agency for Jewish Education of San Diego County