April 2, 2023: The Radical Right and Antisemitism: How Bigotry has Energized the Far Right, from the John Birch Society to MAGA

 

 

Sunday, February 7, 2021: “The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War” – VIDEO RECORDING BELOW

 

 

Wednesday, January 27, 2021 (Holocaust Remembrance Day) 4PM PST: “Impudent Jews: Forgotten Individual Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany – VIDEO RECORDING HERE

Sunday, February 16, 2020: Casden Conversations: “Working in Hollywood: A Jewish Perspective on How the Studio System Turned Creativity Into Modern Labor”

Please Visit: Casden Conversations: “Working in Hollywood” Video Recording 

 

Sunday, February 2, 2020: Casden Conversations: “Anti-Semitism Today and the Tools to Fight It”
Please Visit: “Anti-Semitism Today and the Tools to Fight It” Video Recording

The Ben Hecht Story: Lessons of the Holocaust in the Age of Trump on Sunday, November 17, 2019 

Please Visit: https://vimeo.com/375537534/79df655e66

 

Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love on Sunday, February 25, 2018

 

Race and Inclusivity in the American Jewish Community: Challenges and Opportunities on Sunday, January 21, 2018

 

 

 

The Convergence of Tradition and Global Culture in the Persian Passover Ritual on Sunday, March 26th 2017

 

 

Sunday, February 12 2017 – USC Initiative for Israeli Arts and Humanities 

 

 

Sunday, October 30 2016 – How Barbra Streisand Redefined Beauty, Femininity, and Power

Neal Gabler and USC Professor Steven Ross discuss how Barbra Streisand Redefined Beauty, Femininity, and Power.
Sunday, October 30th, 2016 at 4:00 pm
Wilshire Boulevard Temple Irmas Campus
11661 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles

 

 

Roster of Casden Conversations-2015-2016

Sunday, April 26, 2015- Barbara Isenberg and Gail Eichenthal

“Tradition!” The Phenomenon of Fiddler on the Roof”

Barbara Isenberg, author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller “Tradition!”, and KUSC Executive Producer Gail Eichenthal have a conversation about the impact of the fiftieth anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof on American Jewish identity and consequently how Sholom Aleichem’s 19th century Yiddish stories were re-imagined, set to music and popularized onstage and onscreen worldwide.

Sunday, September 20, 2015-Louise Steinman and Jack Miles

“An American Jew in Poland: Is Reconciliation Possible?”

Louise Steinman is a writer and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history and reconciliation. Amongst several highly acclaimed books, she is the author of “The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation”. Louise has curated the award-winning ALOUD at Central Library series for the Los Angeles Public Library (www.aloudla.org) for the past two decades and is also co-director of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities at USC.

Jack Miles serves as general editor of The Norton Anthology of World Religions (November 2014). In addition, he is a distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California at Irvine and Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy. Jack is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. His book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God led to his being named a MacArthur Fellow for the years 2003-2007.

Sunday, November 1, 2015-Liora Halperin and Sarah Bunin Benor

“Jews, Zionism, and the Politics of Language in Palestine and Israel”

Welcome given by Alan Casden, CEO Casden Properties, LLC

Liora R. Halperin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history, Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, language ideology and policy, and the politics surrounding nation formation in Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.  Liora Halperin is the author of “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and the Politics of Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948”.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion where she teaches masters students in the School of Jewish Nonprofit Management and undergraduates at the University of Southern California. She has lectured widely about the social science of American Jews, sociolinguistics, Jewish languages, and Orthodox Jews. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism  (winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature), as well as several articles in Jewish studies and linguistics.

 

 

January 24, 2016-Hasia Diner and Paul Lerner

“Jewish peddlers and their discovery of the new world”

Hasia Diner is Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. Hasia’s work has been located at the intersection of American and Jewish history. A scholar of immigration history and the history of relations between American Jews and other ethnic and racial groups, her many books and articles explore various aspects of immigration, identity, and women’s experience.

Paul Lerner is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany and Central Europe with particular interest in the history of the human sciences, Jewish history, gender, and the history and theory of consumer culture. He has written on the history of psychiatry, specifically on hysteria and trauma in political, cultural and economic context in the years around World War I in Germany, and he recently completed a book on the reception and representation of department stores and modern forms of marketing and consumption in Germany and Central Europe.