Cine-Seder Roundtable

Tuesday, March 23 | 7 PM to 9 PM | FREE
Alumni Hall (Room 112), Victoria College | University of Toronto | 91 Charles St West

A PASSOVER HAPPENING WITH ARTIST MELISSA SHIFF AND PROFESSORS DORIS BERGEN, RITU BIRLA, HARRIET FRIEDMANN & MICHELLE MURPHY.

Times Square Seder, The Medium is the Matzo and Cine-Seder Plate are all art-activist Passover Happenings created by artist Melissa Shiff. For this event, Shiff will install her award winning video sculpture CINE-SEDER PLATE and invite local scholars to respond to the questions raised in her video projection. With this project, as in all of her reinvented Passover projects, Shiff asks us to think about Passover in light of contemporary problems that plague us today.

Presented together with the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto

+++++

Michelle Murphy on BEITZAH: Who has the right to control our eggs?

Harriet Friedmann on KARPAS: How are we to maintain our fields of green?

Ritu Birla on CHAROSET: Who pays for slave labor?

Doris Bergen on MAROR: Whose lives have been destroyed by the bitterness of war?

+++++

Why is this program different from all other programs?

In the tradition of the Passover seder, we will recline on pillows during the discussion... so you may want to dress accordingly! And BYOP (Bring Your Own Pillow)... or buy a Crush Oppression Passover pillow that night or online: www.japshopper.com

+++++

MELISSA SHIFF is a video, performance, and installation artist who specializes in utilizing Jewish myths, symbols and rituals in the service of social justice and activism as well as engaging with issues of cultural memory. She is an Adjunct Professor in The Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.

DORIS BERGEN examines German and Central European history in the 20th century, especially the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and European women's history. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and is a professor at U of T.

RITU BIRLA is an Associate Professor of History at U of T. Research and teaching interests include modern South Asian history and colonial studies; histories of capitalism and genealogies of modernity; culture, economy, and the social imaginaries of liberal governance; postcolonial intellectual history and historiography; history, epistemology and ethics; fiction (legal and literary) and history; and critical and gendered approaches to law and society.

HARRIET FRIEDMANN is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for International Studies at U of T. Her research explores many aspects of food and agriculture, mainly through the historical framework of “food regimes.” Her current research is on the politics of certification and standards both globally and locally.

MICHELLE MURPHY is associate professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work iis at the intersections of science and technology studies, feminist studies, and environmental history. Her current project, called Distributed Reproduction, seeks to bring histories of economics, reproduction, and chemical exposure into critical conversation.