News Release

N.C. Museum of Art curator
kicks off spring Jewish studies lecture series

CHAPEL HILL - John Coffey of the North Carolina Museum of Art will discuss the museum's Judaic Art Gallery on Jan. 31 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His talk will be the first of five free, public speeches in the spring 2007 lecture series of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, part of the College of Arts and Sciences. All lectures will be at 7:30 p.m. in the theatre of UNC's Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, located at 150 South Road.

The Carolina Center for Jewish Studies seeks to help scholars and students understand Judaism and the historic Jewish experience. The center brings together faculty from several academic departments - including American studies, Germanic languages, history and religious studies - and offers an undergraduate minor. The lecture series is a key component of the center's public outreach activities.

Coffey, curator of American and modern art and deputy director for art at the Raleigh museum, will discuss the history, mission and collection of the Judaic gallery. He is a UNC graduate and Raleigh native. Other series events will be:

• Feb. 15: "Ancient Judaism and the Prism of Orthodoxy." Dr. Michael Stone, professor of religious studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and distinguished visiting professor at UNC-Charlotte, will consider challenges facing Jewish and Christian scholars of Judaism in the ancient world. He has received the prestigious Israeli National Prize.
  
  
• Feb. 28: "New Light on the Phoenicians and the Maccabees: Excavations at Tel Kedesh, Israel." Dr. Andrea Berlin will present the Kaplan-Brauer Lecture on Judaism's contribution to civilization. Berlin, associate professor in the department of classical and near Eastern studies at the University of Minnesota, will discuss how recent discoveries from a dig at Tel Kedesh provide new evidence of political and social interactions among Jews, Phoenicians and Greeks in second century B.C. Palestine.
  
  
• March 20: "Mysticism, Magic and Rabin's Murder: The Pulsa DeNura Ritual." Dr. Zion Zohar will deliver the Morris, Ida and Alan Heilig Lecture in Jewish Studies. Zohar, director and chair of the program for the study of Sephardic and Oriental Jewry at Florida International University, will discuss the pulsa denura, a controversial death curse/ritual performed by rabbis who influenced the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. The late prime minister of Israel was killed in 1995.
  
  
• April 16: "Kurt Weill's Kol Nidre and Jewish Memory." Dr. Tamara Levitz, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a visiting professor at Carolina, will explore composer Kurt Weill's use of the melody of the Kol Nidre - a Jewish prayer recited in the evening service on Yom Kippur - in three of his works.
  

Many of these lectures are made possible by the Charles H. Revson Foundation in honor of foundation president emeritus Eli N. Evans of New York City, who graduated from UNC in 1958. For more information, call (919) 962-0411 or visit http://ccjs.unc.edu.

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Note: For a news release on the Revson Foundation gift, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/mar04/revson031704.html

Carolina Center for Jewish Studies contact: Jeff Spinner-Halev, spinner@email.unc.edu, (919) 962-0411
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu