TUESDAY, March 29th, at 7 pm Eastern:

Katz Tepper’s film Roasted Cockroach for Scale, an experimental social-practice project made in collaboration with the artist’s Soviet-Israeli-American father, is a fragmentary portrait of a contradictory transnational and transgenerational relationship. Calibrated to the specific qualities of remote communication in the global viral pandemic, the film consists entirely of text-based screen recordings created using Google, Zoom, and AI-speech-to-text software. Playful and tender interactions between the filmmaker and their father activate a web of narrative, formal, and political connections between disability and diaspora in this moving film, which orbits themes of illness, memory, genocide, displacement, militarism, statehood, and ableism.

Watch the 47-minute film here at your leisure, and then join us live for a dynamic conversation between Jewish Currents contributor and renowned artist Gregg Bordowitz and director Katz Tepper, two artists whose work explores Jewishness, humor, textuality, and the politics of illness in relation to structures of power.

Note: We will not be screening the film at the event. Make sure to watch it beforehand!

TOMORROW, March 24th, at 12 pm Eastern:

Earlier this month, Greg Afinogenov, assistant professor of Russian history at Georgetown University, published a piece in Dissent magazine titled “The Seeds of War,” in which he outlined the context and the stakes of the Russian assault on Ukraine.

This Thursday, join Jewish Currents Editor-at-Large Peter Beinart in a discussion with Professor Afinogenov on the war in the region and the American left’s unsatisfactory response.

SUNDAY, April 3rd, at 2 pm Eastern:

Join Jewish Currents and The New Press for a celebration of Mikołaj Grynberg’s exquisitely original and darkly funny collection of stories I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, excerpts of which were first published in Jewish Currents as Rejwach. Grynberg, a psychologist and photographer, spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. His first work of fiction recrafts those histories into dazzling first-person vignettes that explore Jewish identity and the contemporary lives and tensions of a generation still haunted by the Holocaust and its afterlives. The event will feature a conversation between Grynberg and translator Sean Gasper Bye, as well as readings by translator Antonia Lloyd Jones and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg.

We are thrilled to bring this group of actors and translators together to illuminate Grynberg’s work on our screens. We look forward to seeing you there!

WEDNESDAY, April 13th, at 6 pm Eastern:

In many ways, translation is an invisible art. Only 3% of all books published in English are works in translation; often, translators’ names aren’t even listed on the covers of the books filled with their words. What might focusing on this obscured form reveal about power, nationalisms, and preconceptions hidden in plain sight? What does it mean to bring a text across languages? How might translation help make visible, collaborate with, and contest other forms of movement, migration, and mobilization?

The Politics of Literary Practice

Join Jewish Currents for the last in a series of three conversations—on poetry, criticism, and translation—to explore the relationships between politics and literary form. Considering the history and present of the genres in question, participants will discuss the various ways that textual practices structure our imaginations—and how they chart possibilities for reading, thinking, and living otherwise.

Check out the previous two events in the series: Poetry and Freedom Movement and Criticism as Political Form.