Category: Events

The Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program Presents: Voices from Exile: Final Report of the Colombian Truth Commission.  Taking place on Tuesday, October 4th from 12-2pm for their first event of the year!  Light lunch and beverages will be provided! Please RSVP by Friday, September 30th. Students will hear from:

Carlos Berenstein, the Comissioner of the Colombian Truth Commission and Colombian survivors of exile.

Elvira Maria Restrepo, George Washington University – University Honors Program, Elliot School of International Affairs

Cristina Espinel, Head Colombian Human Rights Comittee

Diana Fula and Humberto Garces, Survivors of Exiles

Join us next Friday, September 23rd, from 11:45-12:45PM in the townhouse Club Room with Professor Kung to discuss the James Webb Space Telescope over a catered lunch!  RSVP here!

The James Webb Space Telescope

“Despite decades of delays and major cost overruns, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, all folded up snug in its launch vehicle. Despite many possible points of failure (and an unfortunate encounter with a micrometeoroid!), the telescope reached its orbital “parking place,” opened, and began taking its first awe-inspiring science images, which were released to the public just this past July. In this “Food for Thought” talk, I will tell the story of the ups and downs of Webb and describe how Webb – like Hubble before it – is going to revolutionize our understanding of the universe!” -Professor Kung

Pulling upon interviews with more than 475 displaced Syrians around the world, this talk, taking place on Friday, March 25th, from 12-1pm, explores personal stories of losing, seeking, finding, or not finding home, and what they teach us about the meaning of belonging.

This event will be held in-person at The George Washington University Textile Museum, 701 21st St. NW, Washington, DC 20052. A Zoom link has been provided above for those who wish to attend the event virtually.

You can sign up here!

Register for the Book talk, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception, Lectured by Daniel M. Herskowitz (Oxford University)

In this book, Daniel Herskowitz examines the rich, intense, and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger. Contextualizing this encounter within wider intellectual, cultural, and political contexts, he outlines the main patterns and the diverse Jewish responses to Heidegger. Herskowitz shows that through a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, Jewish thinkers developed a version of Jewishness that sought to offer the way out of the overall crisis plaguing their world, which was embodied, as they saw it, in Heidegger’s life and thought. Neither turning a blind eye to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism nor using it as an excuse for ignoring his philosophy, they wrestled with his existential analytic and what they took to be its religious, ethical, and political failings. Ironically, Heidegger’s thought proved itself to be fertile ground for re-conceptualizing what it means to be Jewish in the modern world.

March 21, 2022, 3:45 pm-5 pm (on Zoom) You can register for this meeting here:

Dr. Daniel M. Herskowitz is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, working on the research project ‘Jewish Existentialism and the Legacy of Martin Luther’. He was previously a Career Research Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wolfson College and a postdoctoral fellow at the Religion Department at Columbia University, NY. Dr. Herskowitz is the author of over twenty studies on modern philosophy, modern Jewish thought, Jewish-Christian relations, political theology, secularization, and nationalism. His first book, Heidegger and His Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was awarded the 2021 Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Young Scholars Award for Scholarly Excellence. His essay “Between Exclusion and Intersection: Heidegger’s Philosophy and Jewish Volkism” was the winner of the Leo Baeck Year Book Essay Prize for 2020.