In October, I took part in the travel literature festival in Venice, Invito al Viaggio, in conversation with the British Muslim travel writer Tharik Hussain. Our conversation was moderated by Shaul Bassi.
Take a look — it’s a great conversation (though I didn’t realize how much I fiddle with my hands…..)
Back in July I was the focus of an episode of the webinar series organized by the National Library of Israel. It was me — in conversation with my brother, Dr. Samuel D. Gruber, with whom I have frequently worked and traveled. We touched on a wide range of topics related to our Jewish heritage research — and more — over the past three decades.
The event was hosted and introduced by the NLI’s Caron Sethill.
During the pandemic, I’ve been taking part in a number of online Zoom webinars, lectures, discussions, and round-table projects.
Here’s the most recent:
“Synagogues: The State of Preservation and Future Prospects – possible approaches and challenges in heritage protection” — December 7th 2021
A conversation with me, the historian and artist Natalia Romik, the CEO of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland Piotr Puchta, and the director of the Okopowa St. Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Witold Wrzosinski.
I gave an illustrated lecture — via Zoom — on Nov. 12 as part of a program organized by the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow. It was called Beyond Virtually Jewish: Adventures in Europe’s Real Imaginary Spaces.
In it I looked back over my experience in Poland, dating back to 1980, when I was a correspondent for UPI covering Solidarnosc and Martial Law (including when I was jailed and expelled from the country because of my coverage) and discussed how throughout my career I have dealt with dreams and aspirations — of freedom, of Jewishness, of the wild west. What I’ve called the “Real Imaginary.”
In this talk, I discuss both my exploration of Jewish heritage and the “virtually Jewish” as well as my adventures in the Imaginary Wild West.
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I took part in a conference on Jewish Heritage in Slovenia, held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in September 2019.
My presentation was “Notes” from the survey of Jewish heritage in Slovenia that I carried out in 1996 — the first full survey of Jewish heritage in the country, and an endeavor that in many ways underlay the scholarship presented by the other participants in the conference.
That survey was carried out for the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, and was published in downloadable form. Click here to access it.
The conference was filmed — here is a video of my presentation.
At the conference Jewish Heritage Tourism in the Digital Age, held in Venice October 23-25, 2017, there was an event celebrating 25 years year the first edition of my book Jewish Heritage Travel was published — and 15 years since my book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.
The event was a conversation between me and Shaul Bassi, of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Watch it here:
The Center for Urban History in Lviv has posted the full video of a lecture I presented in Lviv July 27, 2017 at the conclusion of the lecture series “Jewish Days in the City Hall: (Un)Displayed Past in East European Museums.” In the talk I reflected on the changes that have taken place in Jewish heritage tourism since the publication of the first edition of my book “Jewish Heritage Travel” in 1992.
You can watch the entire talk here:
In June, I spoke at the big conference on Jewish Cultural Heritage held at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw — it was three days after my eye operation so I wasn’t 100 percent, but here is the full talk.
