News

Thursday, January 23, 2025

The Nahmanides Institute for Jewish Studies and the Chair Ferrater Mora in Contemporary Thought begin the new series of lectures "The Jewish World on the Big Screen"

•The philosopher, writer and professor Xavier Antich opened the series this afternoon with a lecture on the Holocaust in cinema.

• In parallel, an exhibition on the Jewish contribution to the birth of commercial cinema and the creation of Hollywood will be inaugurated in the coming months.

The Nahmanides Institute for Jewish Studies and the Chair Ferrater Mora of Contemporary Thought have started this afternoon the new series of lectures “The Jewish world on the big screen. Cinema as a tool and as a pretext”. As usual, the lectures take place in the classroom of the Institute of the Bonastruc ça Porta Centre during the first semester of the year. This is the twentieth year that the patronat Call de Girona and the University of Girona have collaborated in an annual series of lectures on Jewish thought and culture and on Jewish history.

In this edition, the proposal deals with the topic of cinema related to the Jewish world. Over time, cinema has been a powerful tool for telling stories, cultures and identities that make up the contemporary Jewish world, from the creation of Hollywood as a film industry to films that teach the cruelty of the Holocaust. Through the seventh art, narratives about Jewish culture, the Jewish people, or Jewish history have been woven. Now, the cycle proposes to explore where this association between cinema and the Jewish fact comes from, and what web of connections we can find between one and the other.

The conferences began today, Thursday, January 23, at 6:30 p.m., with the conference “Pensar i mostrar el mal: l'Holocaust al cinema”, by the philosopher, writer and professor Xavier Antich. The program includes four more lectures between February and May, each one given by a specialist in a different aspect of the subject. The following lectures will be given by Imma Merino (University of Girona), Anna M. Garcia (University of Girona), Paula Kuffer (University of Barcelona) and Jordi Dorca (Girona Cinema Museum).

As a complementary activity beyond the lectures, the series will offer the exhibition “Jewishwood: The Jewish contribution to the birth of Hollywood”. The exhibition will open in the spring and will contain various elements and objects loaned by the Cinema Museum that refer to the beginnings of Hollywood and the Jewish producers who made that dream possible. The exhibition, curated by Jordi Dorca Costa, can be visited at the Museum of Jewish History until September 2025.

All activities in the “The Jewish World on the Big Screen” series are free and open to all audiences, although it is recommended to register in advance for each of the sessions through the website of the Patronat Call de Girona, where you will also find the entire program with all the dates and proposals.

As a result of the collaboration between both organizations, since 2010 all the conferences have been recorded each year and can be consulted or downloaded online through this link. In this way, their dissemination goes beyond the classroom and creates the opportunity to bring the series to a much wider audience.