Written Arts Program, Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Program, Middle Eastern Studies Program, Jewish Studies Program, Division of Languages and Literature, and Classical Studies Program Present
Till we have built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Olin Humanities, Room 102
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Adina Hoffman
Award-winning essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman will discuss her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which is a gripping and intimate journey into the lives of three very different architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem. A powerfully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, the book uncovers multiple layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, in Jerusalem and everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem
“A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate
“Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick
“Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra
For more info please contact [email protected]
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem
“A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate
“Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick
“Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra
For more info please contact [email protected]
For more information, call 845-758-6822.
Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102