Dr. Ruth Bevan, director of the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs, and artist Laura Murlender.

Oct 31, 2007 — Argentina’s “dirty war” nearly thirty years ago changed the life of artist Laura Murlender forever. At age nineteen, Murlender was abducted by government forces, chained, and tortured for eleven days. She is one of the few “disappeared” who survived. On October 30 at the Yeshiva University Museum, she spoke about her ordeal in public for the first time in thirty years.

Murlender’s talk was part of “From Darkness to Life,” a panel discussion dealing with the process of creating art as a crucial response to personal experiences of political oppression and human rights abuse. Moderated by Gabriel Cwilich, PhD, associate professor of physics at Yeshiva College, the panel included Rabbi Arthur Schneier, founder and director of Appeal of Conscience Foundation, and Nora Strejilevich, writer and professor of Latin American literature. Poet María Negroni, who was scheduled to appear, was represented by translator Mariano Amato.

The panelists began by describing their own experiences in Argentina during this period of state-sponsored terror. Rabbi Schneier spoke about his diplomatic visit to the country in 1981 and what he was able to accomplish there. “As a result of the Appeal of Conscience mission, 400 people [being held under martial law] were released. However, this does not bring back all of the ‘disappeared,’” Rabbi Schneier said.

Strejilevich, like Murlender, was a “disappeared,” and she talked about the power that words have had for her in coming to terms with her ordeal. “The goal of a dictatorship is to cancel history,” Strejilevich said. “Survivor narratives must defy this erasure. I struggle with the lexicon of terror and use the truth of my own word—the word of a survivor.”

Amato read from Negroni’s book La Anunciación.

The event was co-sponsored by the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs and served as a supplement to the exhibition “From Darkness to Light: The Paintings of Laura Murlender,” which will be on display through November 11. This exhibition is sponsored, in part, by the Friends of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. For more information, call 212-294-8330, x8805 or email info@yum.cjh.org.

Comments

Oct 31, 2007 — The inaugural public event of The Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization (CJL) drew an audience of 100 academics and members of the community to the law school on Sunday night, Oct. 28.

The crowd heard a cross-disciplinary discussion of “Military Ethics in an Age of Terrorism” by experts on Jewish, Islamic and constitutional law and moral philosophy. The panelists, who included CJL Director Suzanne Last Stone, offered their views on the impact of global terrorism on the ethics of warfare — particularly whether this relatively new threat should alter the moral constraints ordinarily imposed on combatants.

One of the problems in discussing terrorism is that it doesn’t easily fit the way we think about either war or crime, said Stone, who is a professor of law at Cardozo and an expert on the intersection of Jewish law and legal theory. “Is it war? If so, what do we do about these noncombatant civilians? But if it is a crime, how do we manage [what is] a sliding scale between perpetrators and innocents?” she asked.

Stone said she was pleased with the outcome of the discussion. “I think that it demonstrated that the perspectives of very different legal and religious traditions are very relevant to a central topic of urgent concern,” she said. “Each of the speakers was utterly frank and forthright, but also trying to convey the complexities of their tradition.”

In 2004, Stone established the Program in Jewish Law and Interdisciplinary Studies at Cardozo. It was re-launched this summer as a full-fledged center, with a broader mandate than the original focus on interdisciplinary studies. CJL will bring together scholars from a variety of traditions and fields to enhance the study of Jewish law through dialogue with Western legal theory and other religious and secular legal traditions.

The Center will develop publications and course offerings, sponsor fellowships to train scholars of Jewish studies and expand academic ties with scholars and institutions in Israel, and develop joint programs with YU’s other schools and interdisciplinary centers. The center will also organize conferences, workshops, colloquia and public events like the Oct. 28 panel discussion.

In addition to Stone, the panelists were Sohail Hashmi, associate professor of international relations at Mount Holyoke College; George P. Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence, Columbia Law School; and Daniel Statman, professor of philosophy at Haifa University and a visiting scholar at CJL during October. The moderator was Arthur Jacobson, Max Freund Professor of Litigation and Advocacy at Cardozo.

CJL is Yeshiva University’s fourth interdisciplinary center, joining the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs, the Center for Ethics and the Institute of Public Health Sciences.

Comments