AUTHOR LECTURE SERIES

Eight dynamic Jewish authors visit our community to discuss their recently published books. The series features a variety of Jewish topics: Jewish identity, Jewish culture, anti-Semitism, Elie Wiesel, the WWII resistance, Marx Brothers.

All Lectures will feature a Q&A after the author presentation, book sale and signing.

TICKETS

Single-event tickets are $10-$25. Click the purchase button below the author's bio.

For information on this program,
please contact:

Jeremy Lisitza

941.343.2113

jlisitza@jfedsrq.org

DECEMBER 5

7:00-8:30 PM

The  Larry Greenspon Family Campus for Jewish Life

580 McIntosh Rd., Sarasota

Marra B. Gad and Angela Himsel will each present a story about their journey of Jewish identity based upon their memoirs each related to family, love, and faith. Gad, author of The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed Race Jewish Girl, is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds an advanced degree in modern Jewish history from Baltimore Hebrew University. Her book is an unforgettable debut memoir about a mixed-race Jewish woman who, after fifteen years of estrangement from her racist great-aunt, helps bring her home when Alzheimer’s strikes.

Himsel grew up in southern Indiana in an apocalyptic, doomsday Christian faith. She visited Israel in college in an attempt to understand her church’s strict tenets and instead questioned Christianity itself, ultimately leading her to convert to Judaism. Her memoir, A River Could Be a Tree, is an odyssey of love and faith, told in a voice mixed with pathos and humor.

JANUARY 6

7:30 - 9:00 PM

Riverview Performing Arts Center

1 Ram Way, Sarasota

Renowned star of Broadway and London’s West End stages, Grammy-nominated artist and author Alexandra Silber will blend musical stylings with spoken words from her book, After Anatevka, in a cabaret-style performance featuring songs from Fiddler on the Roof and original pieces. The book picks up where the story told in Fiddler on the Roof ends. Alexandra recently starred as Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Olney Theatre Center outside Washington, D.C.

JANUARY 29

10:30 AM - NOON

The  Larry Greenspon Family Campus for Jewish Life

580 McIntosh Rd., Sarasota

S. Perry Brickman, author of Extracted: Unmasking Rampant Anti-Semitism in America’s Higher Education, is a retired oral surgeon, investigative journalist, and former president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta. For a half century, Brickman harbored a deep and personally painful secret; in September 2006, he uncovered documents that strongly suggested that he, and many others, had been failed out of Emory’s dental school because they were Jewish.

FEBRUARY 13

7:00 - 8:30 PM

The  Larry Greenspon Family Campus for Jewish Life

580 McIntosh Rd., Sarasota

Ariel Burger first met Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel at age 15.  They studied and taught together.  Burger’s book Witness chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men over decades. Witness takes the reader into Wiesel’s classroom, where the art of listening and storytelling conspire to keep memory alive. Burger is a writer, artist, teacher, and rabbi whose work combines spirituality, creativity and strategies for social change.

MARCH 8

7:00 - 8:30 PM

The  Larry Greenspon Family Campus for Jewish Life

580 McIntosh Rd., Sarasota

Giraffes on Horseback Salad was a Marx Brothers film, written by modern art icon Salvador Dali. Rejected by MGM, the script was thought lost forever.  But author Josh Frank found it and, with comedian Tim Heideck and Spanish comics creator Manuela Pertega, recreated the film as a graphic novel in all its gorgeous, full-color, cinematic, surreal glory. Frank’s entertaining, interactive presentation includes clips from your favorite Marx Brothers films, music and more.

APRIL 21

10:30 AM - NOON

The  Larry Greenspon Family Campus for Jewish Life

580 McIntosh Rd., Sarasota

Jack Fairweather and Sarah Rose will present a panel discussion on some of the heroes of the resistance during World War II.  Fairweather’s book, The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz, tells the incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltrations of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within and his death defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late. The author is a graduate of Oxford University and has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and the Daily Telegraph. His reporting while an embedded reporter during the Iraq invasion won him the British Press Award (the British equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize). 

Sarah Rose has written for the Wall Street Journal, Outside The Saturday Evening Post, and Men’s Journal. In 2014, she was awarded a Lowell Thomas Prize in Travel Writing.  Rose’s book, D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis and Helped Win World War II, is the dramatic untold story of the extraordinary women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory. These women destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, and gathered crucial intelligence.

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