Cultural Arts & Jewish Heritage Speakers & Authors

Overview

Commonpoint Queens partners with the Jewish Book Council to offer engaging virtual and in person speaker events for all ages and topics!

2023-24 Speakers:

Cyn­thia Ehrenkrantz
Seeking Shelter: Memoir of a Jewish Girlhood in Wartime Britain
Tuesday, May 21, 2024 – 6:30 p.m. (virtual)
Click here to register

Cyn­thia Ehrenkrantz, nee Shelow­er, was six in 1939 when Britain entered World War II and twelve in 1945 when the war end­ed. Seek­ing Shel­ter is her vivid child’s eye account of life in wartime Eng­land as she lived it: an adored only child in a large Jew­ish clan whose com­fort­able exis­tence becomes one of food short­ages, ration books, gas masks, and air raid sirens and – worst of all, for a sen­si­tive pre­co­cious child accus­tomed to cod­dling and att­ten­tion – being sent away for months and years at a stretch to escape Ger­man bombs. Click here to buy the book.

B.A. Van Sise
Invited to Life: Finding Hope after the Holocaust
Tuesday, June 11, 2024 – 11:00 a.m. (Older Adult Center at Bay Terrace members only)

B.A. Van Sise is an author and pho­to­graph­ic artist focused on the inter­sec­tion between lan­guage and the visu­al image. He is the author of two mono­graphs: the visu­al poet­ry anthol­o­gy Chil­dren of Grass: A Por­trait of Amer­i­can Poet­ry with Mary-Louise Park­er, and Invit­ed to Life: After the Holo­caust with Neil Gaiman, May­im Bia­lik, and Sab­ri­na Orah Mark. “No mat­ter how it might seem,” writes B. A. Van Sise, ​“this is not a book about the Holo­caust.” Rather, it is about a num­ber of sur­vivors who emerged from the deep­est depths of the Shoah and accept­ed their invi­ta­tion to life. In nine­ty hand­some and sen­si­tive por­traits, all set against a black back­ground, Van Sise iden­ti­fies in their sto­ries lessons for our unset­tled time. Click here to buy the book.

NEW DATE – Philippa Strum
On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the Making of Gender Equality Law
Monday, April 15, 2024 – 6:30 p.m. (virtual)
Click here to register

Long before she became ​“Noto­ri­ous,” Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg was an attor­ney argu­ing gen­der equal­i­ty cas­es before the U.S. Supreme Court. The cas­es she won in the 1970s changed the mean­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion, adding legal equal­i­ty for women to it. That is the rea­son RBG became the first Jew­ish Amer­i­can and the first woman to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol. Click here to buy the book.

POSTPONED – Elizabeth Mandel
Salt & Hon­ey: Jew­ish Teens on Fem­i­nism, Cre­ativ­i­ty, and Tradition
Wednesday, March 27, 2024 – 6:00 p.m. (virtual)

Eliz­a­beth Man­del is the Founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of jGirls+ Mag­a­zine, an online lit­er­ary mag­a­zine for Jew­ish girls and non­bi­na­ry teens. In Salt & Hon­ey: Jew­ish Teens on Fem­i­nism, Cre­ativ­i­ty, and Tradition, a collection col­lec­tion of per­son­al essays, poet­ry, and visu­al art­work, Jew­ish young adults from the online pub­li­ca­tion jGirls Mag­a­zine con­front dif­fi­cult truths in a chang­ing world. Many of the pieces are unfil­tered, seek­ing to con­nect with oth­er teens rather than defend­ing their points of view to adults. The result is a mov­ing work that encour­ages sol­i­dar­i­ty. Click here to buy the book.

Storytime with Elyssa Friedland
The Museum of Lost Teeth
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 – 4:30 p.m.
In person at Commonpoint Queens Central Queens

Where do all the lost teeth go??

Join Commonpoint Queens as we welcome author Elyssa Friedland for a special reading and Q&A event featuring her exciting and funny book The Museum of Lost Teeth. Click here to buy the book.

For more information, contact SBenAderet@CommonpointQueens.org.

Please register through our online system here: