This year's Catholic-Jewish Women's Conference commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate, the 1965 statement by the Vatican that validated the Jews as elder brothers and sisters of Christians. The Conference kicks off with a free event on November 9th, titled, The Vatican II Revolution: The Ongoing Stuggle for Jewish-Catholic Reconciliation. The second part of the conference, From Estrangement to Sisterhood – Moving Forward Together, takes place on November 11th.
The Conference will feature presentations by nationally acclaimed scholars Professor Amy-Jill Levine and Sr. Mary C. Boys, S.N.J.M. There will also be a Kristallnacht Commemoration on November 9th. You can find out more about the conference here, and then register here.
As the Jewish Studies Program continues to grow at Loyola Marymount, so does Holli Levitsky's To Do list. She says, “I have three hats that I wear – teacher, program director, and fundraiser.” And it seems that she is spending more than adequate time wearing each of these hats. A new fund has just been established to support a number of different courses and projects specifically related to the Holocaust, which is Holli's specific field of expertise.
Dr. Levitsky has also developeda new course that will be taught for the first time in Spring, 2016. The course is entitled Interreligious Experience and Engagement, and it will be taught by Rabbi Mark Diamond, who recently retired as Director of the American Jewish Committee Los Angeles and, prior to that engagement, spent 12 years leading the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.
In addition to her work while classes are in session at Loyola, each summer Holli leads a two-week student trip to either Poland or Israel. The trip to Poland is a bit of a homecoming for Dr. Levitsky. She spent a year in Poland as a Fulbright Scholar in 2001-2002. Relying on her expertise as a William Faulkner scholar, Holli taught Southern American Literature and the Holocaust to Polish students at the University of Warsaw, where she discovered that teaching the Holocaust in Poland was a very different experience than teaching it elsewhere.