Philip Bohlman
In his training and research, Philip V. Bohlman combines ethnographic and historical approaches to understand the many processes in which music generates multiple forms of human identity: cultural and national, political and aesthetic, ethnic and racial, sacred and secular, gender and sexuality. Bohlman searches for musical meaning in the sites of in-betweenness, particularly those formed by displacement and disjuncture in modernity. Jewish music has long provided a center for his work, particularly the presence of music in the shaping of European Jewish communities and Israel. Religious interests extend from this concern for Jewish music, for example, to studies of sacred music in North America and Islam in Europe, as well as forms of sacred music-making, such as pilgrimage and prayer. As a scholar, Bohlman is committed to fieldwork, with current projects ranging from the Eurovision Song Contest to the study of Jewish communities in India. Bohlman is not only a pianist but also the artistic director of the University of Chicago ensemble-in-residence, the “New Budapest Orpheum Society,” a seven member cabaret that has released three CDs.

 

Christine Wilkie Bohlman
Christine Wilkie Bohlman is a lecturer in piano and chamber music at the University of Chicago. She is a pianist with special interests in chamber music and the keyboard music of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. She has studied with Menachem Pressler, Carroll Chilton, Howard Karp, Kenneth Drake, Aiko Onishi, and Russell Sherman, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University, and studying in the doctoral program at the University of Illinois. She held several positions before moving to the University of Chicago, including MacMurray College, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Merit School of Music in Chicago, where she also served as chair of music theory. Most recently, she has performed at Bard College, the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, Yale University, University College Cork, Ohio State University, and the Warburg Institute in London. During the 2008–2009 academic year, she will perform internationally in Melbourne, Berlin, and Vienna, as well as for the Jewish community of Minneapolis-St. Paul. With Philip Bohlman she is preparing a recording of Viktor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, the final work for stage composed in the concentration camp at Terezín

 

Al Staggs
Al Staggs holds a B. A. from Hardin-Simmons University, an M.R.E. degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Th.M. from Harvard Divinity School, and a doctor of ministry degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Al served as Baptist minister for twenty-four years prior to becoming a full-time performance artist.

Al Staggs brings the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, to the stage. The audience is brought into the prison cell where Bonhoeffer awaits execution and listens to his struggles with evil, injustice, and God. In the play, Bonhoeffer tells of the profound influence of fellow Union Theological student, Frank Fisher, an African-American friend who introduced Dietrich to the blight of racism in America. Prisoner Bonhoeffer expresses moral outrage against the Nazi treatment of Jews and explains how that outrage led him to become involved in the German resistance movement, a commitment that would result in his being executed by hanging on April 9, 1945.

 

Facing History and Ourselves
Facing History and Ourselves delivers classroom strategies, resources and lessons that inspire young people to take responsibility for their world. Internationally recognized for our quality and effectiveness, Facing History harnesses the power of the Internet and partners with school systems, universities and ministries of education worldwide. Each year the program reaches more than 1.8 million students through its global network of more than 25,000 educators, staff, adjunct faculty, and international fellows.

Facing History's work is based on the premise that society must — and can— teach civic responsibility, tolerance, and social action to young people, as a way of fostering moral adulthood. If we do not educate students for dignity and equity, then we have failed both them and ourselves.

 

Murray Zimiles
Book of Fire
Murray Zimiles received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Illinois and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Cornell University. His work has been exhibited around the world, and The New York Times has praised his style of “inventive realism.”

Composed of 22 lithographs and three woodcuts this large format book (50” x 38”) tells the emotionally charged story of the destruction of the Polish wooden synagogues during the Holocaust.

The Book of Fire will be on display in the A. C. Buehler Library during the month of April.

 

Eyewitness, Film
This film is a true story of the artist-inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp. Despite the unimaginable horrors of their daily lives and the almost certainty of death, these artists still retained the need for self-expression and somehow found the will to secretly create drawings and paintings that have provided the future with an undeniable account of camp existence Conceived and supported by Granville and Marcia Speck and filmed by internationally acclaimed filmmaker, Bert van Bork, Eyewitness was produced in 1999 and nominated for an Academy Award in the short documentary film category in 2001.