Rooftop Shabbat

Cantor Pamela Schi er will lead a service created for families and their loved ones living with Dementia. e service will include familiar prayers and melodies within a 45 minute timeframe. familiar prayers and melodies within a 45 minute timeframe.

For online registration: tinyurl.com/servicebc For questions or to register by phone call (248) 661-6390, leave a message with your name, address, phone number and email.

Registration preferred by August 30 to ensure delivery of your High Holy Day gi bag.

We are grateful to a friend of the Brown Center who has generously underwritten this event.

for college students by college students

COURTESY WAYNE STATE

Samantha Cohen } jewish@edu writer

o ers classes in Jewish life and culture, both on-campus and on the road (in places as close as New York City and as far away as Germany, Poland, Spain, and Israel). We sponsor faculty and student research—including the groundbreaking project, Jewish Life and Language in Southeast Michigan. We are responsible for a lecture series, which, over the years, has brought students and community members together to sample latkes for Hanukkah, taste “kosher soul” food, dance to klezmer music, laugh at “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” and sing with Israeli singer-songwriters.

8/16/21 2:12 PM

On Friday, Aug. 6, the Wayne State University Jewish Medical Student Association (WSU JMSA) got together for Shabbat dinner with Hillel of Metro Detroit.

After a long year of virtual learning, I, alongside my co-president Daniel Lenchner, felt that it was especially important to connect the Jewish medical students when the new class of first-year medical students arrived on campus. We all felt that it was key for us to establish a sense of community and social support, after spending our first year in medical school lacking these outlets.

Many members were able to meet classmates in person for the first time, even though we had met virtually through our online classes. I was excited to meet the incoming M1 students and introduce them into the WSU JMSA community.

The dinner was on the rooftop of the Scott Building in Midtown Detroit, and we were able to enjoy the beautiful skyline view of the city where we live, study and play.

The best part of the evening was being able to socialize with friends and safely spend time with each other in person. The Shabbat dinner is just the first event we will offer the WSU JMSA this upcoming school year. @

Samantha Cohen is a second-year medical student at Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Andrei Markovits is The Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His extensive scholarly work has appeared in 15 languages and he has taught at universities in the United States, Israel, Germany, Austria and Switzerland! This is the story of an illustrious Romanian-born, Hungarianspeaking, Vienna-schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvardformed middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects. Markovits revels in a rootlessness that offers him comfort, succor, and the inspiration for his life’s work. As we follow his quest to find a home, we encounter his engagement with the important political, social and cultural developments of five decades on two continents. We also learn about his musical preferences, from classical to rock; his love of team sports such as soccer, baseball, basketball, and American football; and his devotion to dogs and their rescue. Above all, the book analyzes the travails of emigration the author experienced twice, moving from Romania to Vienna and then from Vienna to New York.

Markovits’s Candide-like travels through the ups and downs of post-1945 Europe and America offer a panoramic view of key currents that shaped the second half of the 20th century. By shedding light on the cultural similarities and differences between both continents, the book shows why America fascinated Europeans like Markovits and offered them a home that Europe never did: academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance. America for Markovits was indeed the “beacon on the hill,” despite the ugliness of its racism, the prominence of its everyday bigotry, the severity of its growing economic inequality, and the presence of other aspects that mar this worthy experiment’s daily existence.