Event Details
This roundtable brings together scholars, Chelsea Haines and Gabriel Chazan and artist Zoe Beloff to discuss Molly Crabapple’s New York Times bestselling book Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. A sprawling account of the world of the General Jewish Labor Bund, Crabapple’s book has captured the attention of readers at a fraught moment when Jewish communities are looking to the past to reimagine new political futures. Our discussion will consider the book’s possible implications for thinking about new and shifting approaches to narrating Jewish political memory and radicalism in popular culture and mass media. As we explore the book, we are also interested in thinking about the role art plays in forging new political imaginaries.
Chelsea Haines is a historian of global modern and contemporary art and architecture. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History & Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on histories and theories of museums, exhibitions, and the politics of display. Her current book project explores the role of art exhibitions in Israeli nation-building from the founding of the state in 1948 to the establishment of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1965. Chelsea’s research has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Fulbright Fellowship, New York Public Humanities Fellowship, and Presidential Research Fellowship at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center. She received a Ph.D. in Art History from The Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2020.
Gabriel Chazan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation “Devotional Aestheticism: Steinberg, Sontag, Koestenbaum and the Question of a Queer Jewish Art History” considers art writing by three Jewish critics during the AIDS crisis. Drawing on queer theory and Jewish studies, he focuses on Jewish identity, representation, and culture in art history and visual studies. Before arriving at UW–Madison, Gabriel completed his M.A. at University College London (UCL). While there, he wrote the M.A. thesis “Sontag, Etcetera: Towards a Queer and Intersubjective Portrait Photography,” which conceptualized an idea of a “queer gaze” in portraiture through a close analysis of several photographs of the American writer Susan Sontag. He completed his B.A. at Sarah Lawrence College and Oxford University (Sarah Lawrence Program) where he wrote a B.A. thesis on Berenice Abbott. He has taught courses on “Art, Visual Culture and Holocaust” and the “History of Photography” at UW–Madison. He is currently a member of the inaugural educator cohort at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
Zoe Beloff is an artist, filmmaker, writer and rootless cosmopolitan based in New York. She aims to make art that both entertains and provokes discussion. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme. Many works also go out into the world as books.
A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood explored ideas for films proposed by never realized by radical artists; Sergei Eisenstein’s scenario Glass House, Bertolt Brecht’s A Model Family in a Model Home and asked how we might imagine them today. Life Forgotten is her most recent installation that focus on how working people come together to change their lives. Previous projects include, The Days of the Commune, a street performance and installation about the Paris Commune of 1871, and the exhibition, The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle 1926-1972.
Zoe’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; include the Whitney Museum Biennale, MoMA, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Pompidou Center in Paris, International Film Festival Rotterdam and FID Marseille. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Graham Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. However, she particularly enjoys working in alternative venues that are free and open to the community for events and conversations. She is a professor at Queens College CUNY.
The program is presented in conjunction with the installation, Life Forgotten created by filmmaker and artist Zoe Beloff and on view at the City Lore gallery through September 13, 2026.