Newsletter No. 587
Information-Announcement
April 27, 2007

 

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR BEN-AMI SHILLONY

News has reached us of an event to be held April 29th-May 2nd that will be of interest to some Shingetsu members. Ben-Ami Shillony (Shingetsu Member No. 74) is a Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a very senior figure in Israel’s Japan Studies community. He has, on occasion, contributed commentary at this network as well.

An international conference in his honor is soon to be held during the period given above. The conference will focus on the three main areas in which Dr. Shillony has made academic contributions: studies of the Japanese Emperor system; the Japanese military in the 20th century; and Japanese-Jewish relations. The third topic, of course, also falls within the scope of our concerns here at the Shingetsu Institute. Japanese Ambassador to Israel Yoshinori Katori is scheduled to offer greetings at the opening of the conference.

The papers relevant to Japanese-Jewish relations are as follows:

Zvika Serper (Tel Aviv University): “Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Play ‘The Dyubbuk’ and Japanese Theater Aesthetics.”

*Screening of Zvika Serper’s film ‘The Dyubbuk / Between Two Worlds’

Guy Podoler (Hebrew University): “An ‘Other’ Discovered: Japan in the Early Hebrew Press in Palestine at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”

Roni Sarig (Hebrew University and University of Haifa): “WWII in Japanese and Israeli Memory: The Story and Myth of Anne Frank and Sadako Sasaki.”

Ury Eppstein (Hebrew University): “A New Japanese Opera, a Japanese Diplomat, and the Holocaust.”

Ryuji Mizuuchi (Embassy of Japan in Israel): “Questions and Unknown Facts about the Sugihara Visas.”

Naoki Maruyama (Meiji Gakuin University): “Facing a Dilemma: Japan’s Jewish Policy in the Late 1930s.”

Meron Medzini (Hebrew University): “Jewish Scientists, Jewish Ethics and the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb.”

Raquel Shaoul (Tel Aviv University): “Japan and Israel: An Evaluation of Relation Building in the Context of Japan’s Middle East Foreign Policy.”

For the complete program, visit the website of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies.