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When the writer Sholem Alecheim died in 1916, his funeral was one of the largest public gatherings ever seen in New York City. As many as 200,000 people lined the streets of the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens to watch his funeral cortege pass by. A memorial service was held in Carnegie Hall the next day, where Sholem Aleichem was lionized as “the Jewish Mark Twain.”
Tradition! Tradition! Alisa Solomon, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, has written a book about a musical that was so wildly successful, it became a tradition all its own. Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof examines far more than the 1964 Broadway juggernaut whose songs have been enjoyed by millions of Jews and non-Jews alike and has had countless productions mounted in every corner of the globe, from high school auditoriums to the Alhambra theater in Jaffa, Israel. Solomon shows how a musical set in a Jewish village in czarist Russia at the turn of…
As part of its 125th anniversary celebration, the college has mounted an exhibition, "Doing and Undergoing," which honors John Dewey by embodying his concept of learning through experience.
For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells.
Patricia Culligan, professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, is leading a team of 20 investigators who have just won a five-year $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how urban green infrastructure (GI) can mitigate the city's role in coastal zone pollution.
In one of his first public addresses since being elected mayor three weeks ago, Bill de Blasio came to Columbia to give the keynote address at the Earth Institute’s NYC Summit on Children, an all-day conference on the value of early childhood development programs and pre-kindergarten education.
In one of his first public addresses since being elected mayor three weeks ago, Bill de Blasio came to Columbia to give the keynote address at the Earth Institute’s NYC Summit on Children, an all-day conference on the value of early childhood development programs and pre-kindergarten education.
ALAN BRINKLEY, Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Whose John F. Kennedy Volume in the American Presidents Series Was Published Last Year
John F. Kennedy was a good president but not a great one, most scholars concur. A poll of historians in 1982 ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the survey. Thirteen such polls from 1982 to 2011 put him, on average, 12th. Richard Neustadt, the prominent presidential scholar, revered Kennedy during his lifetime and was revered by Kennedy in turn. Yet in the 1970s, he remarked: “He will be just a flicker, forever clouded by the record…
Marianne Hirsch began her presidency of the Modern Language Assocation last January, just months before the release of a report to Congress by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences defending the value of a liberal arts education at a time of reduced humanities funding and waning student enrollments.
A printmaking shop endowed by an artist best known for his sketches in Playboy and at sporting events like the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby has become an important fine art venue at Columbia.
Eleanor Antin is a pioneer conceptual artist working in photography, film, performance, writing, drawing, painting and sculpting. The exhibition brings together “the selves” - the characters she has created and inhabited over the past thirty years.
Dr. Jill Biden today met with student military veterans at Columbia University in New York to learn more about their programs that serve veterans and military families. Dr. Biden announced earlier this week that she would be visiting campus programs that support veterans and military families as part of Joining Forces, the initiative she started with First Lady Michelle Obama to encourage all Americans to find ways to support and honor military families.
A team of Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Mechanical Engineering Professor James Hone and Electrical Engineering Professor Kenneth Shepard, has taken advantage of graphene’s special properties—its mechanical strength and electrical conduction—and created a nano-mechanical system that can create FM signals, in effect the world’s smallest FM radio transmitter. The study is published online on November 17, in "Nature Nanotechnology."
Over the course of five days in October, Brooklyn-based artist Rafael Vargas-Suarez transformed the lobby of Miller Theatre at Columbia University into an immersive artwork with a large-scale wall drawing.