Ilan Stavans discusses his new book Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook, coauthored with Margaret E. Boyle. Through 100 recipes it tells the complex story of Jewish life in Mexico, from the conversos in the colonial period to the Sephardic Jews arriving from the crumbling Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century and the Yiddish-speaking seekers of the Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the 20th century to the Holocaust survivors of the forties and the Israeli emigrants of the seventies. Stavans, an internationally renowned scholar, translator, lexicographer, and cultural commentator, will reflect on the fusion of

Mayer Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934. He taught himself to paint at age 73 and made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, “lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived.” In this talk his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, will discuss her father’s legacy and recent exhibitions of his work, including the current exhibition at the POLIN Museum, which presents a dialogue between Mayer’s depictions of his youth in the shtetl and today’s Opatów, a post-Jewish town with no remaining Jewish community.