Issues, history focus of Jewish Heritage lectures

Historian and novelist Ronald Florence will consider “Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840” at the season’s first Jewish Heritage Lecture Series, sponsored by the Mosse/ Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at UW–Madison. Florence, author of a just-published book of the same name as the lecture, says that the legacies of the incident are firmly in place in the Middle East to this day, including rumors of blood libel.

Florence will speak Monday, Feb. 7. The University of Wisconsin Press is co-sponsoring the speech.

Lectures will continue through April 21. All the lectures are free and open to the public. Each will begin at 7 p.m. in the Memorial Union; check Today in the Union for the exact room location. To learn more about the lectures series, contact Anita Lightfoot at 265-4763, allightf@wisc.edu or Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies’s Web page.