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The Center for the Study of World Religions & CMES present
Benjamin Balint, writer based in Jerusalem, and
Merav Mack, Research fellow, Truman Institute for Peace, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
What might it look like to see Jerusalem, with its cross-hatched encounters between people of diverse faiths and cultures, as a city of the book? Is it possible to use libraries and texts to catch the city’s tragedy and its magnificence, to tell the story of a place where some of the world’s most far-reaching ideas were put into words? Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint will share their forays into the city's most inaccessible reaches in the making of their recently published book (with photographs by Frederic Brenner), which Prof. Moshe Halbertal has called “one of the most intimate and beautiful portraits ever written of Jerusalem.”
Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is the author of Kafka's Last Trial (Norton) and co-author with Merav Mack of Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale). His essays appear in the Wall Street Journal, Haaretz, and Die Zeit, and his translations from the Hebrew have appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic.
Merav Mack received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge, England. She is a Research Fellow at the Truman Institute for Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently living in France. In addition to her work on Jerusalem’s libraries and archives, she is known for her research of contemporary Christian communities in the Middle East, which she conducted in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
Co-sponsors: CMES, Center for Study of World Religions (HDS)
Contact: Ariella Goldberg