Washington College to Unveil New Hillel House as Welcoming Hub for Jewish Students

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College’s gleaming new Roy P. and Nan Ans Hillel House will be dedicated Friday at 4:30 p.m. in a program featuring remarks by the national president of Hillel and a poem written for the occasion by award winning poet Jehanne Dubrow.

“Hillel House is going to be a magnet for Jewish students on campus; it’s going to ensure their voice on campus; it’s going to help them establish their own identities; and it’s something other competitive schools already have that will attract students, particularly Jewish students, to Washington College,” says Roy P. Ans ’63, M.D., who chairs the committee that has already raised more than $208,000 to renovate and endow the house at 313 Washington Avenue, across from the campus lawn.

The program will include an address by special guest Wayne L. Firestone, national president and CEO of Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Washington College president Mitchell B. Reiss will deliver welcoming remarks and Rabbi Peter E. Hyman, MAHL, DD, of Temple B’nai Israel in Easton will deliver the invocation.

Rabbi Hyman, along with Lawrence Golub ’63 and Roy and Nan Ans ’63, will also preside over the installation of the mezuzah, the fragment of parchment inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Torah that is rolled up in a decorative case and affixed to the door frame of Jewish homes.

Jehanne Dubrow, assistant professor of creative writing and English and interim director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, will read her prose poem commissioned for the occasion: “Poem on the Dedication of the Hillel House, at Washington College, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.”

“The poem brings together my family’s personal history – that Jewish story of Diaspora and the long search for home – with an acknowledgement of what a permanent Hillel House can bring to Washington College,” Dubrow says. “The Hillel House will be a physical embodiment of the ways in which we all need community; we all need a warm room, a table around which to share meals or tell stories.”

Mike Kaylor, master printer of the Literary House Press at Washington College, is making a handset limited-edition broadside of the poem to commemorate the event.

There will also be remarks by Washington College Hillel president Ashley Carol-Fingerhut ’14 and by Dr. Ans, who is a member of the WC Society of Visitors & Governors and a longtime supporter of an enhanced Jewish life at Washington College. In 2006, he endowed the Roy P. Ans Fellowship in Jewish American Studies.

The College has set a goal of raising $350,000 to both renovate the house and create an endowment to support it. Jonathan D. Bookbinder ’10, Beth Kahn Leaman’73, Peter D. Maller ’90 and Mark A. Schulman ’67, Ph.D., serve on the fundraising committee chaired by Dr. Ans.

A reception will follow the dedication ceremony, which is free and open to the public. For more information: http://hillel.washcoll.edu/.

New Book by Washington College Historian Explores Lincoln's Racial Attitudes, Political Savvy

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? In his compelling new book, Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press), Washington College history professor Richard Striner weighs the evidence and concludes that, not only was Lincoln free of racial bias, but he also was a political genius willing to deceive his opponents about his racial attitudes in order to further the cause of human rights.

“With lawyerly precision, Richard Striner mines the speeches and writings of our 16th president to make a compelling case for a President Lincoln who, contrary to contemporary belief, had a long and abiding commitment, not just to the end of slavery, but also to equality before the law for all men, whatever the color of their skin,” writes Clay Risen of The New York Times.

The author of five previous books, two of them about Lincoln, Striner has been writing and thinking about the Civil War president since he was a graduate student in history at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s. He says that writing Lincoln and Race gave him a chance to explore in depth one of the themes of his first major work on Lincoln, Father Abraham (Oxford, 2006).

“Was Lincoln, emancipator and champion of liberty, actually a conflicted soul struggling to overcome his own racial prejudice? As I worked my way through the issue in Father Abraham, I thought it quite unlikely for a number of reasons, but most of all because, studying his statecraft and politics, it became clear to me that Lincoln was a moral Machiavellian, an idealist with street smarts,” Striner says.

“Lincoln chose to employ deception a number of times during his White House years, in ways that are easy to document. He had to craft a very careful strategy in order to prevent all sorts of worst-case contingencies, including a white supremacist backlash that would have set back the antislavery cause for God knows how many decades.”

Striner structured Lincoln and Race as a sort of detective yarn, a courtroom drama. He even invokes Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel The Thin Man in his introduction. Assembling the evidence piece by piece, affording all sides of the debate a fair hearing, he has one end in mind: that “any satisfactory theory should make greater sense than the others.”

Striner became fascinated with Lincoln’s statecraft when he was in graduate school, “looking at the past in order to find my own bearings in terms of political philosophy, looking for inspiration. Lincoln struck me powerfully in many ways, not least because of the way he harmonized a great idealism with a very tough realism. Later, when I worked as a grassroots historic preservationist in Washington, I came to appreciate him even more because, trying to summon power to my cause, I realized I was trying at a very low level to do what he did so brilliantly on a grand scale.”

Striner’s habit of mining the past for inspiration has informed his numerous articles, including recent pieces about Lincoln for the popular New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War, and a cover story in The American Scholar in which he urges the administration to consider Lincoln’s strategy of printing greenbacks as a possible cure for contemporary economic woes. His 2011 book, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, examines how Lincoln and five subsequent presidents pushed forward large-scale public projects and policies that made the country great.

Striner is currently working on a book about Woodrow Wilson, who, “unlike Lincoln, was a terrible strategist,” he says. “Wilson was narcissistic and foolish in ways that make him Lincoln’s operational opposite. If democracy is going to work, it demands leadership, and if the world is going to be made better, it will be by people who know how to deliver real results and not just pose on a soapbox demonstrating how perfect they are in their attitudes. That’s nice, but it doesn’t free any slaves.”

Rose O'Neill Literary House Director Jehanne Dubrow Wins Prestigious Poetry Prize

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Jehanne Dubrow, assistant professor of creative writing and English at Washington College and interim director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, has won the Poetry Society of America’s 2012 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.

Dubrow won the coveted prize, which includes a $1,000 cash award, for her manuscript-in-progress, The Arranged Marriage, her first collection of prose poems, which explores a series of often harrowing episodes in her mother’s early life. The judge was Claudia Rankine, one of the country’s most distinguished poets. Author of four poetry collections and editor of numerous anthologies, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

“Each poem in Jehanne Dubrow’s manuscript-in-progress translates a form of violence and altogether adds up to a mosaic of assault,” wrote Rankine. “Details in these stunning prose poems are presented like mini still lifes creating patterns of preparation for victimization, retaliation, or escape.”

Dubrow, who will be feted at a dinner for this year’s Poetry Society of America award winners in New York City in May, describes the prize and Rankine’s affirmation of her work as “a tremendous honor. I usually work in traditional forms like sonnets and villanelles, so it’s been a big deal for me to work, for the first time, in prose poems,” she says. “I am really excited that someone like Claudia Rankine, who is so well known for working in these kinds of forms, would think I was doing it well.”

The country’s oldest poetry organization, the Poetry Society of America was founded in 1910 to create a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment and understanding of poetry. Its members have included many of the nation’s most celebrated poets – from Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay to John Ashbery and Louise Glück.

The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is given annually for a manuscript-in-progress of poetry or verse-drama in memory of a benefactor and friend of the Poetry Society of America. It is partially endowed by the estates of Rachel Dalven and Ellen Lamon Anderson.

“What’s cool about this prize is that, when you are working on a manuscript, it is so easy to doubt yourself,” says Dubrow. “It is wonderful and inspiring to have this kind of acknowledgment of a work that feels both concrete and, at the same time, in a state of becoming.”

The Arranged Marriage will be Dubrow’s fifth collection of poetry. Three poems from the collection won last year’s Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize for Poetry on the Jewish Experience. Her fourth book, Red Army Red, will be published by Northwestern University Press this fall.

Dubrow’s first book, The Hardship Post, won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award in 2009, and her second collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Competition, also in 2009. Stateside was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, The Promised Bride, in 2007.

Dubrow’s poetry, creative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, West Branch, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Copper Nickel and Prairie Schooner.

Her many honors include an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and Howard Nemerov Poetry Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Lecturer Fatma Ismail Explores Foreign Influences on the Art of Ancient Egypt

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Visiting lecturer Fatma Ismail will talk about how ancient Egyptian art affected the rest of the world and was, in turn, affected by other cultures when she presents “Continuity and Transformation: Late Period Egypt,” on Wednesday, April 18 at Washington College. Her talk will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center, on the College campus.

During the time period from about 712 to 332 B.C., Egyptian artistic influences, Egyptian gods and their sanctuaries were widely attested to over the whole range of the Mediterranean world. Through a succession of conquests by Kushites, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks, the Egyptians and their art were, in turn, changed by close contact with foreign cultures. Examining this rich period of ancient Egyptian history, Ismail will illustrate how Egyptian art exhibited both unique qualities and evidence of cross-cultural influences.

Ismail received her Ph.D. from the Near Eastern Department of the Johns Hopkins University in 2009 after completing her undergraduate studies and a preliminary master’s degree in Egyptology at Helwan University in Egypt. She shares her broad knowledge of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world up to medieval Islam as a visiting lecturer in Art and Art History at Washington College. She curated the exhibition “For Now and Forever: Funerary Artifacts from Ancient Egypt” in the Kohl Gallery last fall.

The April 18 lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the William James Forum, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of Philosophy and Religion. For more information, visit http://art.washcoll.edu/.

Pulitzer-Winning Biographer Explores Video Image of Reagans for Next "American Pictures" Event

CHESTERTOWN, MD— Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris, acclaimed for his bestselling books on Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, will take the stage on Saturday, April 21 in the next installment of the 2012 “American Pictures” series at the Smithsonian. Morris will offer a provocative take on Reagan through a close look at a short video sequence of the president’s visit to a German concentration camp. The footage helped inspire his 1999 biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

A joint program of Washington College, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the “American Pictures” series offers a highly original approach to art, pairing great works with leading figures of contemporary American culture. Each talk features an eminent writer, artist, critic or historian who chooses a single favorite image to explore, revealing how artworks reflect American identity and inspire creativity in many different fields.

One of America’s most celebrated biographers, Edmund Morris spent 14 years working on a one-volume life of Reagan, with extensive cooperation from the president during and after his time in the White House. The resulting book, an innovative and controversial blend of research and fiction, has been compared to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Reagan’s visit to Bergen-Belsen took place during a controversial 1985 trip to Germany, in the course of which he also laid a wreath at a military cemetery where members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS were buried. In the brief video clip that Morris will examine, taken from an NBC News report, the president and his wife, Nancy, tour a museum at the former concentration camp and come face-to-face with historic images of the Holocaust.

Morris won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first installment in what has become the definitive three-volume biography of the 26th President. The second volume of the trilogy, Theodore Rex, followed in 2001 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. The third, the New York Times bestseller Colonel Roosevelt, was published in 2010. Morris’s next book, The Bumstitch and Other Essays, 1972-2012, will be published by Random House in 2012.

All “American Pictures” events take place at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, located at 8th and G Streets, N.W., in Washington, D.C. Morris’s talk will begin at 2 p.m. in the museums’ Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. Free tickets are available beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the G Street lobby information desk on a first-come, first-served basis. No reservations are necessary for the general public.

This spring's all-star line-up features four of America’s most celebrated and multi-talented writers: Morris; renowned illustrator and writer Maira Kalman (who appeared on March 24); journalist, travel writer and historian Tony Horwitz (who spoke on April 7); and memoirist, novelist, and musician James McBride, who will conclude the series on May 12. The series director is historian Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of Washington College may reserve tickets to American Pictures events on a first-come, first-served basis. The Starr Center will also run free buses from Chestertown to Washington for each talk. Buses will depart at 10:30 a.m. and leave D.C. for the return trip at 7:30 pm. For details or to make a reservation, please call 410-810-7165 or e-mail lkitz2@washcoll.edu. For more information, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

About the Sponsors

Founded in 1782 under the personal patronage of its namesake, Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland upholds a tradition of excellence and innovation in the liberal arts. The American Pictures series is a project of the college’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and its Department of Art and Art History.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery tells the history of America through the individuals who have shaped its culture. Through the visual arts, performing arts and new media, the Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the American story.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation’s first collection of American art, is an unparalleled record of the American experience. The collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people from the colonial period to today.