CANCELED: Fordham-NYPL Lecture Series in Jewish Studies: ‘Life Is an Eternal Now’

The latest in the Fordham–NYPL Lecture Series features “Life Is an Eternal ‘Now’: Marija Gimbutas, World War II, and the Returns of Lithuanian History.”

Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) was an influential Lithuanian archaeologist and theorist of Neolithic European religion who taught at Radcliffe and UCLA after arriving in the United States in 1949.

This talk will explore Gimbustas’ formation in Europe among ethnographers and romantic nationalists who envisioned—and briefly achieved—an ethno-state during World War II, when around 95% of Lithuania’s large and long-standing Jewish population was killed. Connecting the various strands of her thought and activism, Michael Casper, Ph.D., will show how Jewish history and the Holocaust factored into Gimbutas’s influential theories about the Indo-Europeans and religion, and why, for her and other Lithuanian émigrés, the ancient past was more accessible than the Lithuania they left behind.