Grapevine: Good Fellows

THE HEBREW University has been blessed with an extraordinary array of world-class academics, several of whom last week attended a dinner dedicated to the university at the David Citadel Hotel.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Hebrew U 370 (photo credit: Courtesy of the Hebrew University)
Hebrew U 370
(photo credit: Courtesy of the Hebrew University)
Two recipients of honorary fellowships at last week’s meeting of the International Council of the Israel Museum have a close connection with the museum’s photography department, specifically with its longtime curator Nissan Perez.
Gérard Lévy (France) and Shalom Shpilman (Israel) were named fellows at the beginning of June, and Perez, who has been with the Israel Museum for 40 years, retires at the end of June – after curating almost 180 exhibitions and obtaining 55,000 photographic works for the museum’s collection. His swan song as a curator is the museum’s current photography exhibition, “Displaced Visions: Émigré Photographers of the 20th Century.”
Lévy, a world expert in 19th-century photography, has been a loyal friend and benefactor of the museum’s for decades and, together with Perez, instrumental in the founding of the photography department in 1979. The museum awards the Gérard Lévy Prize for a Young Photographer every two years.
Tel Aviv businessman and philanthropist Shpilman became a museum friend and benefactor only as recently as 2010, but has already made an impact through the inauguration of the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography and the Shpilman Institute for Photography.
IN OTHER museum news, ambassador Dennis Ross – a former US envoy to the Middle East, and current counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – was in Jerusalem last week on one of his frequent visits to Israel. He made a point of visiting the Israel Museum to see the much vaunted exhibition, “Herod the Great: The King's Final Journey.” Ross was accompanied by museum chairman Isaac Molho and guided by exhibition co-curator David Mevorah, who was delighted when Ross pronounced himself to be thoroughly impressed.
THE HEBREW University has been blessed with an extraordinary array of world-class academics, several of whom last week attended a dinner dedicated to the university at the David Citadel Hotel.
Among them were Nobel Prize and Israel Prize laureate Robert Aumann, a mathematician famous for his Game Theory analysis; physicist Hanoch Gutfreund, the university’s president emeritus and responsible for the intellectual property of Albert Einstein at the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem; and economist and Israel Prize laureate Menahem Yaari, a past president of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities. All three participated in a conference held at the hotel. Had the dinner been held on Saturday night, everyone present could have joined Aumann in celebrating his 83rd birthday.
SOUTH AFRICAN-born journalist Benjamin Pogrund was last month the recipient of the International Media’s Life Achievement Award. It was bestowed in recognition of his anti-apartheid writing while in South Africa, and his efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians together since moving to Jerusalem with his wife Anne, an artist, in 1997.
Pogrund was the founding director of Yakar’s Center for Social Concern, which promoted dialogue among people of conflicting politics and ideologies. While in South Africa, he was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, which was closed down in 1985 because of its stand against apartheid.
Pogrund, who had reported on some of the worst incidents of racial persecution in South Africa, for which he had been put on trial several times and imprisoned once, subsequently moved to Britain. There, he was appointed chief foreign sub-editor of The Independent, and he later became editor of the World Paper in Boston.
Pogrund has authored three books: about Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, and the press under apartheid, and is co-editor of Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue.
He is currently writing a book under the title, “Is Israel the New Apartheid?” He has written articles stating that although Israel has moved to the Right, his experience in South Africa tells him that Israel is not an apartheid state.
He also contributes to The Guardian and other publications.
The awards ceremony was held in London.