Presented by Vered Weiss

Click here to register for this virtual Jewish Community Library event.

Vered Weiss will lead a discussion of Omer Friedlander’s short story “Scheherazade and Radio Station 97.2 FM,” which can be read online here or in Friedlander’s story collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, which is this year’s One Bay One Book selection.

In “Scheherazade and Radio Station 97.2 FM,” a trio of Israeli soldiers take refuge in the Beirut radio station they are charged with disabling during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In addition to leading a discussion, Weiss will contextualize the story through the lens of One Thousand and One Nights and folktales more broadly; the impact of the First Lebanon War on the Israeli psyche and artistic expression; and speculative literature and cinema in Israel.

Vered Weiss is the Serling Israeli Visiting Scholar and The Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at Michigan State University. She is a faculty member of the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, and teaches courses on Israeli culture and on world literature. Weiss is co-editor of Tracing Topographies: Revisiting the Concentration Camps Seventy Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz, and is currently co-editing a volume about Israeli culture and post-traumatic stress disorder. She is also working on a co-edited volume about Israeli speculative fiction.