One hundred years ago, Tel Aviv was founded on the sandy outskirts of the ancient port of Jaffa. Today, after a merger with Jaffa in 1950, it is Israel’s economic hub, cultural capital and popular tourist destination whose White City, the world’s largest concentration of modernist buildings, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.
To mark the city’s centenary, York has invited two scholars – Barbara Mann and Maoz Azaryahu – to give this year’s Wolinsky Lectures on the theme From Sand Dunes to Skyscrapers: Tel Aviv at 100. They will speak May 10 at 2pm in N109 Executive Learning Centre, Schulich School of Business.
Mann, the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (2006), will speak about “Tel Aviv, Holy City”. Azaryahu, the author of Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2006), will give a lecture, “Tel Aviv Remembers”.
Mann is a professor of Jewish literature and serves as the Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Her areas of expertise include Israeli 
and Jewish literature, cultural studies, modern poetry, urban studies, literary modernism and fine arts. She is currently writing a book about conceptions of space and place in modern Jewish studies. She is co-editor-in-chief of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
Azaryahu is a professor of cultural geography at the University of Haifa in Israel. His research focuses on the cultural and historical geographies of national myths and public memory in Israel and in Germany, landscapes of popular culture, the politics of street names and the cultural history of places and landscapes.
The Leonard Wolinsky Lectures on Jewish Life and Education are sponsored by the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York and the University’s Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Education.
RSVP by calling 416-736-5823 or by e-mailing cjs@yorku.ca.