Paul Goedeke | Student Life

Steven Galloway discusses his novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, during an Assembly Series lecture in College Hall Monday evening.

Galloway discussed the significance of art, both visual and aural, as evidence of humanity in times of violent upheaval, and said that even though an entire nation’s infrastructure can collapse in a few fleeting moments, art is more permanent.

“Art is indestructible,” he said.

Six large, framed photographs of Sarajevo taken during the Bosnian War lined the entrance to the hall, depicting scenes directly described in the novel. The images, donated by photographer Roger Richards, showed contrasts between everyday life and war. They included laundry hanging across bullet hole-ridden windows and a woman sprinting across a street to avoid being shot by a sniper.

Galloway opened his speech by describing the photo of cellist Vedran Smailovic that inspired him to write the book.

According to Galloway, regardless of where a war is fought, the individual stories behind every casualty deserve just as much painstaking attention as the most masterfully played cello concerto.

Although Galloway resided in Canada on Sept. 11, 2001, he said the attacks still hit close to home. He criticized contemporary pro-war/antiwar debates for generally overlooking the fact that those who die in war are ordinary, common people.

“In contemporary warfare, the vast majority—90-95 percent of the casualties—are civilians,” he said.

Galloway said that he used his novel to describe the small, sometimes mundane, details of daily life during war.

According to Galloway, Sarajevan reactions to his novel have been mixed. While some survivors of the war have criticized him for writing a story about a war that he did not experience, others were relieved to see their stories reach such a wide audience.

Attendees thought the novel was an appropriate choice for the Freshman Reading Program.

“I really liked it. It was a good book that you can get a lot out of,” freshman Lauren Trusheim said.

Trusheim had previously discussed the book with peers on her freshman floor and in her freshman seminar “What is Art?”

Freshmen, who were required to read the book, upperclassmen, faculty members from a wide range of departments, members of the St. Louis community and alumni attended the speech.

The book’s narrative will have a continued presence at the University throughout the semester. In early December, Washington University Dance Theatre is performing a modern dance work inspired by the image of Smailovic playing the cello amidst Sarajevo’s ruins.

Cecil Slaughter, senior lecturer in dance and the choreographer of the piece, said that the dance is about human nature and how people react in times of crisis.

The dance will be set to Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” which was famously played by Smailovic and was an inspiration for Galloway as he wrote his book.

Matt Mitgang | Student Life

Student Union treasurers cast their votes to fund the College Democrat’s appeal to bring Vice President Al Gore to campus in the spring. The total cost of the appeal was $92,350.

Student reactions to the decision are mixed.

The vote in favor of funding Gore for that amount was 12-1 with two abstaining due to conflicts of interest. All voting members were in favor of bringing Gore to campus, but one member was in favor of allocating more money.

Pending final contracts being signed, Gore is expected to come to campus this spring.

Sophomore Elizabeth Peters said that while she’d be happy to attend Gore’s speech, she doubts the College Democrats will be able to coordinate the event to fit his schedule.

“I’d definitely go because I like his government policy talks, [but] I’ll be incredibly impressed if it actually goes through,” Peters said.

Of the 263 people SU surveyed in the DUC Monday, 162 students voted in favor of bringing Gore to campus.

Some students said that they are happy that a well-known speaker is coming to campus, but not necessarily happy that it is Gore.

“I’m kind of a skeptic of global warming and his agenda for different reasons. But he’s a big name and I think that’s good for the University,” freshman Michael Kruse said.

Others said they’re excited to hear Gore speak, as long as his lecture isn’t just a rehashing of “An Inconvenient Truth”—his Academy Award-winning film from 2006.

“I’m really excited about it,” sophomore Andrew Ridker said. “I’m excited for both the political and environmental perspectives he can bring—it’s kind of getting an all-in-one.”

Leaders of the College Democrats said that the former Vice President, Academy Award Winner and Nobel Peace Prize recipient would be an ideal speaker, appealing to a diverse audience by splitting his discussion between government and sustainability.

Students at the SU Treasury meeting generally spoke in favor of funding his speech, even while some disagreed with his political views.

“I also support this—even though I’m not the biggest fan of the guy,” said junior Joel Yambert, president of the College Republicans. “I think that this will bring a big social and political group of people…and I feel like it’s a great effort.”

The event, originally costing $149,850, was presented to SU Treasury at a reduced cost by negotiating the cost of Gore’s honorarium and obtaining funding from the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, the Gephardt Institute, CS40 and the Department of Political Science.

The final cost of Gore’s honorarium was $110,000, which covers both his flights and his speech.

College Democrats ultimately appealed for $94,350, all of which was funded except for the $2,000 reception planned to follow his speech.

At the meeting, SU Treasury also allocated money to bring four small-cost speakers to the University.

Gore was the only “big speaker” on the docket. Asian Multicultural Council dropped its appeal to bring author and journalist Fareed Zakaria to the University earlier this week.

“After writing the presentation [for SU], our group realized Fareed Zakaria wasn’t exactly what the Asian Multicultural Council wanted to push for this year,” speaker for the group, David Yang, said. “It was a very sudden drop; we spent pretty much three to five hours writing the appeal, and then we were like—wait, this doesn’t make sense.”

The group joined the Korean Students Association in presenting its appeal to fund a speech by Daphne Kwok, an advisor to President Barack Obama.

SU Treasury funded their appeal for $2,021. Treasury also allocated funds to GlobeMed for Dr. Joia Mukherjee, Engineers Without Borders for TV personality Deanne Bell and Reflections for motivational speaker Jess Weiner.

Those groups were allocated $10,721, $8,150 and $6,727, respectively. Alpha Epsilon Delta, the pre-medical honorary society, was allocated $100 to hold a student discussion with Dr. Arthur Kleinman, who is coming as part of the University’s Assembly Series.

SU Treasury has more than $300,000 that it can spend on bringing proposed speakers including Al Gore, Fareed Zakaria, John Legend and Garry Kasparov to campus.

Voting on big and small-cost speakers will take place at SU Treasury’s weekly meeting on Sept. 13. The group will vote on medium-cost speakers—those costing between $20,000 and $75,000—at its meeting on the 20th.

Collectively, groups are appealing for a total of nearly $800,000.

SU Treasury will be collecting student input on the appeals by emailing a survey and tabling at the DUC.

“It looks like a good possible lineup,” Speaker of the Treasury, Julian Nicks, said. “What I really enjoy is we have a lot more smaller groups…appealing for speakers.”

In addition to an unusually lengthy docket of appeals, Treasury is also seeing larger appeals than in the past.

The College Democrats will be appealing for almost $145,000 to pay Al Gore to speak on campus. That is equal to the amount used to fund the eight main speakers last year, including news anchor Soledad O’Brien, PostSecret founder Frank Warren, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and journalist Nicholas Kristof.

If passed, it would be SU Treasury’s first time allocating more than $100,000 toward one speaker. Last year, it rejected the College Democrats’ appeal for $127,000 to bring TV comedy personality Bill Maher to campus.

This year’s Student Union executive slate allocated $115,000 to a big speaker account in hopes that SU Treasury would fund one expensive speaker this year.

College Democrats President Sherveen Mashayekhi said the group chose Al Gore because of his qualifications and ability to draw a large number of students. The group estimates that more than 1400 members of the community would attend.

“I think he’ll really speak to a very large audience…both to the political community and the environmental community at Wash. U.,” Mashayekhi said. “We are working with a bunch of campus partners and we’ve had really great feedback.”

The Asian Multicultural Council is also appealing for the money in the big speaker account to bring journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria to campus.
For around $92,000, the group believes Zakaria would draw a crowd of around 800.

According to Nicks, the big speaker account is not the only change this year, Treasury is also putting pressure on student groups to appeal for funding early.
By encouraging groups wanting more than $15,000 for speakers to apply over the summer, Nicks said Treasury should be able to manage a more diverse Speaker Series, avoiding last-minute debacles like funding Bristol Palin last year.

Other significant-cost speaker appeals include those to fund chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov for $72,400, musician John Legend for $69,493, journalist David Brooks for $60,000 and neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta for $57,300.

Pending SU Treasury funding, the speakers will be coming to campus this spring.

The main focus of this fall’s assembly series is the human spirit.

Although there aren’t any big name speakers in this year’s schedule, organizers are happy with the Assembly Series Committee’s selections, Director of Assembly Series and Special Projects Barbara Rea said.

“I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve found that the most interesting speakers—and the ones I would encourage students to hear—are the ones you know nothing about,” Rea said.

The series will touch on a number of controversial topics. A 9/11 memorial panel will focus on the struggle between national security and American civil liberties. Journalist E.J. Dionne and political scientist Robert Putnam will discuss religious freedom, the state of religion in American politics.

Steven Galloway, author of the “The Cellist of Sarajevo,” the 2011 First Year Reading Program novel, will also be speaking.

According to Alicia Schnell, project coordinator for the vice chancellor of students, the First Year Reading Program always partners with the Assembly Series to bring in speakers relevant to the year’s reading selection.

“We chose to invite Steven Galloway as we thought he’d resonate well with students,” she said. “He’s a fairly young writer and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.”

Schnell sees it as a great opportunity for the freshmen, who will be able to participate in a question and answer session with the author during his speech.

Freshmen are excited to hear the author speak firsthand.

“The book was very good,” freshman Elan Baskir said. “But listening to the author speak will give well-needed insight and background to the story that was told in the book.”

While the event is directed toward freshmen, both Schnell and Rea believe the audience will include upperclassmen and faculty members who have read and enjoyed the book.

According to Rea, Galloway’s book embodies the central theme of this fall’s series.

“It’s about people who are individually doing their part to make a difference in the world,” she said.

Rea mentioned that two other speakers in the series—Jeremy Courtney and Ellen Gustafson—particularly embody this.

Courtney is the founder of the Preemptive Love Coalition, which provides life-saving surgery for Iraqi children suffering from congenital heart defects, often as a result of Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare campaign.

“We wanted to highlight his efforts and raise awareness of the Skandalaris Center’s support of social entrepreneurship,” Rosemary Gliedt, manager for the Center, said. “We want to support the Assembly Series in their efforts to bring speakers of this caliber to campus.”

Gustafson, a philanthropist and entrepreneur who has worked with the United Nation’s World Food Program, is most known for her company FEED Project, which she co-founded with Laura Bush, George W. Bush’s niece. The company works with humanitarian organizations like UNICEF to provide hunger relief, selling $60 “FEED bags” that have enough food for an entire year.

Gustafson will be speaking about how she thinks issues like obesity and hunger can be solved.

Comic-strip artist Jorge Cham will attend a screening of a movie based off his popular online comic strips, which depict the lives of graduate students.

There will also be a tribute to esteemed playwright Tennessee Williams to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his matriculation at Washington University.

John Hergenroeder | Student Life

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, addresses the Washington University community in a mostly filled Graham Chapel on Friday evening. Wales delivered the keynote address of the Global Leadership Conference, a speech that was also part of the Assembly Series.

“I’m basically some guy on the Internet who spent the whole day today completely geeking out in my hotel room editing Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales said to open his address. He launched the online encyclopedia in 2001 along with co-founder Larry Sanger.

Wales’ speech, titled “Democracy and the Internet,” began with an explanation of Wikipedia’s mission of spreading the sum of human knowledge worldwide.

The remainder of the speech addressed how Wikipedia developed into the fifth most visited site in the U.S. from a humorous angle. Wales addressed a mostly full Graham Chapel on Friday evening in a speech that was also part of the Assembly Series.

The site currently offers more than 16 million articles in more than 270 languages. Posts in English account for more than 3.5 million articles, and more than a million posts have also been created in French and German. The encyclopedia receives more than 408 million unique visits a month, according to comScore, a company that monitors internet traffic.

“Wikipedia tends to be very similar in all of the languages. There is a certain geek culture that transcends national culture, so we are really strong in ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ everywhere in the world,” Wales said. “Things that geeky, smart people are into tend to be very well covered.”

Initial studies into the workings of the encyclopedia revealed that popular culture, geography, sex and local news are the most researched topics on Wikipedia.

“The Germans are the most interested in geography. Just saying,” Wales said. “Sex is in the top topics in every language here except for in French and Spanish, and I thought this was kind of puzzling until someone explained to me that it’s because the French and Spanish are actually having sex, and everyone else is just reading about it.”

The world’s most popular encyclopedia is written and edited by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide while internal operations of the site are managed by around 70 employees that staff the Wikimedia Foundation’s office. The nonprofit foundation is set to open a second office in India to assist users in developing posts for the various languages spoken there.

The editors of Wikipedia are 87 percent male and have an average age of 26, both of which Wales acknowledged were an area of concern.

“There are barriers to editing Wikipedia that exclude not just women but exclude all kinds of people who are not as tech savvy,” Wales said. “We are plagued a little bit with young males sort of hollering at each other, but we do try to have a very friendly, welcoming culture….Wikipedia is written in a very authoritative style, and men have no problem speaking in an authoritative style about things they know nothing about.”

Toward the end of the speech, Wales addressed the growing role of Wikipedia as a news source.

“[For] people today who are coming up in the next generation, Wikipedia is going to be something that is always there and is the default standard way we go to get information. That means that we have an enormous responsibility at Wikipedia within our community to be open, to be transparent, to be accountable, and above all, to be very high quality, to be as good as we possibly can be,” he said.

In order to ensure this quality, volunteers filter through posts to identify any unsubstantiated information.

The website is rarely asked to censor any of its content, according to Wales, though the site has been completely blocked in China three times since 2004. The Chinese government currently blocks posts to issues that it deems controversial to the regime, such as Taiwanese independence and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize by Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist who has called for a transition to democracy.

Wales sees Wikipedia as a portal for collecting verifiable information, and he sees a need for future collaboration between professional journalists and Wikipedians as society shifts to online news markets. Wikipedia currently receives more visits per month than readers of the world’s 20 most popular newspapers combined.

Wales, 44, received a bachelor’s degree in finance from Auburn University and enrolled in two Ph.D. programs but never finished his dissertation. He previously worked as a financial trader before making the transition to website development.

His first project, Bomis.com, launched in 1996 and became a search engine frequented by male users to search for “adult material.” Wales then launched Nupedia, an encyclopedia with articles written by professionals, before launching Wikipedia in 2001. Wikipedia was first managed through Bomis but has been run by the Wikimedia Foundation since 2003.

As Wikipedia continues to grow, the site hopes to reach more than a billion people per year and hopes that it is used more in developing markets like China, where “Wikipedia” may be more well known for being listed as an ingredient on translated Chinese menus in Beijing than as a source of information.

“We think they just had somebody translating who just said, ‘How do we such and such in English?’ Look at Wikipedia,” Wales said. “Even if we may not ever make it into the top 10 of websites in China, maybe we do have a business model there. Maybe we should open a restaurant.”

Josh Goldman | Student Life

Dan Senor, co-author of the bestseller “Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” addresses the Washington University community Thursday in Graham Chapel. Senor spoke about the paradox of Israel’s prosperity despite the many obstacles it has faced.

Dan Senor, co-author of the bestseller “Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle” and adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke Thursday in Graham Chapel.

Senor explained Israel’s unique culture and dedication to leadership, innovation and determination. He argued that these qualities contributed to Israel’s economic success in entrepreneurship and innovation.

The paradox, explained Senor, is that Israel was able to achieve economic prosperity in spite of the many obstacles it faced.

“This is a country surrounded by adversaries, basically in a state of war since it’s been founded, with barely any natural resources, isolated in its region, a little [more than] 60 years old and smaller than the state of New Jersey,” Senor said.

With so little to work with, Senor said that Israel was forced to resort to an export economy, which is hard to do when 21 of the 23 nations in its vicinity boycott its economy.

Israel has almost no access to the market and investment capital of the oil-rich Arab world.

Despite these challenges, Israel has more companies in NASDAQ than all of Europe combined and ranks third after the U.S. and China. In 2008, it had more than twice the global venture capital of the U.S., 30 times that of Europe and 80 times that of China.

Senor explained that true economic growth is achieved through constant innovation, something that is impossible without the constant activity of small enterprises, including entrepreneurs, small companies and start-up companies.

“So staring at us is this model of a country whose economy is driven almost exclusively by small companies and start-ups, with the largest per capita start-up in the world,” Senor said. “The question becomes, is there anything in the Israeli experience that we in the West can learn from?”

Senor also cited the important role of the immigrant in the growing Israeli economy.

Israel, explained Senor, is a land of immigrants. More than 70 nationalities are represented there, and two out of three Israelis are an immigrant or the child or grandchild of an immigrant.

“When you’re a country that’s so dependent on exports, having connectivity to all these networks around the world, with all these people on top of each other in an economic cluster—it’s like a turbo-charge to the economy,” Senor said.

Senor added that many of the economic success stories coming out of Israel started with an immigrant entrepreneur.

Senor also explained the role of the military in Israel’s economic success. Almost every Israeli goes through military training. Senor said that the leadership training experience that these young Israelis get while in the Israel Defense Forces is crucial to their later success in the business world.

The mentality in the military, and in the country itself, is never to let obstacles stand in your way and to try every solution possible, according to Senor.

“Their innovation comes from this uninhibited culture of problem-solving,” Senor said.

He gave the example of a coffee shop in Israel where a friend stops every morning, even though that shop had been blown up twice by suicide bombers in the past.

“When you wake up in the morning and don’t know if you’ll make it out of the coffee shop alive, you have a completely different perspective when it comes to economic obstacles,” Senor said.

The event was organized by Washington University Students for Israel and co-sponsored by Jewish Student Union, Chabad Student Association, St. Louis Hillel at Washington University, Delta Sigma Pi, the Olin Business School and groups from greater St. Louis.

In the Assembly Series lecture, Kristof called on his audience, men and women alike, to join in fighting discrimination against women by getting out of their comfort zones.

“If only women are involved, then it is merely a marginalized struggle of the society,” Kristof said.

The New York Times writer came to campus to promote his book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” which addresses the atrocities of social discrimination faced by women in underdeveloped countries such as India, Cambodia and Pakistan.

Kristof started his lecture by talking about how the idea for the book came to him and his wife and co-author, Sheryl WuDunn, when they visited China and noticed young girls dropping out of school.

Kristof discussed human trafficking, which, according to him, is one of the worst forms of “gendercide” and a form of 21st century slavery.

“More girls are killed in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all genocides of the 20th century,” Kristof said.

Kristof showed the audience pictures of women who were tricked or forced into prostitution, revealing the worlds these women have to face every day. He recalled a time when he saved a girl’s life by buying her from her pimp and got a receipt for it.

“When you get a receipt for buying a human in the 21st century, that should just be a shame on us all,” he said.

Kristof also touched on women’s health issues, citing examples of girls in Ethiopia who suffer from malnutrition while the male members in their families are in perfect health.

He told the story of a malnourished teenage girl named Mahabouba, who suffered a fistula while trying to give birth to her child but could not as a result of her underdeveloped pelvis, a common occurrence among girls in Ethiopia.

Kristof closed by discussing the measures taken in many places to ensure safety and health benefits for women. Kristof told the audience about medical reforms in Africa and about how women can be provided with microfinancing to start small businesses. Many of the women whose stories he told, such as Mahabouba from Ethiopia and Beatrice from Uganda, changed their lives because of their own determination and courage.

“Very modest amounts of money will help. People can transform the lives of people like Beatrice,” he said. “There is a way for people in St. Louis to make a real meaningful difference around the world.”

Kristof’s book is currently included as reading material for the Introduction to Women and Gender Studies class in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department in Arts & Sciences. Students in the class responded positively to the presentation.

“The lecture was really good,” sophomore Ambica Sastry said. “A lot of the things that [Kristof] mentioned are from the book, but he supplemented the book more when he talked about his own personal experiences. That just gave a whole new dimension to the reading.”

Many students commented that the lecture brought forward previously-unknown information about human trafficking.

“The book opened my eyes to a huge problem in the world that’s not mentioned much in politics or media,” sophomore Sonya Rich said.

As a result of his work, Kristof’s travels have taken him around the world.

“Confusing, embarrassing experiences change our perspective and make us better human beings,” Kristof said. “I am just blown away by what I see.”

The George Warren Brown School of Social Work, the School of Law, the Association of Women Faculty, the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, GlobeMed and Student Union co-sponsored Kristof’s lecture.

With additional reporting by Perry Stein.

Matthew Bishop
Philanthrocapitalism
Thursday, September 16 at 6p.m. May Auditorium (Simon Hall)
Bishop is the Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist magazine. He will address the rising trend of “mega giving” among the world’s largest businesses and wealthiest billionaires.

Kevin Washburn
Improving Criminal Justice for American Indians
Thursday, September 23 at 12p.m. Anheuser-Busch Hall, trial courtroom #309
Washburn is the dean of the New Mexico School of Law and is on the General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. Among his many groundbreaking accomplishments, while visiting at Harvard University Law School, Washburn taught the first class on gaming law in the school’s history.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Reading and Commentary
Thursday, September 30 at 7p.m. Steinberg Auditorium (Steinberg Hall)
Mentored by Joyce Carole Oates while studying at Princeton, Foer turned his senior thesis into his first critically acclaimed novel, “Everything is Illuminated.”

Nicholas Kristof
Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Monday, October 4 at 4p.m. Graham Chapel
Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his writing on human rights violations. On his blog, Kristof wrote that during his travels he has had “unpleasant experiences with malaria, war, an Indonesian mob carrying heads on pikes, and an African airplane crash.”

Cynthia Enlow
Spencer T. Olin Fellows Lecture
Friday, October 8 at 4p.m. Steinberg Auditorium (Steinberg Hall)
Enlow was awarded the Susan Strange Award by the International Studies Association in 2007. Her lecture will focus on the effects of globalization on women.

Adam Ross
Reading and Commentary
Tuesday, October 19 at 7p.m. Women’s Building Formal Lounge
A graduate of Wash. U.’s MFA creative writing program, Ross’s first novel, Mr. Peanut, was #1 on the Huffington Post’s “Best summer reading” list.

Colette Avital
Sponsored by the Students for a Peaceful Palestinian and Israeli Future
Friday, October 22 at 11a.m. Location TBA
Avital was the deputy speaker for the Knesset as well as the former Israeli ambassador. Avital’s specialties include international ethics, foreign relations, women’s issues and immigration.

Mott Greene
Alfred Wegener and The Origins of Modern Earth Science in the Theory of Continental Drift
Wednesday, November 3 at 4 p.m. Location TBA
Science historian Mott Greene’s accolades include a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and the 1996 Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year. Greene will speak about the work of earth scientist Alfred Wegener.

Marianne Hirsch
Holocaust Memorial Lecture
Monday, November 8 at 4p.m. Graham Chapel
A professor of English and Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Institute of Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, Hirsch’s studies cover an integration of feminist studies, memory, literary theory and the Holocaust.

Jonathan Zimmerman
Beyond Bedrooms and Borders: What a Historian of American Sex Education Learned by Looking Overseas
Thursday, November 11 at 5p.m. Women’s Building Formal Lounge
As debates over what should be taught with regard to religion, sex and evolution continually pervade our society, Zimmerman, a distinguished professor at NYU, argues that all sides of these cultural issues should be covered in the classroom.

Mia Farrow
Elliott Stein Lecture in Ethics
Wednesday, November 17 at 12p.m. Graham Chapel
Often known for her Golden Globe award-winning acting and past relationships with Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen, Farrow has also done major humanitarian work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

Van Jones
Beyond Green Jobs: The Next American Economy
Tuesday, November 30 at 12p.m. Graham Chapel
Activist Van Jones has been highly influential in various causes, from human and civil rights to environmentalism. His resume includes co-founding three non-profit organizations and serving as Special Advisor for Green Jobs for President Obama.

Matt Mitgang | Student Life

Before performing on campus Thursday afternoon, Matisyahu chatted with students in the DUC courtyard.

Matt Mitgang | Student Life

In an acoustic session in Graham Chapel, the musician performed with guitarist and WU alum Adam Weinberg. He also answered the audience’s questions in a lively question-and-answer session.

With his hands resting on his legs while sitting onstage in a high-set chair, Matisyahu commanded his quietly captivated listeners Thursday with the performance of three serenely delivered acoustic songs in a blend of words, hums, beatboxing and other sounds.

At times his legs were slightly crossed, rocking to the rhythm; his hands may have moved to grasp the edge of his seat. But one thing remained constant: He kept his eyes closed throughout the performance.

He was accompanied on guitar by Adam Weinberg, the Washington University graduate who first introduced the campus to the Jewish artist more than six years ago.

The first song he performed on Thursday does not appear on any album and is inspired by the Jewish day of observance called Tisha B’Av, commemorating the fall of the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem.

That the song’s religious context likely escaped most of the listeners who filled Graham Chapel did not prevent them from appreciating Matisyahu’s music.

“Matisyahu is an artist I respect for his integration of his personal values and talent in the mainstream industry,” sophomore Anthonia Ojo said. “His songs have great lyrics, and even though they come from his religion, they can be applied to everybody.”

Ojo’s comment points to a universal quality that many have come to attach to Matisyahu’s music.

“Some of the music is clearly based on biblical or Hasidic liturgy or values, but he has the unique ability to translate that into substantive messages that resonate with a large population of areligious people,” said Hershey Novack, rabbi for Chabad on Campus. “Even as a cultural interpreter, he is unique and successful.”

Assaf Shelleg, a visiting Israeli scholar in the Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies program, also finds Matisyahu’s image unique. Shelleg provided the program’s introduction.

“Seeing him creates some sort of cognitive dissonance, because you don’t expect such an image performing this type of music,” he said.

According to Shelleg, Matisyahu is well received among religious communities in Israel—especially younger generations.

“It gives them the legitimacy of listening to something very modern and is not limited by something that they know is Jewish from the music their parents heard,” he said. “It breaches something in Judaism and kosherizes the fact that we can listen to Jamaican music or hip-hop music with kosher texts.”

Though Matisyahu is an artist with widespread international appeal, students in the audience still found him personable and took the opportunity to ask him questions during the question-and-answer part of the program.

When asked if he has ever struggled with his beliefs, Matisyahu replied, “I struggle with believing in God, because God, honestly, is invisible. It’s kind of like having a relationship with an invisible friend.”

One student also asked about his past experiences with using acid, amid much laughter from the rest of the audience. Matisyahu seemed to share their humor and told stories of his high school days and experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

“The first time I did mushrooms with my friends was 16,” he said. “I remember one experience when we were lying on this field and looking up at the sky, and I remember all of a sudden everything feeling really clear, lucid. I think it depends on the person. For me, it changed a lot of things.”

But he also pointed out the less-pleasant experiences that can come with drug experimentation, to which the student responded with a “yeah.”

“You know, obviously,” Matisyahu joked.

The atmosphere ranged from the more serious to the jovial, which surprised some students like Ojo.

“I did not expect him to have such a great sense of humor and great stories,” she said. “During his question and answer session, he was very open and honest, which I really respected and loved.”

Sophomore Josh Yudkin echoed Ojo’s impression of Matisyahu’s honesty.

“I thought it was really good,” he said. “I found it to be a very candid but…provoking performance and talk,” he said.

For Novack, Matisyahu is an example of an individual who is able to bridge religious and cultural barriers and bring people together.

“Some of his songs resonate deeply with me,” Novack said. “I think his music is incredibly potent and has a very positive effect on many, many people. That is something that can never be taken away from him.”

Check out video of his appearance here.

Matt Mitgang | Student Life

Reggae musician and Hasidic Jew Matisyahu spoke in Graham Chapel this Thursday, March 18th. He interspersed an unscripted question and answer session with acoustic performances of a number of songs, accompanied on guitar by Wash. U. alumnus Adam Weinberg.