Each year, the Center for Small Town Jewish Life hosts a lecture that showcases the most innovative and compelling Jewish voices in the world today. Endowed by the Lipman Family, this distinguished lecture brings renowned Jewish thinkers to Waterville. It has attracted a variety of important speakers to Colby since 1979, including Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel (1986), Israeli author Etgar Keret (2013), and Pulitzer Prize winning  journalist Jodi Kantor. 

Lipman Lecture with Dara Horn 
Thursday, April 3, 7 p.m.
Ostrove Auditorium

Dara Horn will deliver the 2025 Lipman Lecture on Thursday, April 3 at 7 p.m. in Ostrove auditorium. 

About Dara Horn:

Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews (Norton 2021). 

One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the JW Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s Best 25 Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into 11 languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet. 

Horn received her doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from Harvard University. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and has held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel, and Australia. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.

  • 2023-24 — Joey Soloway, producer, director, writer, and creator of the award-winning series Transparent (April 2024) 
  • 2022-23 — Jodi Kantor, “A Behind the Scenes Look at Investigative Journalism” (March 2023)
  • 2021-22 — Ariel Levy, “The Jewish Voice” (April 2022)
  • 2018-19 — Masha Gessen, “Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region” (Oct 2018)

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