Brooklyn College

Sabbath Queen Film Screening and Q&A
2026-04-13 10:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Library, Room 150, Woody Tanger Auditorium
At this screening of Sabbath Queen, we will be joined by the film’s director and producer, Sandi DuBowski, and the star of the film, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie. Following the screening there will be an hour-long Q&A between DuBowski, Lau-Lavie, and the audience.
Filmed over 21 years, Sabbath Queen follows Lau-Lavie, the heir to 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis, as he navigates his legacy while becoming a drag performer, queer father, and founder of Lab/Shul. This film captures Rabbi Amichai on a journey to rethink Jewish ritual, challenge patriarchy, support interfaith connection, and explore what Jewish survival means in the 21st century.

Art in Civil Disobedience: In Dialogue With Alan Pelaez Lopez—Artist Talk and Writing Workshop
2026-04-16 13:30 - 15:30
Visual poet, artist, and cultural critic Alan Pelaez Lopez will share their experience as an undocumented Black queer organizer in the migrant justice movement. This talk will feature Lopez’s own contributions to social movements while also highlighting five other artists.
Through collage, installation, and intervention art, Lopez’s work explores erased histories of African diasporic resistance, Indigenous disappearances, and reimagined futures of Black Latin American life. Lopez’s writing has appeared in The Architectural Review, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, and The Nation.
This event is in collaboration with CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium and CUNY Undocumented and Immigrant Student programs. It follows the monthly LGBTQIA+ Book Club and will feature an artist talk and writing workshop with Lopez.

Who Decides Who Belongs—And Who Gets Erased? A Discussion on Housing and Belonging With Filmmaker Derrick Benton and Sociologist Jerome Krase
2026-04-21 11:00 - 12:15
Filmmaker Derrick Benton explores the politics of belonging through the lens of his documentary The House That Love Built. Beginning with his family’s story in 1980s Brooklyn, Benton traces how housing policy, administrative systems, and everyday bureaucracy shape not only where people live, but whether they are recognized as fully human within civic life and how narratives are constructed, who controls them, and what it means to reclaim authorship over one’s own history.
Derrick Benton is a Brooklyn-born filmmaker and writer whose work spans documentary and narrative film. He is the founder of F.R.E.E. Studios (Filming Real Emotional Experiences), a production studio dedicated to community-rooted storytelling and cultural critique. His films explore memory, identity, and the ways institutions shape lived experience. Alongside his film work, Derrick publishes essays on power, belonging, and media through The Stooop.
Jerome Krase, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and the Murray Koppelman Professor at Brooklyn College, is an activist-scholar who works with public and private agencies regarding urban community issues. His self- and co-authored books include Self and Community in the City (1982), Ethnicity and Machine Politics (1992), Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society (1994), Race and Ethnicity in New York City (2005) Ethnic Landscapes in an Urban World (2006), Seeing Cities Change: Local Culture and Class (2012), Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn (2016), COVID-19 in Brooklyn (2022), and forthcoming Local and Global Impacts of the War in Ukraine. He co-edits Urbanities and serves on the editorial boards of Visual Studies and the Journal of Video Ethnography. Krase has twice served a Fulbright Specialist, is an officer of ProBonoDesign Inc, and active in many American, European, and international sociological associations, the Commission on Urban Anthropology, American Italian Historical Association, International Urban Symposium, H-NET Humanities on Line, International Visual Sociology Association, Polish American Historical Association, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, and the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where he currently serves as president.
Sponsored by the departments of Sociology, Political Science, and Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies; the Program in Urban Sustainability; and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College.
