Context & Conversation: Ragtime

Thursday, May 10, 7 to 9pm: Context & Conversation: Ragtime

This season’s final Context & Conversation will look at Ragtime through the lens of the 2017-18 season’s theme, “The American Dream, Then and Now,” with a panel that includes artists, scholars, and community practitioners from each of our previous C&C conversations, along with Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman of Temple Beth-El, this month’s hosting organization. In its evocation of the way that American lives diverge and differentiate due to race, gender, class, religion, and country of origin; in its gathering of diverse characters whose American lives interconnect only intermittently, accidentally, and in crisis; in its depiction of a world in which the connective threads of shared faith and family have been severed and replaced by the worship and pursuit of celebrity, Ragtime is no sepia-toned view of a vanished world. Instead, it offers us a look at ourselves, our moment, and the long roots of our civic schisms, as well as our attempts to bridge them, as individuals and as a nation.  Join us for a conversation about immigration, integration, individuality, and whether we will ever be a nation that is “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Takes place at Temple Beth-El, 70 Orchard Avenue in Providence.

In conversation with Rabbi Howard and previous guests at Context & Conversation from all season. Speakers include: Mike Araujo and Erica Hammond from Jobs with Justice (Fall Rep), Rachel Playe, Touba Ghadessi and Sophia Academy student Ashley Ogoffa.