The convergence of the art and science of dance comes alive when Cal State Northridge graduate students and faculty perform an array of choreography and dance.

“Colaboratoria: Graduate Student and Faculty Dance Concert,” sponsored by CSUN’s Department of Kinesiology, will be an evening of diverse choreographic visions and passionate dancing.

The event will take place on Monday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m. in the Plaza Del Sol Performance Hall of the University Student Union (USU). The USU is on the east side of campus located at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

The event will feature CSUN faculty and students and special guest, soprano Erika Wueschner, a rising star with the L.A. Opera, who will join Ann Baltz and dancer Lilia Kibarska to perform Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.” Percussionist John Roscigno and clarinetist Julia Heinen and dancer Lilia Karbaska will perform a contemporary work, “Damn,” written by John MacKey and choreographed by Paula Thomson.

“We have great dancers and choreographers at CSUN and that’s the fundamental reason for the concert, to showcase the great talents at the university,” said Paula Thomson, course coordinator and professor of kinesiology at CSUN. “What will also make this concert unique is that we’re going to be conducting scientific research with the ambulatory LifeShirt equipment that facilitates the collection of real-time physiological and psychological responses. This will be a rare occasion in which psychophysiological data will be collected in performers.”

Tickets for the event are on sale for $15 for students and $20 for general admission. To obtain tickets, call (818) 677-2488.

For more information about the performance, contact Paula Thomson at (818) 677-7575 or at paula.thomson@csun.edu.

“Jews in Uganda: Celebration, Survival, and Sustainability,” an event organized by CSUN’s Jewish Studies Program, is scheduled to take place from 2 to 3:15 p.m. in the Flintridge Room of the University Student Union located on the east side of campus, at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

Keki is an experienced speaker and musical performer. He was leader of the Abayudaya youth movement in the ‘70s, chairperson of the Abayudaya community in the ‘90s and early this decade, and was elected chairperson of the sub county council for several years starting in 2002. He is also the founder and current leader of the Delicious Peace interfaith coffee co-op. He was honored with an award from Tuft’s University’s Leadership Institute for his work on the coffee co-op.

Keki has been recognized for his composing and singing skills and has been honored with a Grammy nomination in Traditional World Music. His award-winning work with the Delicious Peace interfaith coffee co-op has also been written up in O, The Oprah Magazine.

“This is a community that should be treasured for its commitment and passion,” said Jody Myers, professor and coordinator of CSUN’s Jewish Studies Program. “There have been many links between Jews living in Los Angeles and the Abayudaya and it has been a mutually enriching relationship.”

Also taking part in this event will be CSUN history professor Jeffrey Auerbach, author of “The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display” and co-editor of “Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851.”

Music will be performed by Keki and Cantor Michael Stein of Temple Aliyah. Stein has performed in a Broadway musical, released an album entitled “Shabbat in Swing Time,” and has received acclaim for his innovative Shabbat services at Temple Aliyah.

The event is being co-sponsored by the CSUN History Department, CSUN’s College of Humanities, CSUN’s Distinguished Visiting Speaker’s Program, Temple Ramat Zion and Global Village Forum.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information or to RSVP, contact Jewish Studies at (818) 677-4724 or jewish.studies@csun.edu.

This year the awards will be given at the NCOD’s Stars Gala on Saturday, Nov. 14, from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m. The gala will take place at the Northridge Center Complex in the University Student Union (USU). The USU is on the east side of campus, located at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

The Cloud Award for Exemplary Leadership in Education, Human, and/or Community Services will be presented to Herbert Larson.

Larson is recognized nationally for facilitating greater awareness and appreciation of the abilities of deaf people and advocating for greater access and success for all. He received his bachelor’s degree in education from Gallaudet University in 1956 and a master’s in educational administration and supervision from CSUN in 1965. He served as the NCOD director for several years during his 43-year career in education and administration.

Larson also won an Emmy for his performance in hosting “Off Hand,” an informational television series featuring deaf people and sign language.

The Bulwer award for Innovative Leadership will be presented to both the California School for the Deaf (CSD) and the Deaf West Theatre Company.

The California School for the Deaf celebrates its sesquicentennial anniversary this year. Founded in 1860 in San Francisco, CSD moved to Berkeley and in 1980 to Fremont, where it continues to grow today. With its superintendent, Henry Klopping, at the helm since 1975, the school is recognized and respected regionally,
nationally and internationally as a program of bilingual excellence. Lopping received his master’s in education leadership from CSUN.

The CSD philosophy focuses on the educational, social and emotional needs of the whole student and supports artistic and athletic abilities, leadership and real-world experiences for its students. The school work force, fluent in American Sign Language and English, is knowledgeable and passionate about deaf culture, language acquisition practices, learning technologies and bilingual education.

The Deaf West Theatre Company (DWT), also a recipient of the Bulwer award, is distinguished by award-winning productions and awards that included the 2004 Tony Honor of Excellence for the Broadway play, “Big River,” the 2007 Theatre Ovation Award for “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” and many more.

Ed Waterstreet, Deaf West Theatre artistic director and CEO, and his wife, Linda Bove opened the DWT when they arrived in Los Angeles and were astounded at the lack of a cultural opportunity for the 1.5 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the L.A. area. With 12 years of experience and expertise with the National Theatre of the Deaf, they set about achieving their dream of a permanent sign language theatre company on the West Coast.

With 12 award-winning seasons, DWT continues its goal of providing an exhilarating theatrical experience for all audiences, deaf and hearing, signers and non-signers.

The Distinguished Service Award for Lifelong Commitment to Enhancing Lives will be presented to Sheri Ann Farinha.

Farinha, a CSUN alumna, is a long-time strong and visible civil rights activist on numerous deaf-related issues concerning access and quality. Farinha, is CEO of the NorCal Services for Deaf and Hard of Hearing since 1993, a community based agency which has served in an administrative capacity running non-profit
community based organizations in California for over 26 years. She is nationally known for her leadership and advocacy for system reforms in areas of education, employment, and telecommunications. She served as an elected president of the California Association of the Deaf board member, Telecommunications Administrative Deaf & Disabled Advisory Board (TADDAB), California Public Utilities Commission, and California Judicial Council Advisory Board/Sign Language Interpreters. One of Sheri’s current focus is grassroots coalition work on education reform via early identification and regionalization of programs serving deaf children.

Aside from the award show, the gala will include a banquet and a De’VIA Deaf Arts Auction with Academy-Award winner Marlee Matlin and Ed Waterstreet as auctioneers. Manny Johnson, a CSUN alumnus, will serve as master of ceremonies. All proceeds will go to a scholarship fund for deaf and hard of hearing CSUN students.

The event is open to the public. Tickets are on sale for $85. Please visit www.csun.edu/ncod or e-mail roz.rosen@csun.edu for more information.

The study released today details the toll on communities with a high concentration of payday lending businesses and finds a clear association between the presence of payday lenders and neighborhood crime rates. The study recommends that Congress take action to cap payday-lender interest rates at 36 percent, enacting for the entire country protections Congress put in place for U.S. military families.

The new study, “Does Fringe Banking Exacerbate Neighborhood Crime Rates? Social Disorganization and the Ecology of Payday Lending,” was conducted by Cal State Northridge professor Steven M. Graves and The George Washington University professors Charis E. Kubrin and Gregory D. Squires.

“These findings will surprise very few who both understand how this industry operates, and have witnessed its explosive growth in the very neighborhoods that have struggled to reduce crime,” Graves said.

Squires said the study “shows that not only do individuals suffer from predatory lending practices, but entire communities can pay a price for a high concentration of payday lenders. Congress took an important step by limiting payday loan interest rates in military base communities, but it shouldn’t stop there. Congress should do for all communities what it did for military families.”

Kubrin said that as a criminologist, she can “attest to the fact that there is woefully limited research on the impact of the behavior of financial institutions on neighborhood crime. As our research demonstrates, these connections can no longer be ignored by criminologists and law enforcement officials across the country.”

The study examined payday lending, a practice that has become part of the growing web of fringe banking largely concentrated in low-income and disproportionately minority communities. It allows lenders to provide cash advances on post-dated checks and has increasingly become a way for financially strapped families and individuals to obtain money in the short run. Nearly all of these loans come with exorbitantly high interest rates and fees, and the monetary costs to families, who become trapped by them, have been well documented.

The study found that there are broader community costs that all residents incur in those neighborhoods where payday lenders are concentrated, given the socioeconomic status of the lenders’ customer base and the location of their services. These broader community costs include higher rates of violent crime. The study found that the association between payday lending and violent crime remains statistically significant, even after taking into account a range of factors traditionally associated with crime.

The researchers offered several policy recommendations to reign in predatory practices and provide incentives for banks and other financial institutions to provide alternatives that would preserve access to small consumer loans. As an immediate step, they recommend that Congress cap interest rates at 36 percent. Several states currently provide this project to consumers, and Congress enacted this protection for loans to members of the military and their families.

A draft of the study can be found at http://www.gwu.edu/~newsctr/09/pdfs/Payday_Lending_and_Crime_Working_Paper.pdf.

Steven M. Graves, an associate professor of geography at Cal State Northridge, has been researching the patterns and effects of differential access to credit for more than a decade, publishing several articles on the spatial behavior of payday lenders. His co-authored article exposing the extraordinary concentration of payday lenders near military bases, published in the Ohio State Law Review, was named the Cal State Northridge Pre-eminent Scholarly Publication in 2008. He received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Illinois in 1999.

Charis E. Kubrin is an associate professor of sociology at The George Washington University. She is currently working on a variety of projects that reflect her larger research agenda on neighborhoods, race and violence as central to social disorganization theory. In 2005, Kubrin received the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology and the Morris Rosenberg Award for Recent Achievement from the District of Columbia Sociological Society. In 2007, she was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University. Kubrin served as president of the District of Columbia Sociological Society in 2007-2008. She currently is heading up the Dean’s Scholars in Globalization Program at The George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2000.

Gregory D. Squires is a professor of sociology and public policy and public administration at The George Washington University. He also is a member of the board of directors of the Woodstock Institute, the advisory board of the John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Support Center in Chicago and the social science advisory board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington D.C. He has served as a consultant and expert witness for fair housing groups and civil rights organizations around the country, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Fair Housing Alliance, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and others. He also served a three-year term as a member of the Consumer Advocacy Council of the Federal Reserve Board. He has written for several academic journals and general interest publications, including Social Problems, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Prior to joining the faculty at The George Washington University, Squires taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served as a research analyst for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Cal State Northridge associate professor of English Dorothy Clark and her colleague Holli Levitsky, an associate professor of English and director of Jewish Studies at Loyola Marymount University, have come up with a novel idea for preserving those memories and creating a new generation of “witnesses” to make sure that the world never forgets the genocide of more than 11 million European Jews and others during World War II.

The pair has created a joint, two-semester course, “The Holocaust and Poland: Untold Stories and Politics of Memory,” that explores that troubling time in history through literature and interviews with survivors and witnesses of the German occupation of Poland. The course, which begins in the spring, will include a trip to Poland where students will get an opportunity to visit the places their interviewees spoke of and see for themselves the disappearance of Jewish society and culture.

“The survivors have, sadly, been dying for a while,” said Clark, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. “That was one of the compelling forces in the construction of this class. We both felt it was very important to continue to document the survivors’ stories and find a way to continue to make their stories relevant to a new generation of young people.”

Levitsky, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Poland in 2001-2002, said the idea for the course and the trip to Poland grew out of visits both she and Clark independently made to the country. “Visiting the camps as well as towns and villages that once had thriving Jewish communities was a profound, life-changing experience for both of us,” she said.

Clark and Levitsky said that when the students interview survivors, the experience has greater impact than reading about the Holocaust or watching a film. The survivors are passing on their memories and stories to a new generation, they said, and those memories now become the responsibility of that new generation.

By taking that new generation, their students, to the places where those memories happened and where they can talk to witnesses in Poland, the students understand more deeply what the Holocaust is and what truly happened, Levitsky and Clark said. Thus, they said, “the Holocaust no longer is just something [the students] read in a book or saw in a movie, it is their story.”

Plans for the CSUN part of the trip are still up in the air as Clark scrambles to raise the funds to take about 15 Northridge students to Poland. Loyola, a private university, has more resources to facilitate sending 15 students on the June trip.

“We’re a state university in the middle of a budget crisis,” Clark said. “Our students really can’t afford the approximately $3,000 per person it would cost to make the trip. Maybe we can’t take all the students, but for those we can take, the experience will be transformative.”

Both professors are determined to ensure that every student who wants to go on the trip has the financial backing necessary. They are working together to achieve that goal, and are hoping for funds and donations for any student in need.

Students at both universities will spend the spring semester doing research about the Holocaust in Poland, which will include conducting and documenting interviews with Holocaust survivors who are members of the The 1939 Club, a survivor organization in Los Angeles dedicated to Holocaust education. The students will document survivors’ memories of pre-war Poland and what happened after the German invasion.

During the June trip, the students will be asked to do additional interviews with Polish witnesses and survivors as well as to document through videos and blogs their reactions to their experiences. The students will then spend the summer compiling it all into a multi-media record that can be used as an educational tool about the Holocaust.

Levitsky said she and Clark have already received assurances from Polish government officials that they will do what they can to help the CSUN and LMU students conduct their research while they are in Poland.

“Now, we just need to get our students there,” Clark said.