Global Citizenship Series: May 2025
Before our community scatters across the globe for the summer, Notre Dame Global offers several suggestions for tapping into your curiosity about the world’s peoples: their languages, history, political realities, traditions, and cultures. Activating that curiosity by attending a lecture, film, exhibit, or performance is one way we can become better global citizens.
We are publishing this column a few days early to highlight the last installment of Notre Dame’s Israel-Palestine series, which will be held on Tuesday, April 29, at 5:00 p.m.
Then, once we reach May, there are opportunities for experiencing international film at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Browning Cinema as well as absorbing art, images, and objects from around the globe at both the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and the Hesburgh Libraries’ Rare Books Room.
We also draw special attention to a prominent international chamber music competition that takes place on campus May 8-11. Now celebrating its 52nd year, the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition has grown to become the largest chamber music competition in the world, offering some of the most prestigious classical music prizes attainable today. Hundreds of musicians apply to compete in the live rounds on our campus. All performances are free and open to the public.
Finally, we join in Commencement celebrations by featuring books on global citizenship by two authors slated to receive honorary degrees.
The Ever-Vanishing Horizon toward a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine
Tuesday, April 29, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
155 DeBartolo Hall
Part of the University’s 2024-2025 Forum on the topic “What do we owe each other?”, this discussion is the final installment of the Israel-Palestine Series, co-led by Mahan Mirza, executive director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion and teaching professor, and Tzvi Novick, Abrams Jewish Thought and Culture professor of theology, with support from Notre Dame Jerusalem.
The topic of the night: What might a just peace look like for Israelis and Palestinians? Out of the many options that have been proposed over the decades—one-state, two-state, bi-national confederation, international peacekeeping missions—what seems most likely in the foreseeable future? Is an absence of war our last best hope, or can we keep hope alive for enduring peace that reconciles between the two peoples?
The conversation about the range of futures for the region—the ideal, the possible, and the probable—will feature Hussein Ibish, Senior Resident Scholar, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C., and David Myers, Distinguished Professor and Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History, UCLA.
Film at the Browning Cinema
Throughout the month of May, there are multiple opportunities to see award-winning films at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s state-of-the-art Browning Cinema:
May 1: Internal Affairs (2002, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak)
Closing out the Browning’s Film Noir series, two of Hong Kong cinema's most iconic leading men, Tony Leung and Andy Lau, face off in the breathtaking thriller that revitalized the city-state's twenty-first-century film industry, launched a blockbuster franchise, and inspired Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed—all while raising haunting questions about what it means to live a double life, lost in a labyrinth of conflicting identities and allegiances.
May 1-3: The Working Class Goes to Hell (2023, Mladen Ðorđević)
In honor of International Workers' Day, this film brings forward pressing concerns of labor, both in Europe and around the world. In a small Balkan town, a factory fire claims the lives of many workers—touching every family in the community. Five years later and after many of the remaining workers in the union experience further setbacks, solidarity between the workers flags. When a deal with management can’t be struck, some workers go off-script and look to make a deal with the devil.
May 12-15: The 15th annual Michiana Jewish Film Festival
Now in its 15th year, the Michiana Jewish Film Festival offers award-winning films from around the world, facilitating a multifaceted exploration of Jewish identity, community, culture, and history. One film to see is Never Alone, which tells the gripping story of Jewish refugees seeking safety in Finland during World War II. Another highlight is new film, 999: The Forgotten Girls, which tells the story of nearly 1,000 young Slovak Jewish women, mostly teenagers, who were told by their government that they were embarking on a volunteer work assignment but who were instead illegally deported to Auschwitz on what was the first Jewish transport to the Nazi death camp.
May 24 & May 31: The Met Opera Live in HD
To close out the academic year, the Browning Cinema offers two Met Opera films: Salome (Strauss) on the 24th and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Rossini) on the 31st.
Music in the community
Our Notre Dame community is fortunate to be able to experience some of the best young chamber music ensembles from around the world through the annual Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
Held every spring—this year, May 8-11—the competition has grown to become the largest chamber music competition in the world and offers some of the most prestigious classical music prizes attainable today. Hundreds of musicians apply to compete in the live rounds on our campus. All performances are free and open to the public.
An opening concert will be held on Thursday, May 8 at Indiana University South Bend’s Joshi Performance Hall, with competition rounds held Friday, May 9 through Sunday, May 11, at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center and the O’Neill Hall of Music’s LaBar Recital Hall.
In another venue, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art will host a soiree featuring a Senior Division ensemble on Friday, May 9, at 12:00 p.m. Following the performance, musicians will be available for an interactive Q&A session.
Art on campus
Both the Hesburgh Libraries and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art offer opportunities in May to experience images and objects from around the world.
Tragedies of War: Images of World War II in Print Visual Culture
Ongoing exhibit open daily, through July
Hesburgh Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections Room
To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, this Rare Books and Special Collections’ exhibit explores themes of Nazi racial ideology, the Holocaust, children in war, resistance, liberation, and memories of war using posters, maps, propaganda ephemera, and illustrated books, as well as photographs and first-hand accounts. By presenting images created for personal use and for state-sponsored propaganda, Hesburgh Libraries’ curators and librarians create a visual narrative of the war’s profound impact on individuals and societies, offering deeper insight into how this war was experienced and remembered.
At the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, discover galleries devoted to art of the world—including Africa, Europe, Central America and South America—on your own or through one of the museum’s “Meet Your Museum” tours, held most Fridays and Sundays. Please consult the museum’s calendar for exact tour times.
Also, for children ages 4-6, the museum offers Artful Storytimes throughout the year. The May program will be Saturday, May 10, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. In a partnership with the St. Joseph County Public Library, each Artful Storytime includes stories, songs, artwork explorations, and art-making. In May, children will be guided in a search of the galleries for spring blooms.
Summer reading
Finally, we turn to two Commencement 2025 honorary degree recipients who are authors of excellent books on topics related to global citizenship.
Writer Alice McDermott received the National Book Award for her 1998 novel Charming Billy and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times. Her most recent novel, Absolution (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), deals with America’s involvement in Vietnam in the early 1960s, but her real subject is the altruistic impulse and interrogating how the lives of women then on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—were shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s interference in Southeast Asia.
David Brooks, writer and New York Times columnist, has written widely on civil discourse in these polarized times. The strategies and lessons of his How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023) can be applied to curiosity about other cultures.
“There is one skill,” he writes, “that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood. That is at the heart of being a good person, the ultimate gift you can give to others and to yourself.”