The Institute for Tolerance Studies Celebrates 20 years

by Ron Duncan Hart

April 22, 2025

The Institute for Tolerance Studies has announced its twentieth anniversary celebration led by key Jewish figures in the world of New Mexico music. Steven Ovitsky, the past executive director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, will open the celebration on June 8 with a webinar on his life and love of music, followed by a concert on June 11 of Jewish composers with the talented duo of David Felberg and Judith Gordon. 

Listening to Steven Ovitsky talk about his immersion in the love of music you hear the voice of a master, and he is undoubtedly one of the most erudite students of the history of Jewish music in our presence. In this film memoir he will discuss that history as well as his appreciation of world music from Greek Dimotiko to the mariachis of Mexico. As he discusses music history, he drops in the names of music greats that he has worked with from Thomas A. Dorsey to Alberto Mizrahi and Pinchas Zuckerman among others.

The evening with David Felberg and Judith Gordon will celebrate the universal language of music, as they perform works showcasing the rich cultural tapestry of Jewish composers. Felberg is founder and artistic director of the music series Chatter where he often gives New Mexico premiers of twentieth and twenty-first century pieces of music. He teaches violin at the University of New Mexico where he is director of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. He is concertmaster of the Santa Fe Symphony and has been a soloist with that orchestra as well as with the New Mexico Philharmonic, New Mexico Symphony, and the Palo Alto Philharmonic, among others. He is praised by The Santa Fe New Mexican for his “fluid phrases, rich focused tone, rhythmic precision, and spot-on intonation.” He performs regularly throughout the Southwest as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and conductor.

Pianist Judith Gordon explores a diverse repertoire as both a soloist and in collaboration with other instrumentalists and singers. Starting with a recital debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later being named “Musician of the Year” by the Boston Globe, Gordon has been heard often at festivals and on series including Apple Hill, Charlottesville, Music Mountain, Santa Fe, Spoleto, Tanglewood, Music from Salem, and Chatter. She has performed with the Boston Pops, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and was a member of the percussion-based ensemble Essential Music. Gordon was an associate professor of music at Smith College from 2006-20 and is now based in Albuquerque. 

The Institute for Tolerance Studies is an award-winning non-profit organization dedicated to bringing the best in international scholarship and writing to its audience in New Mexico and beyond. It features three programs: the Santa Fe Distinguished Lecture Series, the Jewish Learning Channel, and Gaon Books. Gloria Abella Ballen and I established the Institute in 2005 as a non-profit community service organization to address issues of antisemitism, tolerance, and religious diversity, and it has provided a platform to dozens of leading scholars and writers. They have given talks on Nazis and the Holocaust, Jewish thought and history, Jewish humor, the complexities of Israel, and much more. 

With its lectures, films, and publications the Institute has become an important Jewish educational organization in New Mexico and the Southwest with arguably the broadest international outreach. More than 20,000 people a year tune into these talks or watch a documentary film on Jewish life, plus thousands more who might read a Gaon Book. Starting in 2005 more than seventy titles have been published from leading rabbis like Zalman Schachter-Shalomi to award-winning authors like Ilan Stavans. Several titles have won either “Best Book” awards or were finalists for such awards.

In 2010 the Gaon Web Films: Jewish Learning Channel was created on YouTube, and it is a rich, continually growing archive of 170 films on Jewish cultural diversity, history, thought, and antisemitism. The JLC has more than 1600 subscribers and 170,000 views, creating a rich archive of Jewish history with all its diversity from New Mexico to Morocco, Israel and beyond. 

In 2012 the lecture series was started in Santa Fe with the first talk by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. The speaker series continued in 2016 with the “Viva Passover” program of speakers and exhibits at the Santa Fe Convention Center. In 2017 the speaker series honored St. Johns College professor Robert Sacks z”l and former New Mexico State Historian Stanley Hordes. The Institute’s Yom Limmud in 2018 formally began the Santa Fe Distinguished Lecture Series, and an early highlight was Prof. Deborah Lipstadt’s talk on antisemitism in 2019 to a sold-out audience of more than 400 people. Since then, the Distinguished Lecture Series has offered nine to ten lectures per year, going exclusively online in 2020. During that time Dr. Bonnie Ellinger joined Gloria Abella Ballen on the programming committee, and together they have collaborated in the identification of speakers and doing interviews. 

The international audience of the Distinguished Lecture Series has grown to more than 2,500 people across the United States and Canada to Australia, England, and Israel. More than fifty leading scholars have appeared, including Pulitzer Prize winners, National Jewish Book Award winners, Guggenheim Fellows, and a Sami Rohr prize winner. With such Jewish scholars and writers the DLS has become a nationally recognized series, and some people have said that it has become their primary connection to Jewish life and thought.

Among other activities in 2019 the Institute initiated a Yom HaShaoh commemoration program in the Rotunda of the State Capitol that has continued to the present as a community wide event, now under the auspices of the JCRC-NM. The Institute has also collaborated with the Santa Fe Jewish Film Festival, the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society and other organizations in promoting Jewish life and culture in the state.

The Steven Ovitsky webinar on June 8 at 11 am will be on Zoom, and the David Felberg/Judith Gordon concert will be June 11 at 7 pm at the Waxman-Muñoz Gallery of the CCA, 1050 Old Pecos Trial, Santa Fe. For further information on the concert and tickets go to www.tolerancestudies.org.

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