David Biale: “Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought”
May 10, 2010
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Cowell 131
David Biale, the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis, will deliver a public lecture entitled: “Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought.” He will discuss Zionism as a movement of Jewish secularism and its roots in the tradition of Jewish secular thought going back to Spinoza.
Courtney Bender: “The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination”
May 13, 2010
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
J. Baskin Engineering, Room 372
Courtney Bender, Associate Professor of Religion at Columbia University, will engage in a public dialogue with Professor Nathaniel Deutsch on her new book The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination.
Harriet Murav: “Poetry After Kerch: Representing Jewish Mass Death in the Soviet Union”
Why was there no Holocaust in Soviet Russia? There were killings, but the killings did not take on the same meaning as in the West, where the Holocaust emerged as a unique and paradigmatic set of events. Official Soviet history is part of the reason for the absence of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. The term “Holocaust” itself did not have broad currency in the West during the 40s and it was not used in Russian until the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Soviet literature, almost completely neglected by scholars and critics, confronts the impossible history of the destruction of the Jews, but not in the same terms as Holocaust literature in the West.