James Young: “Stages of Memory in Berlin and New York”
The selection of a design for the Berlin Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews was a contentious one. After September 11th, the memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center was compared by some to holocaust memorials before it, and by one reporter specifically to the Berlin Memorial. How did it come to pass that the memorial at Ground Zero would evoke Berlin’s Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews?
Galia Benziman: “The Americanization of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish Text”
Galia Benziman will inaugurate the 2009 Jewish Studies Research Colloquium with a talk Sholem Aleichem’s Motl, the Cantor’s Son: “Try Not to Love Such a Country’: The Americanization of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish Text,” on Tuesday, February 10, 4:00 PM in Humanities 1, Room 245.
Yossi Chajes: “Entzauberung (De-Magic-ing) and Jewish Modernity”
Modern identity was forged, in large part, through a self-conscious distancing from a past construed as magical. Until the late nineteenth-century, to be modern meant to have “faith” in “reason & materialist science.” We will explore the ways this identity project worked in Jewish culture, as expressed by figures including the Italians Leone Modena (1571-1648) & Tobias Cohen (1652-1729), as well as in later eastern European Jewish debates on the border between the newly emerging realms of the “natural” and “supernatural.”