By payne | February 8, 2010
The next meeting of the Jewish Studies Seminar will be Sunday, Feb. 28. Professor Ruth von Bernuth will present the topic: “Early Modern Bible Translations in Yiddish.”
By payne | February 1, 2010
The next meeting of the Jewish Studies Seminar is Feb. 7 with Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. The topic of discussion is: “Beyond Judaisms: Metatron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism.”
papers available: JSS-Boyarin JSS-Boyarin.biblio
The next meeting of the Jewish Studies Seminar will be Sunday Jan. 24 with Prof. Boaz Huss of Ben-Gurion University, Isreal. Professor Huss will discuss ”The Kabbalah and the Politics of In-authenticity”
paper available: JSS-Huss.doc
By payne | November 12, 2009
The next seminar will be Dec. 1 with John Efron, Koret Chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday, December 1 at 5PM. Prof. Efron will lead a discussion “Sephardic Beauty in the Eye of the Ashkenazic Beholder.”
paper available JSS-Efron
By payne | November 12, 2009
Upcoming meeting: November 22, 2009 with Steven Aschheim, Professor of History and the Vigevani Chair in European Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He will present “Bildung in Palestine: Zionism, Bi-Nationalism and the Strains of German-Jewish Humanism.”
paper available JSS-Aschheim
By payne | November 11, 2009
Next meeting: November 15, 2009 with Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, Queen Mary College – University of London, “ecclesia and synagoga: Visual Dynamics and Historical Change”
powerpoint available
Rubin_I
Rubin IIa
Rubin IIb
Rubin IIc
By payne | November 3, 2009
November 11, 2009 with Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Professor (Directrice d’études) at École des Hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, “Questions of Times: Conflicting Time Scales in Historical Perspective”
paper available JSS-Goldberg
By payne | October 15, 2009
October 27, 2009 with Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College, “Intrigued with Islam: Jewish Scholars, Travelers, and Converts in Modern Europe”
paper available JSS-Heschel
By payne | September 23, 2009
Next meeting: October 4, 2009 with Prof. Amos Morris-Reich, University of Haifa, “Living in Two Dimensions: A Cultural History of ‘Territory’ (shetach) in Israeli Culture”
Morris-Reich: Living in Two Dimensions: A Cultural History of ‘Territory’ in Israeli Culture
By payne | September 15, 2009
It is with great sadness that we write to impart the news of the passing away, this past Friday night, of our beloved colleague Lilian Furst. From the very beginning of the Jewish Studies Seminar, Lilian graced our events with her presence, her astute remarks and first-hand knowledge of modern Jewish history and culture making an unparalleled contribution to our discussions. Last year, Lilian participated with Saul Friedlander and Albrecht Strauss in a commemorating Kristallnacht in the Freeman Center for Jewish Life at Duke, and provided a testimony to the impact of the events on the six-year-old child, her family and the Jewish community of Vienna.
Just over a month after Kristallnacht, Lilian and her family fled Austria to England (via Belgium). She received her doctorate from Cambridge and, since 1971, taught in major U.S. universities, ending as the Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at UNC – Chapel Hill. She published widely on nineteenth-century European literature – romanticism, realism and naturalism – and, most recently, on literature and medicine and post-Holocaust writing. Her best known work is, perhaps, Home is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), the life-story of her family, told through her own recollections and her father’s memoirs. The autobiography, and her work in general, give delicate but compelling testimony to the social and intellectual world of the Jewish émigrés and their travails, their constant struggle to comprehend, and adjust to different cultures and overcome unsympathetic bureaucracies, political or medical. Her departure marks the passing away of a whole world, which many of us, late comers, were privileged to get to know through her.