UPCOMING FRANKEL CENTER EVENTS
"Beyond Testimony: New Ways of
Listening to Survivors of the Holocaust and
Other Genocides"
Henry Greenspan,
University of Michigan
January 18, 2011, 4 pm
202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022
In his groundbreaking book On Listening to Holocaust Survivors:
Beyond Testimony, Henry Greenspan presents an alternative
approach to the gathering of survival testimonies by emphasizing
ongoing conversation—what Greenspan calls "knowing with"
survivors. Greenspan will discuss his research process as well as
his five years as an advisor to the Montreal project Life Stories of
Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights
Violations. Life Stories is gathering the accounts of survivors of the
Holocaust, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides, and political
violence in Haiti. Like Greenspan's own work, the Montreal
project has engaged survivors as co-equal partners in every aspect
of its work, from interviewer training and interpretation, to media
and curricula production, to budget and overall governance.
"Which 'Jews' Were Still Jewish in
Interwar Germany?"
Leora Auslander,
University of Chicago
February 3, 2011, 4 pm
435 South State Street, 1014 Tisch Hall
Leora Auslander asks the questions that have been raised by
countless Jewish studies scholars—"What makes a Jew Jewish?
Religious observance? If so, of what intensity and form? Self-
identification? Classification by others (both Jewish and not)?
Social, political, intellectual or aesthetic practices?"—and proposes
an altogether new approach. "Finding satisfying answers has
proved elusive," says Auslander. "I would like to argue that rather
than abandon these fundamental queries, we should look at them
differently. Which Jews' were still Jewish in Interwar Germany? will
use the evidence of material culture, social networks, and everyday
practices to propose answers to the question. While the specific
case addressed will be that of Jews in the Weimar Republic, I
hope that the approach will be useful to those struggling with the
conceptual and empirical problems raised by all efforts to classify
(or resist classification)."
"Manasseh Sawed Isaiah With a Saw
of Wood: An Ancient Legend in Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, and Persian Sources"
Richard Kalmin,
Jewish Theological Seminary
February 9, 2011, 4 pm
202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022
By examining ancient and medieval accounts of the martyrdom
of the biblical prophet Isaiah, Kalmin proposes that during
the mid-4th century CE, a period of intense eastern provincial
Romanization of Jewish Babylonia began. At that time, Kalmin
argues, Babylonia became part of the emerging cultural unity
that was gradually forming in pre-Islamic Palestine, Syria,
Mesopotamia, and western Persia. In addition, he argues that
Christian sources attest to the same developments, indicating a
significant linkage between the Jewish and Christian communities
in late-antiquity Mesopotamia.
"On the Hard Evidence of Exile: Secrecy,
Authenticity, and Race in Representations
of New Mexico's Crypto-Jews"
Ruby Tapia,
Ohio State University
February 22, 2011, 4 pm
202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022
In her 2008 book of black-and-white photographs on converso
Image and Memory, Cary Herz documented tallit-clad and candle-
lit New Mexicans testifying to their Crypto-Jewish identity. In
2006, folklorist Judith Neulander collaborated with geneticists to
"resolve" that, in scientific fact, Crypto-Jews by-and-large do not
exist in New Mexico. Impressive illustrations flesh out the texts
of both positions: Herz's body-subjects pose with Jewish objects
as irrefutable identifying evidence, while Neulander's article
stakes a place in the Annals of Human Biology with a historical
sketch of Sephardic migration embellished with definitive
chromosomal charts. The contradictions and tensions between
these two documents constitute a fascinating debate on Crypto-
Jewish authenticity, but the contradictions and tensions within
each of them point to other, perhaps even more confounding
levels of political, cultural and methodological dissonance. This
lecture explores these dissonances and establishes New Mexico's
Crypto-Jews as an important site for understanding the intricate
relationship between blood, image, and identity within Jewish
bodies of exilic and diasporic knowledge.
"Photographing the Jewish Nation:
Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic
Expedition"
Eugene Avrutin & Julie Subrin,
University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
April 1, 2011, 12:30 pm
202 South Thayer Street, Room 2022
"Photographing the Jewish Nation" discusses a series of
remarkable photographs of Jewish life and culture taken during
S. An-sky's ethnographic expeditions on the eve of WWI. Among
the first representations of Jewish culture and society in pre-
Revolutionary Russia, the photographs taken by the Jewish
ethnographic expedition provide visual texture of a world that
has largely been erased from contemporary Ukrainian memory,
offering snapshots that rarely appear in written sources. In
remarkable detail, Solomon ludovin, the young photographer who
accompanied An-sky on his expeditions, captured the diversity
of the customs and rituals of Jewish life in a rapidly changing
milieu: the marketplaces where families bought and sold goods,
the homes in which Jews lived, the prayer houses in which Jews
prayed, and the shops, work benches, and factories in which men
and women plied their trade.