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I. Sample Paper Proposals
Remembering the Murder of the Mother: Implications for Understanding the Holocaust
In Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, when Moshe the Beadle returns from a mass grave to warn the people of Sighet of the approaching storm, he cries out to them, ‘I have come to tell you the story of my own death.’ Such, indeed, is the position of any Holocaust survivor: like Moshe the Beadle, he rises from a continent that was transformed into a mass grave to relate the tale of his own death. As it unfolds in the Holocaust memoir, the process of telling the tale is part of the process of recovering the soul, where recovery entails a return to origins. And a fundamental figure at the origin of any human being is the mother. The purpose of the propose paper is to examine the testimony on the murdered mothers that we have from numerous Holocaust memoirs in order to attain a better understanding of (1) the essence of the mother in Jewish teachings and traditions, (2) the Nazis' murder of the Jewish mother, and (3) what the two may reveal about the essence of the Holocaust.
Exploring the symbolic and metaphysical dimensions of the assault on the Jews in the Holocaust, the paper will first explain the significance of the mother in Jewish teachings. Here it will be shown that the assault on the mother as the origin of life is part of a larger, calculated assault on the soul, and not just on the body, of Israel. Next the paper will examine the implication of removing not only the mother but also her maternal love from the world. Here we shall see that the violation of this most intimate bond between two human beings -- the bond between mother and child -- is a definitive aspect of creating the ‘anti-world’ of the ‘concentrationary universe,’ which is a realm void of human relation. In this connection the paper discusses the moral dilemma of having to kill newborn infants in order to save the lives of the mothers. Finally, the paper will explain how the murder of the mother is connected to a general assault on the home as a sanctuary and dwelling place for the family. To be sure, a defining feature of the Holocaust is seen in this devastation of the home: living in a camp, in a ghetto, or in hiding, every Jew in Nazi Europe was homeless.
By the Light of the Moon and the Hanukkah Candles: Traditional Jewish
Practice and Jewish Women’s Enlightenment in the Writings of Sarah Foner and Hava Shapiro
In her now classic study of British women novelists, A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter makes a plea for the study of neglected minor women novelists in histories of women’s writing. This paper, which includes a discussion of two so-called ‘minor’ writers (Sarah Feige Meinkin Foner and Hava Shapiro) alongside a more canonical one (Devorah Baron), follows Showalter’s lead and brings to feminist Hebrew literary studies the same conviction about the importance of ‘the minor’ in constructing a literary history to the study of Hebrew women writers. Specifically, it looks at the ways in which these three writers tell the story of their own education and enlightenment against the (countervailing) backdrop of traditional Jewish practice and traditional gendered notions of Jewish education for girls.
I begin with discussion of an essay by Sarah Feige Meinkin Foner, the first Hebrew women novelist (she published her novel Ahavat Yesharim in 1882), and how it is that she came to learn Hebrew; significantly, this educational process is inaugurated at the very moment, when her father returns from morning services at the synagogue and she (the daughter) takes his tallit and tefillin out of his hands. The paper continues with a discussion of two pieces of Hava Shapiro, a haskalah woman writer, who published Hebrew short stories as well as some of the first feminist Hebrew literary criticism. ‘Kiddush Levana,’ the first piece discussed in the paper, was published in Shapiro’s 1909 collection of sketches (Kovetz Tziyyurim) and depicts a young girl’s personal and religious aspirations in relation to an experience in which her brothers excluded from joining in the recitation of the Kiddush Levanah. A later essay by Shapiro called ‘Yemei Hanukah’ (Chanukah days, 1924), will be read as a postscript to ‘Kiddush Levanah.’ In this essay, Shapiro looks back nostalgically at her childhood experiences of Chanukah as representative of a traditional lifestyle she left behind so long ago. What is so intriguing about this essay is the way in which Shapiro juxtaposes these insights against her memories of her educated mother reading Hebrew books.
The plethora of light-related imagery in the essay highlights the importance of this sketch as a reflection on the consequences of enlightenment. The section on Deborah Baron’s fiction, looks at two stories, an early piece called Kadishah, which tells of a young girl’s intellectual prowess of her desire to say ‘Kadish’ for her grandfather. The light and dark imagery in this story ‘highlights’ the enlightenment theme of the piece. Lastly, I’ll be looking at a later story called Ketanot, which casts the story of women’s enlightenment and shared (intellectual) community against a countervailing cycle of traditional Jewish holiday observances.
Unity in Diversity? Alexander Dushkin and the Jewish Education Committee
of New York, 1939-1949
This paper will explore the genesis of the Jewish Education Committee (JEC) and the challenges that it faced during its first decade, under the direction of Alexander Dushkin. It will analyze the context for and contours of the debate over the proper role for a central agency for Jewish education, shedding new light on the history of Jewish education in the 1940s, a pivotal decade of communal transition.
In the conventional narrative of the history of American Jewish education, the establishment in 1939 of the JEC of New York is celebrated as a milestone, a successful effort to create a new paradigm for how to conceptualize a central educational agency. The JEC's predecessor, Samson Benderly's Bureau of Jewish Education was never a truly communal agency in that it focused most of its resources on the Talmud Torah system, leaving other schools and their supporters to their own devices. Benderly's agenda was, arguably, well suited for a semi-acculturated, urban population. But by the late-1930s shifts in community demographics and movement loyalties demanded a more inclusive approach to the concept of a central agency. Dushkin is lionized for creating a system that championed "unity in diversity," a service orientated communal agency that eschewed ideological labels and aimed to strengthen the gamut of educational options through research, publications, supervision, and a variety of other services. Dushkin's JEC quickly became the model for central agencies for Jewish education and remains dominant even today.
In reality, Dushkin's approach was controversial from the outset and caused a split among the "Benderly Boys." Epitomizing the new approach was Dushkin's decision not to establish his own model schools, but rather to award grants to a handful of existing institutions to act as laboratories for schools that subscribed to their particular movement or ideological orientation. Isaac Berkson, whose 1936 study of New York Jewish education became the basis for the 1939 reorganization, was an adamant supporter of the community school model, and felt strongly that the new communal agency should run its own experimental schools.
The controversy between Dushkin and Berkson was well known at the time. Recently processed JEC papers reveal, however, that the debate remained very much alive throughout the 1940s. Members of Dushkin's staff had serious misgivings about his policy. Many were committed Hebraists who were shaken by the decline of the Talmud Torahs and hostile to the congregational schools with their reduced program and alleged lack of commitment to Hebrew language instruction. This faction's case was strengthened by the JEC's mixed record in promoting experimentation in designated laboratory schools. On the other side of the ideological spectrum were some prominent members of the JEC board of directors, who conceptualized Jewish education primarily as religious education and resisted Dushkin's efforts to prop up the Talmud Torahs. Using this internal debate as a backdrop, this paper will analyze the extent to which the JEC's trans-denominational agenda and ability to respond to changing communal needs were held hostage by the ideological convictions of its staff and lay leadership.
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II. Sample Session Proposal (Roundtable)
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish Translations of the Bible
The quantity and diversity of contemporary Jewish translations of the Bible into modern languages, especially English, are unprecedented. Moreover, these versions are
being packaged and used in an increasingly varied number of contexts, including synagogues, educational institutions, and study groups. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to explore these issues in some detail at an annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies. I propose a roundtable, consisting of myself as chair and respondent and with the following four individuals making presentations: Naomi Seidman (Graduate Theological Union), Frederick Greenspahn (Florida Atlanta University), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Gratz College), and Gary Rendsburg (Rutgers University). Under this format each speaker will make a presentation, after which I will respond and then open the discussion to both speakers and the audience.
Seidman's paper will deal with the past, in order to provide some context. In particular, the ancient translator/reviser Aquila will be singled out, with emphasis on differing evaluations of his largely word-for-word translation method and its relevance for later Bible translating among Jews. Greenspahn's paper will cover aspects of Jewish translations at present, both in terms of the texts available and the uses made of these texts within major denominations in America. Fundamental commonalties, as well as significant differences, will be highlighted.
The last two presentations will offer differing approaches as possible frameworks for future Jewish Bible translators. Rendsburg's approach advocates strict adherence to the Hebrew, especially in difficult passages, so as to allow English readers to encounter the ancient text in as close and direct a manner as possible. Rosenbaum looks to the medieval practice of surrounding biblical texts with rabbinic commentaries as a model for presenting a new, unified translation of the Hebrew Bible in the electronic age.
These four presentations, along with my response and further discussion, are not intended to be comprehensive; rather, they can serve as a springboard for extended consideration of the continuing role of Bible translation within the Jewish community and the direction or directions future versions may take.
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III. Sample Session Proposal (Panel)
Images of Travel in Poland From the First World War to the Shoah
This panel seeks to analyze images of travel to Poland written in Yiddish and German between the First World War and the Shoah. In so doing, it seeks to frame in a new comparative context questions of how Jewish writers wrote about Jewish life in Poland, and how, in turn, their experiences shaped their writing. To be sure, this problem has been dealt with in the past - by Steven Aschheim in his ground-breaking study “Brothers and Strangers” (1982), by Leah Garrett in her recent study of Yiddish travel narratives, “Journeys Beyond the Pale “ (2003), and others. This panel differs in two respects. First, it sets differing images of travel through Poland in a comparative context by including writers who worked in Yiddish and others who worked in German. These writers were, moreover, based in three different regions - the U.S., Germany, and Russia. Second, the panel crosses disciplinary boundaries by including papers from the fields of literary studies (Skolnik, Grossman) and history (Finder), and a respondent from anthropology (Kugelmass).
Jonathan Skolnik's paper focuses on Alfred Deblin's “Journey to Poland “ (1926), situating that text within a wider German-Jewish "literature of discovery" of Eastern Jewish life after World War I. Skolnik further relates Deblin's portrayal of Polish Jewry to the images of masses and crowds in his novels “Wallenstein” (1920) and “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929), showing that such images were for him emblematic of modernity and urban life. Gabriel Finder turns to the American Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein, suggesting that his two novels, Ven “Yash is geforn” (When Yash Went, 1938) and Ven Yash is gekumen ( “When Yash Came”, 1940), published after his 1934 trip to Poland, enrich our understanding of the period with their insights, often expressed symbolically, into the emotional lives and sensibilities of Polish Jews in the turbulent decade before the Shoah. The novels further mark a caesura in Glatstein's work, which by the mid-1930s became preoccupied with the fate of the Jewish people. Where Skolnik focuses on German and Finder on Yiddish, Jeffrey Grossman draws on texts from both contexts, exploring how the Yiddish writer An-ski and the German Jewish writers Arnold Zweig and Joseph Roth present Polish Jewry in the wake of World War I. Grossman focuses specifically on how cultural position helps shape each writer's perception of Polish Jewry and the war itself. Noting the important differences between Yiddish and German writers, Grossman argues further that all three writers share as a problem the position of the intellectual seeking to describe the broader Polish Jewish population in a period of duress.
Their disciplinary differences notwithstanding, all the panelists seek to explore how various writers constructed images of Polish Jewry that varied with the foreknowledge they brought to their subject, and with the ideas they sought to promote for their target audiences. The panel thus seeks to open new paths for analyzing the images of travel across various Jewish contexts, while also exploring points of contact among the disciplines for studying Jewish culture.
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IV. Sample Session Proposal (Panel)
Place, Voice, Vision: Israel Inside/Out
Few countries but Israel has had its cultural identity produced from inside and outside its actual borders. For decades an amalgam of Jewish diasporic longing and Zionist idealism, Israel's image and cultural position has become a construction of its internal mix of peoples, a polity that is poised, as Jews have been for millennia, between and within European and Islamic worlds.
This panel of four papers considers the representation of Israel as place through several media and genres. Central to our concern is the plurality of audiences. Like the global Jewish diaspora, the fictive homogeneity mythologized outside of the modern nation state belies Israel's diverse population. Everyone inside Israel knows all too well its diversity and schisms, while yearning and trying to project political and cultural unity. This diversity is evident in its cultural production, from the utopian preoccupations and polemics of the Yishuv to the more contentious arts of contemporary singers, poets, photographers, playwrights and visual artists. In part, the our purpose is to explore the terms and limits of utopian/dystopian cultural production and the problematic of what Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi in Booking Passage calls the insistence on an "exact correspondence between map and territory...between the Jerusalem of prayer and dream and desire and the Jerusalem of its citizens and traffic jams&the struggle between utopian and pragmatic negotiations with place in modern Israel." How does a culture invent or represent itself in the face of its own diversity? When does pluralism degenerate into sectarianism? When is it appropriate to relinquish utopian dreams in the name of vibrant cultural exchange and heterogeneity? Raising this question through a range of periods, media, and genres will open discussions of Israel's cultural pluralism and its challenges.
The panel presenters include: Shelley Hornstein (York University), who will speak on a family collection of Palestine/Israel postcards dating from the 1930s to the 1990s; Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (Hebrew University), who will discuss Jerusalem as metaphor (featuring the poetry of Yehuda Halevi and Yehuda Amichai); Carol Zemel (York University), who will explore recent images of Israel by photographer Aliza Auerbach (including pictures published in Amichai's Jerusalem); Amy Horowitz (Ohio State University), who will speak of about the popular Mizrahi music of Zehava Ben. Taken together, these papers consider both high and mass cultural forms in architecture, literature, music and the visual arts, made by well-known and anonymous practitioners who themselves to constitute Israel's diversity.
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