2023 Winter Program

Course List · January 10 – 27, 2023

American Yiddish Short Stories

Instructor: Anita Norich

In each of these six sessions, we will read a Yiddish writer (in English translation) who came to the U.S. and reflected both on the European past and American present and future. We’ll spend a day each on Tsilye Dropkin, Blume Lempel, Moyshe Nadir, Lamed Shapiro, Fradl Shtok, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.  The first five authors have been translated fairly recently and we’ll ask why and how they’ve been translated. We’ll also ask how they fit into or change our sense of Yiddish literary history. Some stories are humorous, some may be shocking. Taken together, they underscore the extraordinary range and sophistication of Yiddish story stories.

Treblinka and Its Contexts – Past and Present

Instructor: Elżbieta Janicka

A Jewish town, a Polish village, a German Nazi camp archipelago located within walking distance of one another, connected by a road built out of the matzevot… This seminar proposes to follow that road in time and space. Our ground of investigation will be – respectively – Kosów Lacki where the matzevot come from, Wólka Okrąglik and Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries among which the most numerous were Jews of Poland.

We will retrace prewar, wartime and postwar history of these sites until the present day. Our questioning will pertain to the interrelations between them. We will contextualize them geographically, topographically, socially, economically, politically and culturally (meaning also: religiously). We will ask what are the consequences of such a contextualization for the bigger picture. In other words: What stems from it for the description and understanding of the Holocaust?

Yet another question is how these sites look and what is going on there today. How does “Treblinka” function as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station (set up in 1887 under the Russian Empire, dismantled progressively after 2000 in the Republic of Poland) at Treblinka the village?

The Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable – however conducted with different tools – echoes the postwar Polish exploitation of Jewish ashes and other remains. This raises the question: Why doesn’t the present Polish state strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation?

We will investigate a variety of sources including the wartime collections of the Ringelblum Archive, Jewish Social Self-Relief (Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna, ŻSS) and The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Our reading list will encompass testimonies of the survivors as well as those who did not survive alongside the immediate postwar accounts produced and collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH). We will draw on the Kosów Lacki memorbuch as well as the documentation of the 1947 sculptural-architectural contest for and the 1964 erection of the Treblinka memorial – together with the scholarly literature and present-day iconography.

Visions of Continuity and Rupture: Franz Kafka, S. An-ski, Isaac Babel, and Joseph Roth

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

Between World War I and the onset of World War II, Jewish writers and thinkers in Eastern and Central Europe became acutely aware, perhaps more so than their Western European or American cousins, of the gathering forces of future catastrophe. They understood that cultural, social, as well as purely physical survival was at stake. From the visions of Franz Kafka to the more muted transformations in the work of Joseph Roth, these writers registered the profound threats to Jewish culture and historical memory.

In this class, we will examine works by four of the greatest of these writers: S. An-ski (1863-1920); Franz Kafka (1883-1924); Isaac Babel (1894-1939); and Joseph Roth (1894-1939). An-ski was born in what is now Belarus; Kafka in Prague; Babel and Roth, exact contemporaries, were born in Ukraine. We will examine the diaries of An-ski and Babel and Roth’s late novel Job to ask what these threats were and what recourses they imagined to preserve Jewish culture. How do we today evaluate the accuracy and value of their accounts? Are their visions still relevant to understanding Jewish history?

Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe

Instructor: Marek Tuszewicki

Within the context of East European Ashkenaz, the term ‘folk medicine’ refers to curiosities, particularly various non-medical methods of treatment, preserved in ethnographic sources of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this course, we will consider the question of Ashkenazi Jewish folk medicine in historical, cultural, and social contexts.

We will go beyond a narrow understanding of the term, removing the stigma of harmful superstition, to understand it in connection with other aspects of daily life. Why could the white pigeon be an effective remedy against jaundice? What was the "frog under the tongue", and which townspeople were the most proficient at folding broken limbs? We will try to find the logical (although not always obvious) rationale behind these ideas, taking into consideration such fundamental issues as religious traditions, daily activities, the division of gender roles, and contacts with the gentile population.

Folkways were rooted in the heritage of ancient (medieval, early-modern) medicine and the pre-modern morals bound it tightly with religious ideas and demonology. Our geographic interest will cover most of the lands inhabited by Ashkenazi Jewry in Eastern Europe: the Russian Empire (the Pale of Settlement), Austro-Hungary, Poland and Romania.

From Ashes to Ashes: Death in the Jewish Imagination

Instructor: Maya Balakirsky Katz

Death is the definitive end. Though, in practical terms, death also defines life. But however real, death is also mythical, creating an imaginary experience for the living. Representations of immortality shape mortality. Death has thus inspired entire cultures around it. While death is constant, it is reimagined anew in every generation. And, while death is universal, Jewish culture has generated unique customs and images surrounding the passage of life. Jewish attitudes towards death provide an understudied lens for studying the construction of identity, selfhood, and collective memory across various periods of Jewish history. Artistic themes and visual practices surrounding the spectacle of death, necro-politics, celebrity funerals, and different modes of death (e.g., execution, suicide, martyrdom) reflect and indelibly mark Jewish history. 

This course is thematic. Each class explores the meanings of a broad range of artistic and functional objects, rituals and customs related to dying and death, such as the transition from family crypts to community cemeteries, the customs of preparation of the body and the grave, the advent of funerals, the rituals of mourning and commemoration, and artistic representations of the afterlife and the anticipation of the messianic rising of the dead.

History of the Yiddish Language

Instructor: Dovid Katz

Starting with the rise of Ashkenazic civilization, this course will begin by focusing in on early Yiddish in a society with three Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish) and will pivot to the origin and development of Yiddish per se, alongside west-to-east migration precipitated by the Crusades and other episodes of violent intolerance.

The cultural dialectology of Yiddish and (mostly) Eastern Ashkenazic history will be discussed, with a long period of East European tolerance punctuated by massacres and false messiahs. These were followed by Hasidism, demographic explosion, and the rise of modern literary genres, followed by later 19th century political polarization linked to contemporary revolutionary movements ranging from Socialism and revolution at the left, to Zionism at the nationalist end of the spectrum. The twentieth century creation and achievements of modern Yiddish institutions, Yiddish-Hebrew battles, and the internal conflicts centered on religion, politics, culture, or aspects of dialects, standard language, vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling. Discussion of the sociology of Yiddish with reference to the recurring phenomena of love and hate for the language. Attempts to come to grips with the varying conceptualizations of Yiddishism. Summary of twenty-first century Yiddish debates will include the advent of the new Hasidic period. The final session will include a survey of current Hasidic magazines alongside analysis of the contemporary secular scene (popular as well as academic), with discussion of the decades ahead.

‘Israel’s Moment’: A History of the Establishment of the State of Israel

Instructor: Jeffrey Herf

When the State of Israel was born, support for the Zionist project was strongest among liberals and left-leaning politicians and journalists in both New York City and in the U.S. Congress, as well as the Soviet Union. The most intense opposition at the time arose from leaders of the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the British Foreign Office. In this course, we will consider the important debates in the United Nations about the Partition Plan, the arms embargo, and details of truce resolutions and borders during the war of 1948. Students will also learn how to access important, now declassified documents of the State Department, and the CIA, and how to use the United Nations Official Documents System to examine UN records. Students will also read more recent historical scholarship on the events before, during and after the establishment of the Jewish state. The course will also touch upon Nazi antagonism to the Zionist project, and the history and significance of the collaboration with the Nazi regime by leading Arab nationalists and Islamists.

In view of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel this coming May, this course is particularly timely as it offers both a fresh look at these events, as well as a challenge to misconceptions about who supported and who opposed the Zionist project.

The Birth of the Jewish Novel: La Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Quixote de la Mancha

Instructor: Ilan Stavans

This course offers an exploration of the origins of the Jewish novel in Spain after the expulsion in 1492 and the world of so-called marranos. By delving into the sensibility of cristianos nuevos, conversos, and crypto-Jews, the course will discern the role of fiction as a tool of social critique, entertainment, and mimesis.

Three novels will be discussed in English translation: The tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, commonly known as La Celestina (1499), attributed to Fernando de Rojas; the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554); and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605-1615).

Clothing, Crime and Class Conflict: Jews in the Shmate Trade

Instructor: Tony Michels

A century ago, Jews dominated the garment industry as manufacturers, contractors, workers, union leaders, hired thugs, and in most other capacities. What drew Jews to the clothing business? Why was it so volatile? How did it become a hotbed of social protest? And what did it have to do with the rise of Hollywood? This course will explore these and other questions through autobiography, poetry, and historical analysis.

Jews and Photography

Instructor: Maya Benton

The questions, “What is Jewish Art?" and "Is there such a thing as Jewish Art?” have been debated by art historians and Jewish studies scholars for centuries. In recent decades, a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, critics, and curators have noted the preponderance of Jewish photographers who have shaped the medium. What is the role – and what are the limits – of Jewish biography and Jewish identity in understanding the work of Jewish photographers?

In each of these six sessions, we will explore the unique contribution of Jews to shaping the history and medium of photography, including the practice of image-making, the establishment of photo agencies and the transmission, editing, and dissemination of images, and photography as visual activism. In richly illustrated presentations and lively class discussions, topics under consideration will include, but are not exhausted by: photography as anti-fascism, with a focus on Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim's photographs fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War; Holocaust Trauma and Memory, with a focus on examining the perpetrator, bystander, and victim photographers of Nazi ghettos in shaping visual records, Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of the liberation of concentration camps, and Roman Vishniac's images of Jewish life in 1930s Central and Eastern Europe; Jewish women photographers in Weimar Germany and interwar Europe; iconic images of the American Civil Rights Movement made by Jewish photographers and Jewish visual activism, with a focus on the work of Jill Freedman, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Danny Lyon, and Gillian Laub; vernacular photography and the imagined future of a Vernacular Jewish Photography Archive.

Readings will include previous attempts – often deeply problematic missteps – to pose and answer the question, “Why are so many of the great photographers Jewish?,” and we will explore alternate approaches and theories to the question. Is there such a thing as a Jewish photograph, or, as some have claimed, a "Jewish sensibility" in photography? Jewish photographers' engagements with the photographic image will be explored in relationship to exile, diaspora and immigration, political art intended to affect social change, artistic communities and notions of kinship, antisemitism directed towards Jewish photographers, gender and sexuality, photojournalism, modernism, and visual cultural theory, Zionism and anti-Zionism, Jewish family albums, the role (and absence) of non-Ashkenazi photo histories, and the imagination of possible futures.

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