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Leading Scholars from Around the World Discuss: Growing Up Jewish
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Panel Discussion
Co-sponsored by Center for Jewish History This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Admission: $15 |
Samuel Kassow:
Youth Movements
Miriam Udel:
Socialist Literature for Jewish Children in the U.S. and the Soviet Union
Naomi Seidman:
Max Weinreich’s work on the Psychology of Jewish Adolescence
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett:
Painted Memories of My Father's Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust
Before World War II, Jewish culture blossomed throughout Eastern Europe and in the growing Ashkenazi diaspora. Scholars Samuel Kassow, Miriam Udel, Naomi Seidman, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will discuss the lives of children in this Jewish world.
About the Speakers
Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. Her research interests include Yiddish modernism, genre studies, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016), winner of a National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. She is preparing an annotated, translated anthology of Yiddish children’s literature called Honey on the Page, slated to appear with New York University Press.
Naomi Seidman is the Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Her first book, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 1997; her second, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation, in 2006. A third, The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature, is forthcoming in July. She is presently working on a study of the founding of Bais Yaakov in interwar Poland.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler), among others. Her edited volume Writing a Modern Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Salo W. Baron won a National Jewish Book Award. They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt) won two Canadian Jewish book awards. She was honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 2015 and will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in June 2017, and was honored with the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. She was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the President of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and is serving as a consultant on museum and exhibition projects in the United States, Lithuania, and Israel (National Library of Israel’s new permanent exhibition).
