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Introduction: New Media/New World/New Jews?
February 17, 2009
The past century has witnessed the advent of a series of new communications technologies, from sound recordings and silent film to the Internet an array of digital media. By looking at the experiences of American Jews with these new technologies and the media practices they engender, what can we learn about their impact on religious life?
Cantors on Trial: Sacred Music and Stardom
February 19, 2009
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new medium—sound recordings—helped transform the cantor from a spiritual messenger into a celebrity performer. With the advent of "talking" motion pictures a generation later, stories about cantors portrayed them as exemplars of American Jewry, negotiating the demands of religious tradition and the lure of modern culture.
Turning on The Eternal Light: Jews, Christians, and the National Airwaves
February 24, 2009
At the end of World War II, original radio dramas about Jewish history that were aired on national networks provided Judaism with a new prominence in the American public sphere and positioned Jews as America’s archetypal minority in a Christian nation as The United States forged a new vision of pluralism in the first postwar decades.
"The Scar without the Wound": America's Civil Religion of Holocaust Remembrance
February 26, 2009
The Holocaust looms large in America's moral landscape, even though few of its citizens directly experienced Nazi persecutions. Films, broadcasts, sound recordings, museum displays, and tourist practices have been instrumental in establishing the Holocaust so prominently in this nation's public culture, by adapting the protocols of established religious practices, including inspirational dramas, rituals, moral instruction, pilgrimages, and monuments.
Observing Rites: Videotaping Life-cycle Celebrations
March 10, 2009
Over the past several decades, video has had a remarkable impact on planning, enacting, and recollecting rituals associated with birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. At times, videos have even become an integral component of the ritual experience itself, which some participants deem incomplete until they have witnessed the ritual's video-documentation.
The December Dilemma: Jews and Christmas
March 12, 2009
Responding to December 25 as a national as well as religious holiday has been a challenge for American Jews for generations. Through an array of media practices—including journalism, greeting cards, and television programs—the December dilemma has inspired a remarkable array of Jewish media practices through which they engage larger issues of religious and cultural difference during a season of celebrating universal optimism.
The Virtual Rebbe: Outreach and Messianism among Lubavitcher Hasidim
March 17, 2009
Today no Jewish religious group makes more expansive and provocative use of communications media than Lubavitcher (Chabad) hasidim. Through broadcasts, video, and the Internet, this ultra-Orthodox Jewish community seeks to promote greater religious observance among other Jews and to maintain a relationship with its charismatic leader, who died in 1994 but left an extensive legacy of media documenting his life and teachings.
The People of the eBook?: Contemplating the Future of Text Practices in the Digital Age
March 19, 2009
How will new digital media transform the literacy and text practices of Jewish religious life? Looking back at the impact of print on prayer and devotional study informs the questions to ask about the current revolution in text transmission, literacy, and practice.
This event is co-sponsored by the Judaica collection, UCB Main library.
Dr. Moshe Goultschin is presently lecturing in the Department of Hebrew Literature and the Center for Yiddish Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Goultschin has published articles on modern Hebrew literature and Yiddish literature, theories of discourse, aesthetics and hermeneutics and the phenomenology of culture.
Opening remarks and moderation by Dr James A. Donahue
President and Professor of Ethics, Graudate Theological Union
Lecturers:
Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian-American Studies, UC Davis
"Speaking of Islamophobia: How, Why, When"
David Biale, Professor of History, UC Davis
"Judeophobia and Antisemitism: Mythological Motifs"
Presented by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union.
There are many levels and byways of cultural memory in Genesis, including legendary topography, the cultic retrieval of memory, counter-memories, mnemo-history, and the necessity of collective forgetting. This talk will focus on the story of Jacob's dream (Genesis 28) to explore these themes of memory.
Bernard Avishai's lecture, "The Hebrew Republic," should be of compelling interest to anyone concerned about the future of Israel and the prospects for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Avishai, who has written frequently on Israel in The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and other prominent journals, is an unblinking critic of many aspects of Israeli policy and of the current legal and political arrangements of the Israeli state. Though his perspective of critique comes from the Left, he has also been deeply engaged in the business community and in practical issues of globalization. In his new book, from which the lecture is drawn, he makes a series of fresh proposals about how Israel, as an information-based economy, needs to be integrated with an emerging Palestinian state as it is already integrated with Europe.
9:30 a.m. – Noon Moderator: Chana Kronfeld
• Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan
Jewish Bilingualism as a Mirror of Class Struggle: Meir Wiener's History of Yiddish Literature and Soviet Marxist Theory
• Roni Gechtman, Mount Saint Vincent University
The Jewish Labor Bund, National-Cultural Autonomy, and the Jews' Position in the "Symphony of Nations"
• Allison Schachter, Vanderbilt University
Resexualizing Jewish Modernity: Gender and Jewish Modernism
• Barbara Henry, University of Washington
The Pale of Settlement as Wild West
• Robert Adler Peckerar, UC Berkeley
Serkele Logic: Language Confusion, Class, and Gender in the First Modern Yiddish Play
Michael Alpert (voice, accordion, violin, guitar, percussion) has been a pioneering figure in the current renaissance
of East European Jewish klezmer music for over 25 years, and is internationally known for his performances and recordings
with Brave Old World, Khevrisa, Kapelye, David Krakauer, Itzhak Perlman and others. Raised in a Yiddish-speaking home,
he is considered the finest traditional Yiddish singer of his generation, and is noted for his original Yiddish songs
on contemporary themes. Alpert was the Emmy Award-winning musical director of the PBS Great Performances special "Itzhak
Perlman: In the Fiddler's House" (1996 Emmy and Rose d'Or Awards) and its subsequent concert tours, and executive producer
of the Perlman / Klezmer CDs.
• Michael Miller, Central European University
From Curse Word to Badge of Honor: Cultural Zionism and the Reclaiming Jargon in the Habsburg Monarchy
• Bluma Goldstein, UC Berkeley
Franz Kafka, 1911-1912: Jargon, Jargontheater, and Literature of a Small Nation
• Naomi Shulman, UC Berkeley
Paul Celan's Language Crossings: Reading the Yiddish Intertext of "Near, In the Aorta's Arch"
• Naomi Seidman, Graduate Theological Union
The New Testament as Yikhes-Briv: Christian Evangelism, Yiddish Modernism, and the Jewish Jesus
John Schott is well-known as a guitarist and composer working in the boundaries between jazz and new music. His 14 CDs include Shuffle Play (New World), In These Great Times (Tzadik), and, with TJ Kirk, If Four Was One, which was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1996. Accompanied by John Hanes on drums and electronics and Jess Ivry on cello and voice, this Grammy Award nominee will perform new music derived in great part from the speech of Y. L. Peretz inaugurating the "Symphony of Nations" in Czernowitz.