The Viennese critic Karl Kraus declared that "psychoanalysis was the disease of assimilated German-speaking Jews, Eastern European Jews make do with diabetes." This lecture will trace what Freud meant for Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, who in fact did catch the Freudian "disease" in the interwar period, when Freud was a regular staple of the Yiddish press and lecturers traveled through Poland satisfying the "Freud craze" that gripped Jewish society and beyond.
Naomi Seidman is the Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto. Her fifth book, Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish, appeared in 2024 and emerged from the Taubman Lectures she delivered in 2019 at the Magnes Collection for Jewish Life and Art. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Her 2022 podcast, Heretic in the House, won a Signal Award.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025 @ 5:00-6:30pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
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