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News and Events
Fall 2012 Semester Events
Lavy Colloquium, October 15 and 16 2012:
Yiddish After the Catastrophe: 1935-to the Present
What "goes without saying" in the contemporary status of the Yiddish language and its culture is the degree to which it has been shaped and determined by the cataclysms of the 20th century; both the philosophical condition and the demographic statistics of Yiddish have been constituted by events that in any language are essentially unnamable and therefore unspeakable. How, then, does Yiddish provide a discourse for confronting these historical traumas, and to what extent can an understanding of trauma as such contribute to an understanding of the ways in which Yiddish continues to persist in the contemporary moment? This interdisciplinary conference will consider the recent history of Yiddish culture through a variety of topics and methodologies: the significance of modern Yiddish literature written after the rise of totalitarianism and the Holocaust, by figures such as Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jacob Glatstein, and Chaim Grade; the confinement of Yiddish as an everyday vernacular among ultra-Orthodox, particularly Hasidic, Jews; the institutional history of Yiddish scholarship; the preservation and transformation of Yiddish memory via contemporary technologies; the problems and possibilities created by Yiddish nostalgia, the echoes of Yiddish in other languages, the uses of Yiddish in popular culture, and the symbolic status of Yiddish among non-Yiddish speakers. Through this array of subjects and diversity of approaches, the participants can hope to establish a critical understanding of contemporary Yiddish culture as well as the interconnectedness of Yiddish scholarship in all its dimensions.
The Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program is pleased to announce that Professor Steven Harvey will be joining us as the Crane visiting professor for the Spring 2012 semester.
Steven Harvey is Professor of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, and former chair of Jewish Philosophy. He is President of the Commission for Jewish Philosophy of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale. He has published extensively on the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers, with special focus on Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle and on the influence of the Islamic philosophers on Jewish thought. He is the author of Falaquera’s Epistle of the Debate: An Introduction to Jewish Philosophy (1987) and editor of The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy (2000) and Anthology of the Writings of Avicenna (2009, in Hebrew). He received his PhD from Harvard University with a specialization in Jewish philosophy and intellectual history and Islamic philosophy.
FELLOWSHIPS
Congratulations to Professor Yitzhak Melamed, Department of Philosophy. Dr. Melamed is the recipient of three fellowships, NEH, ACLS Burkhardt Residential Fellowship and the Humboldt Research Fellowship to conduct research on Spinoza and German Idealism.
FORTHCOMING BOOKS
How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative from in Peripheral Modernisms, Professor Marc Caplan's first book will be published this September by Stanford University Press. Professor Caplan in the Zelda adn Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures.
