Below the Line: The Feuilleton & Modern Jewish Cultures Conference

DAY 1 SCHEDULE                           DAY 2 SCHEDULE                           CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

When: October 21-22, 2018

Where: Day 1: 168 Dulles Hall & Day 2: Ohio Union - Hayes Cape Room

What do Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, Ilya Ehrenburg, Leah Goldberg and Antoni Słonimski all have in common?

These Jewish writers all wrote feuilletons: entertaining essays, sketches, satires and stories that appeared “below the line” in newspapers. The feuilleton was a key site for discussions of national character, portraits of urban life, and cultural and aesthetic innovation and experimentation. This conference will explore feuilletons in many different languages and their connections to modern Jewish cultures.

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Tentative Schedule:

Sunday, October 21 - 168 Dulles Hall

4:00pm           Welcome - Tamar Rudavsky

                       Roundtable Discussion: How to Write a Feuilleton...

• Discussant: Shachar Pinsker
• Discussant: Naomi Brenner
• Discussant: Matthew Handelman
• Chair: Paul Reitter

6:30pm           Dinner

Note for Sunday session: Papers circulated in advance. Please email Naomi Brenner at brenner.108@osu.edu to receive a copy of the papers

 

Conference Participants

 

Olga Borovaya

Olga Borovaya holds an MA in Romance Linguistics from Moscow State University and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, Taube Center for Jewish Studies. She is a co-organizer and contributor to The Digitized Ladino Library at the Sephardic Studies Project at Stanford University (Ladino.Stanford.edu).

Borovaya has taught Sephardi History and Ladino Literature at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, UC Davis, and other American universities. Her research focuses on Sephardi history and Ladino print culture in the Ottoman Empire. Borovaya is the author of numerous articles on Sephardi culture and three books: Modernization of a Culture: Belles Lettres and Theater of Ottoman Jews at the Turn of the 20th Century (Moscow, 2005); Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2011); The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2017). Currently, she is working on a book project that deals with the blood libel in Rhodes in 1840 and its representation in Jewish sources.

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Naomi Brenner

Naomi Brenner is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Culture at the Ohio State University.  Her work focuses on issues of multilingualism, circulation and translation in modern Jewish literature and culture. She has published Lingering Bilingualism (Syracuse University Press, 2016) as well as a variety of articles on translation, women's writing and intersections between Hebrew and Yiddish. Her current project examines the emergence of popular fiction in Jewish literatures.

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Jordan Finkin

Jordan Finkin is Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A specialist in modern Jewish literatures he is the author of several books as well as numerous scholarly essays and articles. His most recent book, Exile as Home, explores the work of the Yiddish poet Leyb Naydus. His translation of Leyb Rashkin’s novel The People of Godlbozhits appeared last year.

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Daniel Frank
Dr. Frank's primary field of research is the history, literature, and doctrines of the Karaites, an ancient Jewish sect which does not accept the authority of the Talmud.  His other areas of expertise include medieval Jewish history, literature, and culture especially Judeo-Arabic literature and biblical exegesis. Before coming to OSU, Dr. Frank spent twelve years in England as a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University.  He served as the Reviews Editor for the Journal of Jewish Studies for four years. Among his publications are Search Scripture Well: Karaite Exegetes and the Origins of the Jewish Bible Commentary in the Islamic East (Brill, 2004) and two edited volumes: The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity (Brill, 1995); (with Matt Goldish), Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times (Wayne State, 2008).

 

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Matthew Handelman

Matthew Handelman is an Assistant Professor of German and a member of the Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities at MSU. His research interests include German-Jewish literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century, the intersections of science, mathematics and culture in German-speaking countries, as well as the digital humanities and the history of technology. His first book, The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press (expected publication 2019). It explores the underdeveloped possibilities of mathematics for critical theory, focusing on how mathematics helped Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer navigate the intellectual crises facing German Jews during the Weimar Republic. A second book project, which explores the synthesis of the digital and the humanities through the philosophical question of judgment, is also in the works. Matthew has published on these topics, as well as others, in international journals such as The Germanic Review, Scientia Poetica and The Leo Baeck Yearbook.

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Roni Henig

Roni Henig received her PhD in Hebrew and comparative literature from Columbia University in 2018. She is currently a full-time lecturer in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include language politics, multilingualism, modern Jewish literatures, dysfluency studies, the critique of nationalism, subjectivity and subjectivation, concepts of performativity and translation studies. Her work has been acknowledged by the American Comparative Literature Association, which has awarded her essay “Stammering Hebrew: Y.H. Brenner’s Deferred Beginnings” with the 2017 A. Owen Aldridge prize.

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Brian Horowitz

Brian Horowitz is the Sizeler Family Endowed Professor at Tulane University. He has written on Russian Jews and Zionism. He has just finished a book on the Russian Zionist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a radical rightist.

 

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Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson is a PhD student in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. His research interests include 20th- and 21st-century German and Yiddish literature; the cultural history of Central Europe; and translation theory. He previously studied in Berlin, New York, and Vilnius.

 

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Robin Judd

Professor Judd teaches Modern Jewish history, German History, The Holocaust, and Women’s History. Professor Judd is the author of, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, (Cornell University Press 2007). Her new project is Love at the Zero Hour: European War Brides, GI Husbands, and European Strategies for Reconstruction. She has received several grants and awards including the College of Humanities' Virginia Hull Research Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend, the Coca Cola Grant for Critical Difference, and the 2001 Clio award for teaching. She has presented her work in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

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Lital Levy

Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She specializes in contact zones of Hebrew and Arabic within literature, cultural studies, and intellectual history, and is the author of Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine.

 

 

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Shachar Pinsker

Shachar Pinsker is Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion and the Hebrew University. He is the author of A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 20118), and Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2011.  He the editor of Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (Magnes Press, forthcoming, 2018), Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores (Wayne State University, 2016), and the co-editor of Hebrew, Gender and Modernity (University of Maryland Press, 2007). , He is currently completing a book on Yiddish in Israeli literature

 

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Paul Reitter

Reitter’s scholarship focuses primarily on two areas: German-Jewish culture and the history of higher education. Of particular concern in both cases have been the links between intellectual and institutional history, the relationship of cultural crisis and cultural innovation, and the effects of technological change on humanistic culture. A practicing translator, Reitter is also interested in the field of translation studies. He is the author of three books. The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U of Chicago Press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton UP, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015).

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Eli Rosenblatt

Eli Rosenblatt received his PhD in Jewish Studies from UC-Berkeley in 2017. His dissertation, titled “Enlightening the Skin: Travel, Racial Language and Rabbinic Intertextuality in Modern Yiddish Literature,” examines the politics and form of Jewish travel narrative in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. His most recent publication, about the first Yiddish adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, appears in “Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook” (Routledge, 2018.) Currently, Eli is an affiliate of the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University, where he is working on a book about Jewish literature and racial politics in four urban complexes: Paramaribo, Kiev, Johannesburg and Chicago. He has taught at Berkeley, George Washington University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

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Tamar Rudavsky

T.M. Rudavsky is Professor of Philosophy. She specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy and has edited three volumes: Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Perspectives(1984), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition (1995); along with Steven Nadler, she is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (Jan, 2009). Her volume Time Matters: Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy appeared in 2000. Her most recent book (2010) on Maimonides has appeared in the "Great Minds" series with Blackwell-Wiley Press. Her major research continues to focus on issues connected to philosophical cosmology in medieval Jewish and scholastic thought.

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Martina Steer

Martina Steer is a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute of New York University. She teaches modern Jewish history at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Bertha Badt-Strauss. Eine jüdische Publizistin (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005) and Margarete Susman und die Frage der Frauenemanzipation (Bochum: Winkler, 2001) and number of volumes and articles on Jewish history, collective memory, and cultural transfer. Her new book, a transnational history of the commemoration of Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, Poland and the United States will be published in 2019. She is currently working on a social and emotional history of Jewish women in Germany and Austria after 1945.

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Laura Wiseman

Professor Laura Wiseman is a member of the Faculty of Education and Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the Koschitzky Family Chair of Jewish Teacher Education. Her doctorate and primary research are in layers of Hebrew language and literature, with an accent on the influence and effects of intertextual echoes.

 

 

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CONFERENCE SPONSORS:

The Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
Melton Center for Jewish Studies
Department of Germanic Langauges and Literatures
Diann and Thomas Mann Symposium Fund
The American Academy of Jewish Research