Literatures of Jewish Secularism and Secularization
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA
August 1-10, 2011
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Seminar Leaders
The 2011 seminar was led by Rachel Rubinstein, (Hampshire College), Naomi Seidman, (Graduate Theological Union), and other faculty. The program consisted of lectures, discussion of readings, presentations of participants' research, and cultural programs. Time was reserved for fellows to work on their own research.
2011 Seminar Fellows and Research Topics
Debra Caplan, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University
In the Temple of Art: The Vilna Troupe and the Interwar Yiddish Art Theater Movement
In spite of a significant expansion of Yiddish theater scholarship in recent years, the history of the movement to create a high-art modernist theater in Yiddish has yet to be assessed. My dissertation aims to correct this scholarly lacuna by presenting the first study of the secular Yiddish art theater movement that flourished during the interwar period. My study will show how the dozens of Yiddish art theaters in Eastern Europe and America not only inspired the Jewish intelligentsia to turn to the theater as a vital source of secular Jewish cultural creativity, but also how the innovations of these theater companies caught the attention of influential figures around the globe. I argue that the spirit of innovation that characterized the artistic activities of the Yiddish art theaters and enabled them to become so influential was a direct product of the transnational nature of their movement. Operating in a Jewish cultural context unbounded by national borders, the success of these companies was propelled by a steady exchange of directors, actors, scenic designers, and critics between Poland and America, the two geographical centers of this movement. The transnational reach of the Yiddish art theaters is best exemplified by the Vilna Troupe, the primary catalyst for this movement and the focus of my study. Drawing upon the correspondence, essays, memoirs, and theatrical ephemera found in the archival collections of the members of the original Vilna Troupe, I will trace their career trajectories as agents of cultural transmission who carried and developed a transnational Yiddish art theater movement. By tracing the transnational trajectory of the Yiddish art theater movement through the activities of its dynamic and influential founding company, my dissertation aims to add an important missing chapter to our understanding of both secular modern Jewish culture and the modernist theater. Participating in the 2011 Posen Summer Seminar would add a strong theoretical foundation in modes of Jewish secularism to my research on the Yiddish art theater movement, which was an integral part of secular Jewish culture during the interwar period.
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Dr. Sarah Casteel, Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, Carleton University
"Calypso Jews": Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination
Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics have focused almost exclusively on the United States and are often inflected by contemporary tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Yet Jewish characters and themes also figure prominently in fiction, poetry and drama by a number of Caribbean, Caribbean diaspora, and Black Canadian writers. Additionally, theorists of the Caribbean diaspora ranging from Edward Wilmot Blyden and Aimé Césaire to Paul Gilroy have drawn inspiration from Jewish intellectual traditions and encounters with modernity. These Caribbean writers read Jewishness in predominantly secular and identificatory terms, invoking calamitous moments of Jewish history such as 1492 and the Holocaust in order to explore what Gilroy describes as the "knotted intersection of histories." Thus if narratives of Jewish historical experience inform conceptions of secular Jewishness, they also contribute to the articulation of contemporary Caribbean identities.
A central premise of this research project is that Caribbean invocations of traumatic episodes of Jewish history cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, and especially not through a paradigm that Michael Rothberg terms "competitive memory." Instead, such invocations need to be contextualized with reference to the specific histories of contact and entanglement—both material and symbolic—between Jewish and Black diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world. Accordingly, I argue for a transnational approach to the study of Black-Jewish literary dynamics as well as for a consideration of not only the Holocaust but also 1492 as a node of interdiasporic comparison. Such an approach reveals the alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation that become available when we widen our lens to encompass a broader African diaspora cultural landscape.
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Nathan Devir, Assistant Professor, Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Utah
The World as Midrash: Modern Jewish Cultures and the Re- envisioning of Tradition
A defining characteristic of secular Jewish literatures since the Haskalah, or the movement toward “Jewish Enlightenment” that began around the end of the eighteenth century, is the reliance upon the archetypal aspects of the Judaic tradition, together with a propensity for intertextual pastiche and dialogue with the sacred texts. In the domain of literary studies, however, the comparative aspects of such a rapport have not yet been analyzed, especially with respect to the interpretive differences in the composition of secular Judaic narratives across geo-political, linguistic, and gender-based paradigms.
To that end, this project presents a case study of the cultural variables of modern Judaic discourse through an archetypal analysis of selections from secular African, American, Asian, and European Judaic cultural production. By way of a careful examination of each writer’s exegetical responses to the long-held stories of the Judaic textual tradition (as found in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, and other celebrated, canonical works that are familiar to Jews the world over as symbolic points of reference), this study demonstrates the ways in which the modern interpretation of foundational Judaic narratives is codetermined by several key locational factors in each author’s particular sub-cultural worldview. These factors include: geo-political affiliation; attitudes regarding gender roles; and notions of ethnicity. Such factors create the conceptual frameworks through which Jewish writers from differing backgrounds reference, recast, re-envision, or subvert traditional and/or religious figures, themes, tropes, discourses, or narratives from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture. In the same way that the differences in those conceptual frameworks illustrate the sub-cultural schisms that exist between modern Jewish sub-groups, this study shows how such frameworks are also responsible for the varieties of aesthetic formulae that depict those schisms in the literary text.
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Dr. Jordan Finkin, Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew, Oxford University
Jerusalem and the Space of Diasporic Literature
Jerusalem persists in the Jewish imagination as that compelling (if at times infuriatingly stubborn) mix of religion and politics, faith and ideology. Long the axial center of Jewish geography to which all communities were reckoned as varying degrees of periphery, Jerusalem comes to be written of in far more complicated ways through the course of the modern period. This project investigates the image and uses of Jerusalem in modernist Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. Modernist writers, and especially poets, who as part of their secular cultural engagement pulled apart the ideological strands of the image of Jerusalem, paid particular attention to the metaphorical value of Jerusalem as a symbolic center of Jewish life. In many important cases they questioned that centrality by decoupling understandings of Jewish culture from a center–periphery model and by investigating the idea of home and homeland outside the Jerusalemite context.
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Dr. Olga Gershenson, Associate Professor, Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
My book is the first scholarly treatment of Holocaust representations on Soviet and Russian screens, 1938-2007 (over forty titles). It will put forgotten or unknown Soviet films on the map of international Holocaust cinema, recreate the cultural history of their production and reception, and compare them to European and American Holocaust films. The representation of the Holocaust in Russia is considered within three contexts that set it apart from Western films: the historical context of the Holocaust in the USSR; local representational tradition; and the context of Soviet censorship. Particular attention is paid to the representation of Judaism as religion as well as Jewishness as peoplehood and culture. The analysis shows the complexities of the memorial project in Russia, where memories of the Holocaust are competing with the more “universal” memory of the war.
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Dr. Jennifer Glaser, Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati
“Exceptional Differences: Race and the Postwar Jewish American Literary Imagination”
America’s move away from defining ethnicity through the trinity of Protestant-Catholic-Jew had vast repercussions for Jewish American writers and intellectuals. In “Exceptional Differences,” I construct a genealogy of Jewish American literary response to the shifting role of race in postwar America, focusing particularly on how the rise of discourses privileging racial difference challenged ideas of both Jewish American and American exceptionalism. This project centers on how Jewish writers and intellectuals responded both to America’s changing attitude toward cultural pluralism and racial difference after 1967 as well as to the imagined extinction of the Jewish “race” in America due to intermarriage, growing secularism, and many Jews’ lack of interest in maintaining a distinct identity apart from their national one.
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Shaina Hammerman, Ph.D. candidate, Graduate Theological Union
The Fantastic Hasid: A History of Secular Jewish Imagination
Debates about Jewish secularization generally revolve around intellectual developments, political affiliations, or waning religious practices. This project will contribute to those debates by suggesting another approach to the study of secularization, the way the Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox Jew figures in Ashkenazic Jewish imagination. Jewishness as a whole is consistently and disproportionately signaled and represented in film and fiction through the “visible” Jew. This image spans the intellectual, political, and religious realms and functions as a moving target—or floating signifier—for how secular Jews imagine themselves and their place in the modern world. Conceived of by nineteenth- century historians and reformers as a hindrance to the ultimate goal of integration, the figure of the religious Jew has been called upon for two centuries to signify the superstitious, the authentic, the comic, the tragic, the nostalgic, the shameful and often a combination of these conflicting sentiments.
This project investigates the curious persistence of the image of the Hasidic Jew in the artistic fantasies of filmmakers and authors as well as its symbolic life among readers and audiences. I will argue that the Hasidic fantasy has its own history which fulfills a key function in the dynamic of Jewish secularization even as it is conceived of as the very opposite of secular. Examining the growing instances of religious imagery next to the history of Jewish secularization offers a new dialectic for the study of modern Jewish history. Tracing the figure of the ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic figure through film and literature will historicize an image whose very power lies in its ahistorical quality.
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Dr. Daniel Itzkovitz, Associate Professor, English, Stonehill College
Fixing the Jews
My research project explores the recent reframing of Israel as a source for Jewish American ethnicity. After looking at the history of Jewish ethnicity, and the Jewish role in American cultural pluralism since World War II, I turn to debates about Birthright Israel, the richly funded, wildly successful movement to send young Jews to Israel for “re-ethnification,” in the words of Birthright Israel theorist David Mittleberg. Writing in direct response to the 1990 Jewish population survey and similar data, Mittelberg, and an increasing number of Jewish leaders over the past decade see an alternate path: a Diasporic Jewishness grounded specifically and directly in the state of Israel‐ —a Jewish Diaspora re‐framed with the help of heritage tourism, with Israel now standing as a direct referent thanks to the ethnic pilgrimage. “The visit to Israel” becomes as Mittelberg explains, the most “important agent of Jewish ethnicity.” Mittleberg argues that Israel be transformed from “an ‘overseas’ philanthropic allocation”—buying Israel bonds, donating to Hadassah, etc.—to “an integral part of [young people’s] lives.” I am interested in thinking about this reframing in the broader context of Jewish American culture over the past two decades, and recent struggles in Israel over the limits and meanings of Jewish and Israeli identities.
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Enrico Lucca, Visiting Research Fellow, The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Quest for a Secularism out of the sources of Jewish tradition. Reflections and Problems drawing on some Gershom Scholem’s notes.
I am interested in theories of Jewish secularization that reflect on the dialectical relation between religion and the secular. With this respect, in my research I will focus on some published and unpublished notes Gershom Scholem has devoted to secularization, Zionism, and the future of the Hebrew language. I will try to examine them with the help of a hermeneutical analysis in order to highlight their importance within Scholem’s scholarship.
After presenting Scholem’s position, I would first compare his vision with the broader philosophical and cultural debate on secularization and modernity that took place in Germany after the Weimar crisis (particularly considering the case of Hans Blumenberg and Karl Löwith). In this regard, I would like to discuss what is peculiar of Scholem’s theory and whether his convictions, although confined to a Jewish context, could provide elements for a better philosophical understanding of the relation between secularism and religion. I will also deal with some political insights of Scholem’s perspective, seeing if it can shed a more critical light on the different positions that form the theological-political discourse emerging in the Israeli society with the foundation of the State.
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Zia Miric, Ph.D. candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Minority Patriots and Nationalist Cosmopolitans: Israel Zangwill and Late- Victorian & Edwardian Anglo-Jewish Culture
Even though they for the most part had no clear territorial attachment to the Land of Israel as a lost or desired political entity in distinction from their country of residence, in the course of the nineteenth century British Jews increasingly recognized themselves as part of a world Jewish community, where the emerging global Jewish public sphere combined with ancient messianic hopes to forge religious internationalism expressed both in affect and activism. British Jews fashioned an extraterritorial national culture, on a par with portable British culture, thereby affirming their presence in the British empire and asserting their solidarity with the world Jewish diaspora. In this arena literary culture interlocked with economic and political transformations of a multi-ethnic nation-state into a global empire, with its Jewish minority gradually seeing itself as the forefront of the international humanitarian mission across the British empire and world Jewries.
My dissertation traces the dialogue with the dominant British culture as nineteenth-century British Jews reimagined Jewish collectivity, successively, in religious, civilizational, ethno-cultural, and racial terms. One of the most prominent Anglo-Jewish authors and public intellectuals, Israel Zangwill renegotiated the “Jewish discourse” used to probe “English origins” in the 19th-century British novel, and produced autoethnographic fiction tracing the encounter between Englishness and Jewishness in metropolitan native and foreign Jews. His position as a gentrified second-generation Anglo-Jew, bridging the traditional Anglo-Jewish aristocratic-merchant establishment and the Yiddish-speaking working-class immigrants, helped articulate a representative version of Jewish nationalism in the British context of civic emancipation, cultural integration, Eastern European immigration and anti-alienism. In the course of political engagement as the leader of Territorialist Zionism, Zangwill was ambiguously positioned as both an imperialist cosmopolitan and a nationalist social activist. Acutely aware of the distress and needs of stateless immigrants, Zangwill harnessed the logic of civilizational imperialism in order to accommodate asylum-seeking aliens into the nascent nation-state world order. His vision of diasporic Jewish culture was grounded in the fusion of revitalized religion and race, and open to political implementation within the imperial framework.
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Dr. Ranen Omer-Sherman, Professor, English and Jewish Studies, University of Miami
Orientalism's Guests & Hosts in A.B. Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride
Throughout A.B. Yehoshua's (b. 1936) literary oeuvre of four decades there have been several milestones marking new paradigms that significantly altered both his political and imaginative engagement vis-à-vis the Israeli Arab. Among Israeli critics there are many who regard him as Israel's boldest and politically erudite writers, and his art has influenced the lives of many average Israelis who grew up reading works such as The Lover [Ha-Meahev, 1977] in high school. Few literary narratives have taken readers on a more provocative journey into the condition of Israeli-Palestinian codependency than Yehoshua's epic novel, The Liberated Bride (first published in Hebrew in 2001 as Ha-Kala Ha-Meshachreret). This work is clearly a vital sign of Yehoshua's unflagging, ever-deepening interest in the uneasy questions provoked by the enduring presence of the Other. A stirring encounter with the problem of "being at home," the tension between cultural homogeneity and alterity, this novel manifests a deeply conflicted and even contradictory view of the fluidity of identity and borders in the troubled Jewish state. It is nearly fifty years since the Tunisian-born Jewish writer Albert Memmi (writing his The Colonizer and the Colonized [1957] in the midst of the Algerian war) , eloquently described the processes whereby colonization grotesquely disfigures the colonizer and the colonized alike, corrupting both societies morally and economically. The Liberated Bride's central character, Professor Rivlin, imagining himself an "objective scholar" of the colonial past (and Yehoshua's ironic rendering of the Israeli academic mind demonstrates how very difficult it is to discern the legitimacy of that utopian term), is uneasily aware that this situation may have bearing on his own society's fatal entanglement with Palestine. Recoiling from violent events in the present, he cannot escape the cynical echoes and repetitions of the colonist-colonized animus.
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Abraham Rubin, Ph.D. candidate, CUNY Graduate Center
“The Nothingness of Revelation” History, Memory, Eschatology from Franz Kafka to Jacob Taubes
In Kafka’s novels and short stories we find an amorphous legal code that — rather than sustaining authority — erases all hierarchies, functioning as an anarchic element that undermines the order it is supposed to maintain. This law, which, according to Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, represents the Mosaic law, follows an antinomian logic whereby its nullification becomes its fulfillment (“bitulah shel torah zehu kiyyumah”).
My project traces the contradictory theological logic in Kafka’s writing in order to argue that a similar dynamic of actualization-through-annulment informs the historical and philosophical writings of a prominent group of Weimar German-Jewish thinkers, mainly Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Jacob Taubes. My claim is that their work attributes a hidden anarchic potential to religious law, which collapses the distinction between a pre-modern tradition that makes claim to transcendent authority, and modern secularity understood as a departure from the predicates of religious doctrine. I contend that this religious paradox becomes the paradigm through which these thinkers recast modernity, not as the progressive disenchantment of the world, but rather as the displacement of its theological constitution. The goal of this dissertation is to explore how these writers construct an alternative genealogy of modernity through their reliance on historical notions of Judaic memory and eschatological messianism.
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Elissa Sampson, Ph.D. candidate, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Tenement Tales
Addressing narratives of place and their overt use in identity formation can bring a useful perspective to researching discursive and material practices of Jewish secularism. My research as a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina‐Chapel Hill examines how narratives of past immigrant life and hardship in ethnic enclaves are harnessed in a new age of migration. In this regard, the Tenement Museum’s depictions of its historic New York immigrant neighborhood are of particular interest, as they portray the Lower East Side’s intense immigrant life and cultures as a famous exercise in rapid urban change, industrialization and immigrant absorption and often stress connections to a new era of heightened migration and urbanization. Indeed, by 1910 the Lower East Side’s impoverished ethnic enclaves had a population density estimated at anywhere between 270,000 to 330,000 people per square mile, which transformed the neighborhood into the world’s largest Jewish city.
This case study uses archival and other sources that document the evolution of the Museum’s landmarked 97 Orchard Street tenement as a place re‐constructed to tell more generalized narratives of a diverse, historic multi‐ethnic Lower East Side. These narratives can be seen as a specifically liberal Jewish type of response to questions of identity and politics. In describing immigrant hardship, the Museum’s founders associated eventual immigrant upward mobility with the development of a somewhat secularized but still marked American Jewish ethnic identity known for its ethos of social concern. Of interest here is how secularization for descendants, one which remains marked by an attendant ethnic identity and thin religiosity, is seen as a necessary part of immigrant adjustment and a needed part of the model that worked for Jews.
The Museum is an excellent site for teasing out the distinct, separate yet strongly interwoven strands of the successful narrative of universalism, liberalism, and secularism in its tours and other practices which support its mission of building “tolerance and historical perspective.” In part, this case study is significant by investigating how in presenting a past Lower East Side success albeit, one marked by severe hardship, the Museum’s narratives also address the nature of diversity as part of the production of a successful urban sociality. This intersection which the Museum straddles is one where elements of past immigrant identity and diversity, including secularization, are re‐constructed in a new rapidly expanding age of migration. In its uses of the past, the Museum’s work in reinforcing a social ethos for immigrant descendants can also be most telling in imagining the future.
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Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Ph.D. candidate, University of California-Berkeley
So the Kids Won’t Understand: Inherited Futures of Jewish Women Writers
My research explores the construction of genealogies of Jewish women writers, and in so doing becomes a part of that lineage. Reading poetry and essays in or about Yiddish, as well as Hebrew, German and Polish, from the 1920s, the 1970s and from our current times, I focus on how historical narrative is built and challenged by Jewish women from Eastern Europe, the US and pre-state Palestine. Looking at how secularization freed Jewish women from the confines of religious patriarchy, I investigate women’s tactics of gaining entry into Jewish history, overcoming the limited access they had to the Jewish cultural past, and formulating new ways they could participate in the future. Rather than a singular completed moment, my project treats this secular emancipation as an ongoing process that invites a rethinking of the question of the Jewish future, which has defined so much Jewish cultural politics and production. My project calls into question both the religious and the reproductive teleology that foreground the future at the price of celebrating present diversity and past complexity. What emerges is an alternative history of resisting futurity through Jewish women's writing across the 20th century. Between the modernist resistance of messianic futurity by Jewish women writers in the 1920s, the 1970s lesbian-feminist refusal of heteronormative reproductive-futurity, and the current state of Yiddish and its precarious relation to the future, a community is born by way of looking backwards rather than forwards. Secular Jewish identity forged along this historical continuum does not do away with the past in the name of the future, but rather must engage in a process of truly choosing how to connect to the past and the future of the goldene keyt, the golden chain, of Jewish literature, and Jewish tradition at large.
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