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Jewish scholars to speak in lecture series
The 2011 David Blitzer Lecture Series presented by the UB Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage will open on Jan. 31 and continue through April 4 with free public lectures on campus and off by five leading Jewish scholars, philosophers and historians.
All events in the series are free of charge and open to the public.
The series will open on Jan. 31 with presentations by American historian Hasia Diner, Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History.
Her first talk, “No Generation of Silence: Postwar American Jews and the Memory of the Holocaust,” will take place at 3 p.m. in 120 Clemens Hall, North Campus.
In that talk, she will address the creation of a memorial culture by American Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its destruction of European Jewish life. It is a culture, Diner says, that not only memorializes the 6 million who perished, but attempts to remake the world in the light of this catastrophe.
At 7 p.m. that evening, Diner will present a lecture, “Jewish Peddlers and the Discovery of New Worlds,” at Temple Beth Tzedek, 621 Getzville Road, Amherst.
Here she will discuss how, from the middle of the 19th century into the first decades of the 20th, peddling—selling goods place to place or door to door—helped many of the millions of Jews emigrating out of Europe and the Ottoman Empire to create new lives and new communities across the globe.
Diner is a specialist in immigration and ethnic history, American Jewish history and the history of American women. Her many books include, most recently, “We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962,” which won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish Studies.
The series will continue on Feb. 21 with talks by Lisa Silverman, assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Silverman’s research specialties are modern German and Austrian Jewish history, Jewish cultural studies, Holocaust history and representation.
Her first lecture, at 3 p.m. in 120 Clemens, is titled “Four Trials, Three Murders, Two Jews: Staging Anti-Semitism in Interwar Austria.”
Her second talk, which will take place at 7 p.m. in Temple Beth Tzedek, is titled “From Falling to Jumping: Phillip Halsmann and the Austrian ‘Dreyfus Affair.’”
In both lectures, Silverman will address the sensational murder case against legendary Latvian- American portrait photographer Philippe Halsmann, who spent two years in an Austrian jail (1928-30) convicted of his father’s bludgeoning murder, despite a lack of evidence. Known as “The Austrian Dreyfuss Affair,” his was one of four famous trials of the era that served as stages upon which tensions between city and province intertwined with Jewishness to reveal a deeply engrained system of thought and legal practice used to shape contemporary interpretations of unexpected events in unstable times.
The second presentation also will examine the role that photography played in Halsmann’s trials, from his evocation of an imagined “photograph” of his father’s fall during his testimony to the hundreds of photographs of the head of murdered Max Halsmann that were displayed to the jurors. It will focus on the degree to which photographs allowed jurors to re-imagine an act of patricide that never happened and will reveal the integral links between the events of the trial and Halsmann’s later career as a photographer.
Silverman is co-editor of “Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity” (Camden House, 2009) and has published articles in the journals Prooftexts, Austrian Studies, German Quarterly and the Journal of Modern Jewish History. Her book “Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
On March 7, the series will host talks by Allan Arkush, professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University.
The first, at 3 p.m. in 120 Clemens, is titled “Making the Case for Secular Judaism.” It will address claims by historians and scholars that there has been a rebirth of Jewish secularism in this country, something that literary critic Irving Howe thought had reached a dead end just a few decades ago.
At 7 p.m. in Temple Beth Tzedek, Arkush will present a talk titled “Defending the Idea of a Jewish State” in which he will address the new anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state.
Arkush is the author of the classic book “Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment” (SUNY Press, 1994) and many articles on modern Jewish thought and Zionism. He is a fellow in the Department of Religion at Princeton University and senior contributing editor to the Jewish Review of Books.
The speaker series will continue on March 28 with talks by Jonathan V. Dauber, a Buffalo native and assistant professor of Jewish mysticism, Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University.
At 3 p.m. in 120 Clemens, Dauber will present the lecture “New Perspectives on the Emergence of Medieval Kabbalah” in which he will argue that in the early 13th century, the first Kabbalists adopted a philosophic ethos that was foreign to traditional Rabbinic Judaism but had taken root in Jewish communities in Languedoc and Catalonia under the influence of the newly available philosophical materials.
Dauber argues that this ethos, in which the act of investigating God was accorded great religious significance, spurred Kabbalists to actively develop and expand their traditions concerning the nature of divinity. His thesis serves as a corrective to the common view that the emergence of Kabbalah must be seen as part of a negative reaction to Jewish philosophy.
That evening at 7 p.m., Dauber will address an audience at Temple Beth Tzedek. In this lecture, “Mysticism versus Rationalism: Kabbalistic Responses to Maimonides,” he will demonstrate the complexity of the interaction between Maimonidean and Kabbalistic thought over the centuries.
Dauber’s areas of research specialization include the various historical stages of Kabbalah. He is completing a monograph, “Glorying in the Understanding of God”: Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah,” on the development of Kabbalah as a literary tradition in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The series will conclude on April 4 with a talk by Sergey Dolgopolski, assistant professor in the UB Department of Comparative Literature and the UB Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage. Dolgopolski will speak on “The Talmud as Thought” at 3 p.m. in 120 Clemens.
Talmud is the central text of mainstream Judaism and Dolgopolski will analyze and situate intellectual practices displayed in the late-ancient text of the Talmud within a broader context of philosophical and rhetorical disciplines, and attitudes related to thought and memory.
He will lecture again at 7 p.m. that evening in Temple Beth Tzedek on “The Talmuds: From Ancient Israel to Medieval Spain to the United States.”
Because the Talmud is formed of records of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history, Dolgopolsi points out that there are as many Talmuds as there are cultural worlds in which the Talmud was envisioned, conceived and studied. This lecture will survey three important environments in which Jews were shaped by the Talmud, and which shaped the Talmud in turn.
Dolgopolski specializes in the interpretation of the Talmud and Jewish thought and philosophy, both classical and contemporary. His latest book is “What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement” (Fordham University Press, 2009) and is finishing a monograph, “Who Thinks, Speaks, and Remembers in the Talmud?” in which he discusses thinking and remembering practices in Babylonian Talmud in the context of philosophical and rhetorical disciplines of thinking and remembering.
The David Blitzer Lecture series is funded by a generous donation by UB alumnus Wolf Blitzer. Additional support is provided by Hillel of Buffalo, Temple Beth Tzedek, and the Marvin Farber Memorial Lectureship Fund in the UB Department of Philosophy. For more information visit the Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage’s website or call 645-3695.
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