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National, ethnic, and linguistic borders have evidently separated the populations of Eastern Europe. On several other levels, however, the turmoil has been expressed between rich and poor, high and low culture, Christian and Jewish practices as well as between religious and secular or traditional and modern communities. Scholars of history, literature, literary theory, and religion will meet at Syracuse University to analyze these shifting borderlines.
Participants from Syracuse University, the Central New York community, and scholars from other universities are welcome to attend all sessions.
Presentations will be grouped into two formats. Half a dozen panel sessions on Sunday and Monday, designed to facilitate conversation, will center on previously circulated articles. These papers should be available for distribution, enabling participants to read them prior to the symposium. Approximately 40 minutes will be allotted to the presentation and discussion of each paper. The keynote lecture by Steven Zipperstein––a large, plenary session intended for a broad audience of university faculty, students, and community members––will be held on Sunday evening in conjunction with the annual B. G. Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies.
The keynote lecture and all panel discussions will be held in the Kilian Room, 500 Hall of Languages, Syracuse University.
Saturday, 6 April
The Dybbuk
7:30 p.m. – Conversation with Barbara Damashek, director of The Dybbuk, at the Storch Theatre, Syracuse Stage.
8:30 p.m. – Syracuse Stage Performance of S. Ansky’s play, The Dybbuk
Sunday, 7 April
History and Cultural Contexts
9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
Chair: Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University)
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (University of Misconsin, Madison), “Strangers to Others and Half-Strangers to Ourselves”: Jews and Russians in the Russian Religious Renaissance
Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania), “Pale Lines: Russians, Jews, and the Boundaries of Historical Knowledge, 1860-1930”
Rebecca Stanton (Columbia), “Identity Crisis: The Literary Culture of Odessa in the Early Twentieth Century”
Literary Theory
11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
Chair: Erika Haber (Syracuse University)
Kristi Groberg (Hjemkomst Center), “Jewish Trilingualism in Nineteenth-Century Russia”
Amy Mandelker (CUNY), “The Ethics of Estrangement in Culture and Explosion: Iurii Lotman and Jewish Philosophy”
Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian Literature
2:15 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.
Chair: Harriet Murav (University of California, Davis)
Hamutal Bar-Yosef (Ben Gurion University), “Apocalypticism in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature: The Russian Context”
Robert Rothstein (University of Massachusetts), “As the Worm Turns: Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz and the Purim-shpil”
Gabriella Safran (Stanford University), “God on Trial: How Ansky Wrote and Rewrote the Jewish Folktale”
Gennady Estraikh (SOAS, London), “Yiddish Proletarian Literature in the Soviet Union”
Keynote Lecture
7:30 p.m. B.G. Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies
Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University), “History, Literature, and the Russian Jewish Past”
8:45 p.m. – Reception for Steven Zipperstein, BORDERLINES participants, and the Syracuse community
9:45 p.m. – Gabriella Safran, Robert Moss, et al. in a post-play panel discussion of The Dybbuk at Syracuse Stage
Monday, 8 April
Polish and Russian Literature
8:45 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.
Chair: Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (University of Wisconsin, Madison),
Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University), “Caught in Half-Sentence: Polish-Jewish Writing before World War I and in Interwar Poland”
Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University), “Mikhail Zhvanetsky: The Last Jewish Russian Joker”
Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College), “Exile and the Unburdening of Guilt: A Tribute to David Aizman”
Yiddish and Russian Literature
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Chair: Ken Frieden (Syracuse University)
Vassili Schedrin (Brandeis University), “Memoranda Literature on the Jewish Question in Nineteenth-Century Russia and Its Authors”
Jeremy Dauber and Cathy Popkin (Columbia University), “How To Do Things With Literature: Constructing and Construing Russian and Yiddish Prose Fiction”
Harriet Murav (University of California, Davis), “Post-Soviet Jewish Writing: History, Memory, Language”
Art and Architecture
3:00 p.m. – 4:30p.m.
Chair: Amy Mandelker (CUNY)
Samuel Gruber (Syracuse University), “’Seeing Leads to Remembering’: The Ethnographic and Architectural Expeditions of S. Anski (1912-15) and Szymon Zajczyk (1929-39) and Their Legacy Today”
Murray Zimiles (SUNY Purchase), “The Synagogue and the Carousel”
The Keynote Lecture and all panel discussions will be held in the Kilian Room 500 Hall of Languages, Syracuse University
For further information, including details about accommodations and parking, please contact Pamela Paul at 315-443-5671 or papaul@syr.edu
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