Event Archive 2016 - Present

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers in her recent book, 'Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida and the Literary Afterlife of Religion,' Sarah Hammerschlag, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism in the Divinity School, argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. For more information and to RSVP, go to the Seminary Co-op Bookstore website (below).

Esra Özyürek, Associate Professor and Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE, will deliver a public lecture: 'Wrong Emotions for the Holocaust: Invisible Contributions of the Turkish- and Arab-Germans to the Cosmopolitan Memory Culture' It is often assumed in Germany that Turkish- and Arab-Germans cannot or are not willing to relate to the Holocaust, the central negative foundational myth of German and European identity. Fieldwork reveals the actual complex and diverse ways working class minorities emotionally engage with the Holocaust. An analysis of the wide spectrum of emotions, including pride, fear, envy, mistrust, and withdrawal, the Holocaust triggers among different groups reveals the relational and politically contextualized nature of these reactions. By consistently being judged as wrong, amoral, and out of place, minority emotions are stripped of their political capacity to critique contemporary racialization in Germany. Esra Özyürek is Associate Professor and Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is the author of 'Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe' (2014) and 'Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey' (2007) and the editor of 'The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey' (2007).

Erik Dreff, PhD candidate in the Divinity School, will speak at the Jewish Studies Workshop. Light refreshments will follow. For information, contact the workshop coordinators, Anna Band (aband@uchicago.edu) or David Cohen (davidc1@uchicago.edu).

Anna Elena Torres will present her research on anarchist diasporism and the experimental work of Yiddish writer Perets Markish. The talk will focus on questions of radical temporality in Der fertsikyeriker man (The Man of Forty Years), an epic poem smuggled out of the USSR before his arrest at Stalin's order. Torres is the Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.