Event Archive 2016 - Present

When a Great Tradition Modernizes: Judaism and Its Engagements with Politics and Culture A conference honoring the scholarship and teaching of Paul Mendes-Flohr “When a Great Tradition Modernizes” will celebrate the work of Paul Mendes-Flohr, the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, on the occasion of his retirement from the teaching faculty of The Divinity School. Paul Mendes-Flohr has been a beloved member of the Divinity School faculty since the 2000–2001 academic year. Cosmopolitan in his scholarship and generous in his teaching and advising, this conference honors those commitments through a set of lectures o ered by several of his many students that engage abiding themes of his work as scholar, teacher, and advisor: intellectual history in modernity, Jewish philosophy and religious thought, German intellectual history, and the history and sociology of intellectuals. Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Swift Lecture Hall PARTICIPANTS Sam Brody (PhD’13) United Passions: Jewish Modernity and the Quest for Integrity in Some Works of Paul Mendes-Flohr Benjamin Sax (PhD’08) ‘Sprechen ist Natur. Hören ist Kultur’: Paul Mendes-Flohr and the Life of Quotation Rachel Seelig (PhD’11) Mentor and Pupil: On Martin Buber, Ludwig Strauss and Tuvia Ruebner Heather Miller Rubens (PhD’04) Imagining Interreligious Citizens: Dualities, Divisions, and Dialogues This conference is cosponsored by the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.

This conference will explore the intimate relations and tensions that accrue between Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. How were they variously marked as linguistic “homelands,”and why did that sense of home sometimes break down? What conversations and contestations took place in and between these languages—including, but not limited to, the complex legacies of Mendelssohn’s translations and his shift from Yiddish to German, the development of Hebrew-Yiddish literary bilingualism, and the return of “diasporic Hebrew” to Berlin today? We will also think about how this particular linguistic constellation enables us to rewrite entrenched histories of modern Jewish-European culture and to rethink more general questions of language and diaspora, linguistic and cultural translation, modernity and secularization, gender and emancipation, the major and the minor. The keynote address will be delivered by Liliane Weissberg, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. This conference is supported by the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, Yiddish Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Friends and musical colleagues Alexander Fiterstein, clarinet; Elena Urioste, violin; Nicholas Canellakis, cello; and Michael Brown, piano, are members of the new generation of super-musicians and bring Olivier Messiaen’s ethereally beautiful masterpiece, written and premiered when the composer was interned during World War II. Program: Weinberg Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 28 Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)

Sonali Thakkar, assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, will present a paper for the Jewish Studies Workshop. For more information, contact Joel Swanson, at joelhswanson@uchicago.edu.