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? We are also interested in how this particular linguistic constellation enables us to rewrite entrenched narratives 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. Presentations will be given by invited faculty and graduate students at the University of Chicago.
All events will be held at:
The Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago
1100 E. 57th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 [on the ground floor of the Regenstein Library]
Monday, November 26
The Franke Institute for the Humanities
5:00pm KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Name: Language: Heimat
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania
Tuesday, November 27
The Franke Institute for the Humanities
8:30am Light Breakfast and Coffee
9:00am-10:30am PANEL ONE
Chair: Anna Elena Torres
Taytsh, Translation, and Cultural Intimacy
Saul Zaritt, Harvard University
Vilna, my Vilna: The Place of Language in the Hebrew and Yiddish Urban Poetics of Zalman Shneur and Moyshe Kulbak
Anna Band, University of Chicago
Paul Celan’s Yiddish Other
Matthew Johnson, University of Chicago
11:00am-12:30pm PANEL TWO
Chair: Na’ama Rokem
The Sorrows of Translation: German-Hebrew Negotiations in the Yishuv
Maya Barzilai, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Pathological Prose: S. Y. Agnon’s Rabid Multilingualism
Sunny Yudkoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison
‘Literature has Always been My Glasses’: Intertextuality and Dialogism in Leah Goldberg’s Letters from an Imagined Journey
Michal Peles-Almagor, University of Chicago
12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch for Conference Participants
2:00-3:30pm PANEL 3
Chair: Jessica Kirzane
‘No Sin to Limp’: Performing Linguistic Ignorance in Auerbach, Freud, and Hartman
Samuel Catlin, University of Chicago
German Alone: Language and Land in Grete Weil’s The Bride Price
Chloe Blackshear, University of Chicago
Broken German: On Writing without Mastery
Rachel Seelig, University of Toronto
3:45pm CLOSING REMARKS
Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago
About the Speakers
Anna Band is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Chicago.
Maya Barzilai is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Chloe Blackshear is a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Samuel Catlin is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Religion & Literature, the Divinity School, at the University of Chicago.
Matthew Johnson is a PhD student in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.
Jessica Kirzane is Lecturer in Yiddish in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.
Paul Mendes-Flohr is the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought at the University of Chicago.
Michal Peles-Almagor is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
Na’ama Rokem is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
Rachel Seelig is Visiting Scholar in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto.
Anna Elena Torres is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
Liliane Weissberg is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sunny Yudkoff is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and German, Nordic, Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Saul Zaritt is Assistant Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University.
This conference was made possible due to the generous support of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Yiddish Studies Fund, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Graduate Council.
Questions or concerns about accessibility can be addressed to the conference organizers Michal Peles-Almagor (michalpa@uchicago.edu) and Matthew Johnson (mjohnson26@uchicago.edu), or to the administrator of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, Nancy Pardee (npardee@uchicago.edu).