The UMass Amherst Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies hosts a daylong symposium honoring the work of James Young, Distinguished Professor emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern studies and founding director of the institute.
The symposium, “Edges, Textures, Stages: James Young and the Field of Memory Studies,” will be followed by a reception until 6:30 p.m. The symposium and reception are free and open to the public.
Young, an important figure in the field of memory studies, taught at UMass Amherst from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He also has consulted with municipal agencies in developing memorials and was a jury member for the National 9/11 Memorial competition.
He is the author of “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust,” “The Texture of Memory,” “At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture,” and “The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between.”
The symposium will feature panel talks by visiting scholars, including:
- Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College and author of “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial”
- Alice M. Greenwald, president and chief executive officer of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum
- Debórah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History, founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University and co-author of “Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946” and “Auschwitz”
- Horst Hoheisel, sculpture artist and designer of “counter-monuments” such as “The Crushed Brandenburg Gate”
- Laura Levitt, professor of religion, Jewish studies and gender at Temple University and author of “American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust”
- Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College and author of “Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive”
This two-day conference, co-sponsored by Catholic Theological Union and the University of Notre Dame, will focus on issues of scholarship and community which are at the heart of Jewish-Christian dialogue. It includes panels and presentations from 13 scholars at the forefront of Jewish-Christian studies, both here in the United States and internationally.
Presentations include a panel on: Synagogues, Churches, Shrines: Interacting Sacred Spaces in Antiquity
Presentation of the books: “In the Shadow of Empires: Synagogue Architecture in East Central Europe”, by Sergey Kravtsov, with preface by Ilia Rodov (Weimar: Grünberg Verlag, 2018) and “Ukrainian and Jewish Artists of Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv: From Ausgleich to the Holocaust” Sergey R. Kravtsov, Ilia Rodov and Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia eds. (Weimar: Grünberg Verlag, 2019).
Vilnius presentation of the new book by Dr. Richard Freund, the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford in Connecticut: The Archaeology of the Holocaust: Vilna, Rhodes, and Escape Tunnels.
Click to read more about the book
The conference will highlight issues related to the peculiarities of the organization of field research and work in modern Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space.
Organizers: Jewish Museum and tolerance center, Center of Slavic -Jewish Studies Of the Institute of Slavic studies RAS, Center “Sefer”
Venue: Jewish Museum and tolerance center; Institute of Slavic studies, 32 A Leninsky Prospekt, building B, auditorium 901
The specificity of the “Jewish” field will be discussed, and a review of new research in the field of Jewish archaeology, anthropology, folklore, linguistics, sociology and epigraphy will be held.
We will talk about the results of the summer season 2019, prospects and plans for new research.
At the end of the conference, participants will present new collections of articles and monographs based on field materials of recent years.
Entrance to the conference is strictly by registration.
If you have questions, contact sefer@sefer.ru
An international conference to officially launch the massive website and digital database of Jewish cemeteries in Turkey, A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey 1583-1990.
The database and web site are a project of the The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. We wrote about it when it first went online last year as a beta version — though the site still says it’s in beta, the kinks that some users experienced appear to have been worked out, and we find it easy to search and use.
Dedicated to the memory of the oriental studies scholar Bernard Lewis, who died in 2018, the database is the culmination of decades of research by Prof. Minna Rozen (and others) and comprises digital images and detailed textual content of more than 61,000 Jewish gravestones from a variety of communities in Turkey from 1583 until 1990. Rozen’s onsite documentation of the cemeteries was carried out in 1988-1990. The material was digitized in the 1990s but until the web site was uploaded, it had not been publicly accessible.
The Conference will focus on Sephardic Jews, between Messianism and Modernity
The conference gathers some 70 international researchers of Sephardic social, cultural, and art history, languages, and literature from before and after the Expulsion of 1492.
There will be papers on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attitudes toward Jewish messianism as reflected in the scholars’ particular areas of interest. In addition, the Conference will focus on the overlooked Sephardic embracement of modernity and Virtual Sepharad’s gradual yet unwavering secularization, whether in the expanse’s south—the ex-Ottoman realms—or its northern extremities – Holland, England, and the Americas.
The International Conference on Cemetery Studies, organized by the Harokopio University in collaboration with the University of York, will take place from 18 to 20 April 2024 at the Harokopio University in Athens, Greece.
The event will bring together a wide spread of academics, presenting their latest research findings concerning various aspects of cemeteries (end of 18th century onwards), including history, art and culture, anthropology, geography, social studies, and cemetery tourism.
The conference fee is 30 euros (15 euros for doctoral students). The fee includes a light lunch, refreshments, and a guided tour in the historical cemetery of Athens.
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