Lecture series to explore Jewish identity

How the arts — music, dance, literature, textiles — interpret Jewishness will be the focus of special programming this fall at the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies.

The Fall 2000 Jewish Heritage Lecture Series will bring to Madison an international roster of guest lecturers to offer their insights into ways the arts articulate Jewish themes. However, Robert Skloot, director of the center, notes that this year’s Jewish Heritage Lectures also will explore Jewishness in other disciplines, even though the arts will be highlighted.

“The lecture series, like the center itself, is broadly based,” Skloot says. “We try to schedule a wide range of topics we hope people will want to learn more about.”

Each free public lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in Memorial Union. Events include:

• Tuesday, Sept. 26: “A Pleiad of Russian-Jewish Composers,” by folklorist and ethnomusicologist Izaly Zemtsovsky. St. Petersburg native Zemtsovsky will discuss and demonstrate the legacy left by musicians associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, a little-known organization active in the early 20th century.
• Tuesday, Oct. 3: “Women, Religion and the Struggle for a Jewish Identity,” by Moshe Re’em of Ben-Han University. By analyzing life stories of native-born Israeli women, Re’em, a UW–Madison alumnus, has been able to articulate a new understanding of an emerging Jewish identity among religious women in Israel.
• Thursday, Nov. 16: “The Jewish Self-Image in the West,” by Michael Berkowitz of London’s University College. Despite hundreds of years’ worth of images — including grasping money-lenders and worse — Jews have exercised at least some control over how they were represented in various media. Berkowitz outlines what kinds of self-portraits those were.
• Thursday, Nov. 30: “Choreographing Jewishness in American Dance” by Naomi Jackson, Arizona State University. Jackson will focus on how 20th century modern dance has interpreted Jewishness and discuss such artists as Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow, UW–Madison dance professor Douglas Rosenberg and others.

“We’re also looking ahead to February, when the center will co-sponsor an exhibition of textiles by contemporary Jewish artists,” in the UW–Madison Gallery of Design, Skloot says. “Material culture makes an important contribution to the representation of Jewishness in America.”

The center and the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies will present a two-part symposium Nov. 8-9 in Grainger Hall entitled, “Sex and the Sacred: Love Poetry of the Ancient Near-East and Its Re-appropriation in Jewish and Christian Thought.”

In addition, the center will join the UW–Madison Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. to present an international conference on “German-Jewish Identities in America: From the Civil War to the Present.” German-Jewish figures whose political, social, philosophical and cultural contributions have helped shaped the nation will be the focus. The conference is scheduled Oct. 26-29 in the Memorial Union.

For more information, contact Anita Lightfoot, (608) 265-4763; allightf@facstaff.wisc.edu.