Jewish Studies Week returns to the University of Alberta

A trio of virtual lectures and Q&A sessions explore Jewish history, literature, and culture.

Wirth Institute Staff - 17 March 2021

Jewish Studies Week returns to the University of Alberta — virtually — March 23 to 25, 2021. Presented by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, this annual series brings together three expert speakers in a trio of virtual lectures and Q&A sessions to explore a breadth of topics across Jewish history, literature, and culture.

This year’s lineup includes renowned historian Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, POLIN Museum Core Exhibition and University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Professor Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will deliver the 2021 Tova Yedlin lecture Coming of Age: Jewish Youth in Poland between the War on March 23 live via Zoom. Her illustrative talk will examine life for Jewish youth in Poland — in their own words — prior to the onset of the Second World War.

Endowed in 2007, the Annual Tova Yedlin lecture series has brought over a dozen prominent historians to the UAlberta campus to speak on topics devoted to the study of Central and East European Jewry prior to the Holocaust. A long-time professor at the University of Alberta in what was then the Department of Slavic and East European Studies, Yedlin herself had fled Poland just prior to the siege of the Nazis. By 1975, she became one of only eight female UAlberta professors. Deborah Yedlin, Tova's daughter, launched the Tova Yedlin Lecture Series along with her husband Martin Molyneaux, in honour of her mother and her remarkable contribution to Eastern European scholarship.

On March 24, hosted by Dr. Peter Sabo, Belzberg Lecturer of Jewish Studies at the University of Alberta, Professor Vered Weiss, Israel Institute Teaching Fellow in the Department of Jewish Studies at SF State, will present Juda and the New Jew: Undead Jewish Israeli Identities.

This virtual talk will explore the 2017 Israeli television series Juda as a platform for social critique, and expose the productive use of the vampire as a means to address antisemitism and reconsider social boundaries. Content warning: the presentation will discuss sex and violence and will contain spoilers for the first season of Juda.

The Annual Central European Art History Lecture concludes the series on March 25. In her talk, Rethinking Jewish Space in Vienna before 1938Professor Lisa Silverman explores how texts including newspaper articles, novels, caricatures, and maps created by both Jews and non-Jews reveal the significance of the coding of space as “Jewish” or “not Jewish,” both inside and outside Vienna, particularly after the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918.

Professor Silverman is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Contributing Editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book for Central European Jewish history. This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta.

Registration is required but all events are free to attend and open to the general public. Click here for full details: https://www.ualberta.ca/wirth-institute/online-programming/jewish-studies-week-2021