Jewish Friends. Contemporary Figures of the Jew

< Prev79 /95 EventsNext >

Jewish Friends. Contemporary Figures of the Jew

Organizer
Institute of Jewish Studies, Freie Univerität Berlin; Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin
Venue
Freie Universität Berlin
Location
Berlin
Country
Germany
From - Until
17.10.2017 - 18.10.2017
Website
By
Hannah C. Tzuberi

An extraordinarily central, even constitutive element of the set of questions concerning Jews has always been the question concerning the image, the idea or the figure of the Jew for non-Jews. In 2013, David Nirenberg showed how in virtually every chapter of the history of Western thought, basic notions of the world and the self, such as the good and the body, the national, the religious and the cultural, were fashioned and transmitted through figures of Jews. These figures have not always been coherent; they presented contradictory images, and flexibly merged, like fluids, into ever new iconographic formations. What they did have in common was that the Jew has paradigmatically been the figure of the antithesis: a foil to Christian love, a symbol of global commerce, an opponent of reason and tolerance, a malign cancer to the Aryan national body, a problematic origin of Christianity and Western civilization. Thus, the figuration of the Jew not only did not require the presence of real Jews, as Nirenberg shows, but was perhaps even predicated on their absence.

This conference will reflect on the current situation of this paradigm. It will tentatively point at and attempt to contemplate a profound shift in the paradigmatic figuration of the Jew that seems to have begun after the Shoa and is still at work today. While “Jews”, “Judaism” and “Israel” remain important terms for describing and accounting for global agenda, they seem no longer to serve as figures of antithesis, but on the contrary of essential and integral, even representative element of the West’s political-cultural self. For the first time in history, the Jew has become a figure of the Western establishment, which is normatively committed to support the Jewish state and to protect and cultivate Jews and Jewish institutions. Jews have become a “good other”. Anti-Semitism still exists, but is perceived by normative institutional discourse as social and psychological, even epistemological pathology. The conference will reflect on the ambivalent nature of this new situation of the Jew as a figure of hegemony.

The historical situation of Germany makes it an especially interesting place for this conference. In contemporary Germany, figures of Jews have been playing an important role in the making of a new national self, following the fall of the Berlin wall. “Renaissance of Jewish life” has emerged, as also observable in Eastern and Central Europe, as a powerful narrative of overcoming the past destruction. The central role of this narrative stands in utter disproportion to the very limited presence of actual Jewish communities. Thus, the Jew has become a figure of a national discourse that does not necessarily promote pluralism and multiculturalism.

This conference will be highly interdisciplinary and will gather scholars of a wide range of research fields and methodologies to explore various aspects of the new figural paradigm of the Jew. It will be preceded by a one-day workshop with Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. We would like to invite in particular early and mid-career researchers, whose work engages the following questions:

- How can the current figure of the Jew be more accurately characterized, in itself and in historical and transcultural comparisons?
- How can the ambivalence of this figure be described and identified in concrete situations worldwide, on the political, social, cultural and epistemological levels?
- What is the relation between the current figure of the Jew and the various Jewish personal and communal forms of existence?
- What is the relation between the current figure of the Jew and other basic categories and figures of Western discourse?
- How does the figure of the Jew intersect with the figure of the Muslim?

The program is available here: http://www.fu-berlin.de/sites/dhc/programme/termine/workshop-jewish-friends.html

Programm

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17th, 2017
Room L113 (Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin)

9:00-9:30 Greetings and Introduction

“Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti- White” (J. Baldwin)

09:30-10:30
Ben Ratskoff (University of California, Los Angeles)
Whiteness and Christendom: James Baldwin’s Figure of the Jew
Response: Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley)
t.b.a.
Chair: Anne Eusterschulte (Freie Universität Berlin)

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

The “bürgerliche Verbesserung” of Jewish Knowledge

11:00-12:00
Elad Lapidot (Freie Universität Berlin)
My Disfigured Friend
Response: Asher Mattern (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
The Leveling of the Human or the Sublation of Jewishness in the Liberal Form of Consciousness
Chair: Gilad Shenhav (Minerva Humanities Center / Goethe Universität Frankfurt)

12:00-13:00
Ivan Segré
Criticism as Conservatism: The De-Revolutionized Talmud
Response: Ron Naiweld (CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
Reading the Talmud with Hope in my Heart and Against the Illusion of Timelessness in Talmudic Scholarship
Chair: Hannah Tzuberi (Freie Universität Berlin)

13:00-14:30 Lunch Break

Making Jews for Europe

14:30-15:30
Hannah Tzuberi (Freie Universität Berlin)
Filling a Void. The Making of Jews in Contemporary Germany
Response: Johannes Becke (Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg)
When Rachel Dolezal Goes to Shul: Transracialism, Atonement and the German Convert to Judaism Chair: Schirin Amir-Moazami (Freie Universität Berlin)

A Nation Among the Nations

15:30-16:30
Hillel Ben Sasson (Jewish Theological Seminary New York) “In the Name of the Jewish People” – The State of Israel and Its Figures of the Jew
Response: Oded Schechter (Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, Universität Hamburg)
The Desecration of the Name
Chair: Nahed Samour (Universität Göttingen / Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin)

16:30-17:00 Coffee Break

17:00-18:00
Ofri Ilany (Van Leer Institute Jerusalem)
Radical Politics of Chosenness
Response: Raef Zreik (Tel Aviv University)
Dancing with the Devil?
Chair: Omri Ben-Yehuda (Freie Universität Berlin)

18:15
Cynthia M. Baker (Bates College)
Europe’s and America’s “New Jews”
(Dahlem Humanities Center Lecture, Room L116)

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18th, 2017
Room L113

Gendered Images of Power

9:00-10:00
David Hadar (Freie Universität Berlin)
Reading Gal Gadot: The Image of the Tough Israeli Woman in American Popular Culture
Response: Silvana Greco (Freie Universität Berlin)
Myth and Anti-Myth of the Strong Israeli Woman Chair: Michael Weinman (Bard College Berlin)

Europe’s New Jews?

10:00-11:00
Anya Topolski (Radboud Universiteit)
Good Jew, Bad Jew … Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: “Managing” Europe’s Others.
Response: Özgür Dikmen (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
“These Are Not Like Them!” – On Perceptions of Anti- Zionist Jews
Chair: Michal Y. Bodemann (University of Toronto)

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

11:30-12:30
Sultan Doughan (University of California, Berkeley)
Jewish Friends and Muslim Enemies? Or How Do We Commemorate Auschwitz Today?
Response: Baruch Wolski
The Importance of “Being Jewish” for Muslims
Chair: Irit Dekel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

12:30-14:00 Lunch Break

Politics of Friendship

14:00-15:00
Oriol Poveda Guillén (Uppsala University)
“A Friend of the Jews” – Walking the Razor's Edge Between Judeophilia and Friendship
Response: Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham)
“Not So Friendly and Still Ruling the World”: On the Persistence of Some East-European Myths
Chair: Elad Lapidot (Freie Universität Berlin)

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-16:30
Daniel Marwecki (SOAS, University of London)
How Jews Became Germans At Last: German Politics Towards Israel and the Transformations of Antisemitism
Response: Dani Kranz (Universität Wuppertal)
The Special Jewish Friend Reloaded? Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Muslim ‘Friends’ in Germany
Chair: Jan Eike Dunkhase (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach)

16:30-17:30
Concluding Remarks: Cynthia M. Baker, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Raef Zreik, Hannah Tzuberi

Contact (announcement)

Hannah Tzuberi

Institut für Judaistik
Freie Universität Berlin

tzuberic@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Editors Information
Published on
Author(s)
Contributor
Citation ⇓