ÂéśšAV

ÂéśšAV.CA / Jewish Studies מדעי היהדות

Talks and Events

ÂéśšAV

The Department of Jewish Studies is proud to present many exciting guest speakers and events throughout the year. Please consult the list below. 

If you are a ÂéśšAV employee and would like to promote an event please complete the form .

Welcome Event (2024-2025 Academic Year)

  • Date: September 4, 2024
  • Time: 5:30-7:00 pm
  • Location: Arts 160
  • RSVP:Ěý

An opportunity to learn about the Department of Jewish Studies, to launch a year of teaching, events, and research, and to gather and reconnect. Food and drink will be served. RSVP required.

Jewish Identity in Contemporary Morocco: Memory, Reconciliation, and Citizenship

Aomar Boum (Professor and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, UCLA)

Aomar Boum talk poster

  • Date: September 10, 2024
  • Time: 5:30-7:00 pm
  • Location: Leacock 232

On July 13, 2022, King Mohammed VI approved the establishment of three new national representative bodies of the Jewish community which include, in addition to the traditional National Council of the Community and its regional committees, a National Commission of Moroccan Jews Living Abroad as well as a Foundation of Moroccan Judaism. Although the recent political, social and economic context of “Moroccan-Israeli normalization” may look as the leading impetus for these royal and statal decisions, I argue that these much-needed measures were decades in the making and are part of the Moroccan state’s engagement with the “Jewish Question” during the reign of Mohammed VI. While this official program started during the reign of King Hassan II, its rhythm accelerated and took different forms, particularly in media, civil society, and non-academic circles, after the enthronement of King Mohammed VI in 1999. I revisit the issue of “reconciliation” of Moroccan society with its Jewish memory through an analysis of its expression through history, literature, media, and intergenerational memory especially in the last two decades. I underline reconciliation here because the history of human rights abuses and the state’s record during the Years of Lead (1956-1999) left their imprint on all Moroccans, independently of their religion. The monarchy has indeed, since the time of Mohammed V, maintained strong relations with its Jewish subjects in the Jewish communities across the country, Morocco, as a nation, continues its own search for a way to “recognize and accept” its Jews while being sentient to the question of Palestine.

With support from the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice-President (ODPSLL), the Equity Team, and the Dean of Arts Development Fund.

RSVP:

“Jews and Other Poles”: A Tribute to Gershon Hundert (z”l)

Jews and Other Poles poster: A Tribute to Gershon Hundert

  • Dates: September 22-23, 2024

This two-day symposium celebrates the remarkable legacy of our dear colleague and friend, Gershon Hundert (1946-2023). Over the course of his 48 years at ÂéśšAV, Gershon left an indelible impact on faculty and students. Not only was his scholarship influential but his warmth and generosity as a mentor, colleague, and teacher were legion. Beyond Montreal, scholars across the world recognize Gershon as one of the most significant Jewish historians of his generation. His pioneering research on the Jews of Eastern Europe reshaped our understanding of Jewish history and continues to inspire new generations.

“Jews and Other Poles” brings together some of the most creative and innovative minds in Polish and Eastern European Jewish history to reflect on the state of the field and its future––a fitting tribute to Gershon’s enduring influence.

The symposium begins on Sunday, September 22 with a keynote address by Olga Litvak (Cornell University) entitled “Remapping Jewish Modernity: The Legacy of Gershon Hundert.” Litvak’s talk will set the tone for what promises to be a series of thought provoking discussions.

On Monday, September 23, the tribute continues with a full day of panels by scholars who have drawn inspiration from Gershon’s extraordinary contributions. Joining us are Israel Bartal, Jeremy Brown, Maria Cieśla, Natalie Cornett, Ofer Dynes, Esther Frank, Uriel Gellman, Ula Madej-Krupitski, Moshe Rosman, Nancy Sinkoff, and Adam Teller.

Together, we will honour Gershon’s memory and continue the important conversation he started half a century earlier

Day 1:

Sunday, September 22, 2024, 7:00 - 9:00 pm

Congregation Dorshei Emet [18 Cleve Rd, Hampstead, Quebec H3X 1A6]

Keynote: Olga Litvak (Cornell University), “Remapping Jewish Modernity: The Legacy of Gershon Hundert”

Free, RSVP required:Ěý

Day 2:

Monday, September 23, 2024, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Faculty Club, Billiard Room, ÂéśšAV

Program:

  • 9:00 – 10:30 - Session 1: Borders, Borderlands, and Boundary Crossing in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth

Chair: John Zucchi

Adam Teller, Beeswax and Books: Connections Between Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman Jews at the End of the Sixteenth Century

Mania Cieśla, Microhistories of Coexistence: Jews and non-Jews in an Urban Context in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Moshe Rosman, Two Models of Female Piety: Beyla Falk (Sixteenth Century) vs Leah Horowitz (Eighteenth Century) (delivered remotely)

  • 10:30 – 11:00 - Coffee Break
  • 11:00 – 12:00 - Session 2: Crowns, Courts, and Thrones: Rethinking Jewish Paths to Modernity

Chair: Heidi Wendt

Uriel Gellman, Tradition in Transition: Social Engagement in Early Hasidism

Ofer Dynes, The Legend of Saul Wahl: A Reconsideration

  • 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch (on site, per invitation only)
  • 1:00 - 2:30 - Session 3: Poetry as Memory, Memoires as History

Chair: Olga Litvak

Jeremy Brown, Revivals of Ancient Piety from Medieval Spain to Modern Poland-Lithuania

Esther Frank, The Literary Relation between Memory and History in Rokhl Korn's Village Poetry

Israel Bartal, Glikl, Birkenthal, and Spivakoff: Three Centuries of Ashkenazi Memoires (1691-1964) (delivered remotely)

  • 2:30 – 3:00 Coffee Break
  • 3:00 - 4:30 Session 4:“Jews and Other Poles” in the Modern Period

Chair: Christopher Silver

Nancy Sinkoff, Reporting on the Spanish Civil War through Polish Jewish Eyes: S. L. Shneiderman's Krig in Shpanyen: Hinterland

Natalie Cornett, Exploring the Impact of Women’s Education on Polish-Jewish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Poland

Ula Madej-Krupitski, Zakopane as a Jewish Space? A Reevaluation of the 1920s and 1930s.

4:45 Closing Remarks

6:00 Dinner, (off site)

Free, RSVP required:Ěý

Centuries Surround Me With Fire: On a Late Celan Translation of Mandelstam with Stephen Ross (Concordia University)

Part of Jewish Studies Seminar

  • Date: October 30, 2024
  • Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
  • Location: Leacock 738

On May 10, 1967, Paul Celan (1920-70) wrote a ten-line poem, "Nah, im Aortenbogen" (near, in the aortic arch) on the inside cover of a human anatomy textbook he had recently acquired while hospitalized at Sainte-Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris. Though the poem has apparently been picked clean by critics, I will argue that its key operation--a translation of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) that is far more than a translation--has gone unnoticed. Beginning with a very close reading of the poem itself, the talk will drive toward a theory of poetic translation that brings together Celan's readings in Kabbalah, human anatomy, and psychoanalysis.

Stephen Ross is associate professor of English at Concordia University and editor of Modernism/modernity. He is the author Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP) and coeditor of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury).

Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.

RSVP required:Ěý

“The ‘Womanly’ Bible: Sentimentality and the Tsenerene at the Origins of Modern Yiddish Culture” with Miriam Borden (University of Toronto)

Part of Jewish Studies Seminar

  • Date: November 13, 2024
  • Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
  • Location: Leacock 738

The Tsenerene, the enormously popular seventeenth-century Yiddish adaptation of the Hebrew Bible, has long been known as the “women’s Bible.” This doesn’t just refer to the people who read it, however. Early twentieth-century Yiddish intellectuals trying to excavate their own literary lineage, and thus to affirm modern Yiddish writing as truly modern, looked to the Tsenerene as their literary foremother. They described it not only as a woman’s Bible, but as a “womanly” (vaybershe) Bible. They described the text as “feminine,” saying its author assuredly also possessed a “feminine character.” This conjured a mythical audience of women, but—I will argue—also gestured toward a key feature of the work that has been neglected: the literary intimacy of the text. Exploring some of the Tsenerene’s intimate aesthetics, real and imagined, I suggest that the key to understanding how critics defined Yiddish literature is located in what they defined it against: the “womanly,” emotional investment the Tsenerene cultivates in its reader.

Miriam Borden is a PhD candidate in Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto working on the way folklore in Yiddish and the folklore we create about Yiddish shapes the way we’ve understood Ashkenazi Jewish life before the Holocaust and since. Her most recent publication is “Joshua, King David, and the Flying Nun: Doodles and Reader Annotations in Post-Holocaust Yiddish Primers for Children” (Canadian Jewish Studies / Études Juives Canadiennes 38, 85–112).

Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.

RSVP required:

The Post-Shoah Movement of Moroccan Jews Through French Colonial and Metropolitan Territories (1948-1967) with Émilien Tortel (UQAM)

Part of ÂéśšAV Jewish Studies Seminar

  • Date: November 20, 2024
  • Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
  • Location: Leacock 738

Using French archives and private testimonies, this presentation explores how the French colonial administration in Morocco managed the departure of Jewish subjects and citizens between 1948 and 1967. It also treats the migration paths of Moroccan Jews with a focus on the camp system erected in colonial and metropolitan territories. Finally, it discusses French and Israeli migration policies toward Moroccan Jewish children.

Émilien Tortel is a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at the UniversitĂŠ du QuĂŠbec Ă  MontrĂŠal (UQAM), Canada. His articles have appeared in Histoire, ĂŠconomie & sociĂŠtĂŠ and ˇĄ˛ő˛ú´Çç´Ç˛ő.

Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.

RSVP required:Ěý

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