Ninth Annual Greenfield Summer Institute

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Information about the TENTH Annual Summer Institute.

The George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies proudly announces the Ninth Annual Greenfield Summer Institute – July 13-17, 2008, Madison, Wisconsin. A faculty-taught four-day program including classes, films, and social events.

The World of European Jewry

This summer’s Institute will be devoted to the Jewish experience in Europe: from the Ashkenazim in the east to the Sephardim in the west, from Jews in the Low Countries on the frigid North Sea to Ladino-speaking communities on the Mediterranean coast. We will learn about tradition and change, and about community, assimilation, immigration, oppression and toleration. A variety of cultural and intellectual approaches to the topic will be offered through history, literature, philosophy, art, and music. Please join us as we look at centuries of Jewish life in the old world.

The George L. Mosse/ Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies invites you to an unforgettable week of summer learning and fun.

Whether you’re an alum who wants to relive your college days, a friend of Jewish Studies who wants to share the excitement of Jewish learning, or a member of the public interested in studying Jewish history and culture, the George L. Mosse/ Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies invites you to participate in its Ninth Annual Greenfield Summer Institute, “The World of European Jewry”

Fees

The fee for the Greenfield Summer Institute is $125.
This includes classes and selected meals.

Optional Events:

a) A variety of afternoon lectures (free)
b) An evening of klezmer music with Yid Vicious on the Union Terrace (free)
c) Concert on the Sqaure (free)
d) A tour of UW’s Hillel Foundation (free)

Parking

Parking is available close to the State Historical Society building and will cost $8/day for the duration of the Institute. Application forms will be sent to you upon request.

Lodging

The Institute has reserved rooms at several nearby hotels/motels and campus housing. Information will be mailed in the registration packet.

For more info about Madison, please contact:
The Greater Madison Convention and Visitor’s Bureau
615 East Washington Avenue
Madison, Wisconsin 53703
1-800-373-6376 – fax (608) 258-4950
E-mail: gmcvb@visitmadison.com

Program

Sunday, July 13th

5:00-6:00pm	Registration University Club, 803 State Street
6:00-7:00pm	Opening Dinner (no charge) Welcoming remarks by the Center’s Director Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
7:00-8:00pm	Schmoozing Time

Monday, July 14th

(All lectures will be held at the Wisconsin Historical Society [816 State Street] unless otherwise noted.)

9:00 am – 10:30 am “The Changing Synagogue as a Guide to European Jewish History”
David Sorkin, Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies, UW History Department

The European Jewish synagogue changed dramatically from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. These changes are not just matters of shifting architectural style: rather, changes in style reflect dramatic transformations in European Jewish life. In other words, the modern history of European Jewry can be read from the mutations of the synagogue. This lecture will be copiously illustrated with slides.

10:30 am -10:45 am Break

10:45 am – Noon “Jews in the Dutch Golden Age”
Steven Nadler, Max and Frieda Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies, Chair, UW Philosophy Department

This lecture will look at the Portuguese and Ashkenazic Jews who settled in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. We will consider historical circumstances, philosophical ideas, and, above all, the art of the Dutch Golden Age.

Noon – 1:30 pm Lunch on your own

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm Movie: The Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe

Alan Barry, Executive Producer of the documentary, will be on hand to provide opening remarks and lead a question and answer period after the movie. Before World War II, more than a thousand wooden synagogues dotted the shtetls of Eastern Europe. For decades, the world believed all of these structures were lost. Then, a few years ago, a team from Hebrew University discovered six in Lithuania. Barry has been fascinated by the synagogues and the culture surrounding them for much of his adult life. He will recount his travels to Lithuania and Latvia as he discovers four more synagogues, the story of their life before the war and what has happened in the last fifty years. (running time: 48 minutes)

3:00 pm – 5:00 pm Plan to stay after the movie to meet and share conversation with some of the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies faculty and staff (held on site).

Evening Free time

Tuesday, July 15th

9:00 am – 10:30 am “In Celebration of St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Music: 100 Years Young”
Izaly Zemtsovsky, Visiting Professor, Music and Slavic Departments, Stanford University

This lecture will honor Russia’s Society for Jewish Folk Music, celebrating its 100th anniversary, by showcasing a significant group of Jewish musicians who were active under their auspice in Russia during the beginning of the 20th century. The work of these musical pioneers provided an important part of the foundation for the renaissance of Jewish music which took place in North America during the second half of the same century. The courage, vision and talent of the “St. Petersburg School” echo in every composition written today. Its composers were truly among the Fathers of modern Jewish music. The lecture is going to be rich in music in order to recreate the sound universe of Russian Jewry. The unique collection of audio and video recordings will be introduced for the enjoyment during this presentation of Russian-Jewish composers, performers, writers, artists and musicologists.

10:30 am – 10:45 am Break

10:45 am – Noon “Habima Theater in Russia”
Andrei Malaev-Babel, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Florida State University

Not many people outside of the theater history world today know that the National Theatre of Israel, the Tel- Aviv Habima, was born in Moscow at the height of the Russian Revolution. Ironically, Stalin himself signed the 1920 decree establishing Habima as an institution. Just two years prior to that, a group of amateur Jewish actors, headed by Nahum Zemach, knocked at the door of the Moscow Art Theater’s legendary founder Konstantin Stanisalvsky. Stanislavsky turned the Habima over to his most gifted follower, the Russian- Armenian director Yevgeny Vakhtangov. Having trained the Habima actors, Vakhtangov staged with Them (in 1921), arguably, one of the most significant 20th Century productions – The Dybbuk.For several decades to come the mystical Dybbuk defined the Habima. Vakhtangov’s swan song (the master director died just a few months following the opening), The Dybbuk allowed the young Jewish theater to take wing. The actors embarked on a world tour that eventually led them to Palestine where the troupe settled. Professor Malaev-Babel’s lecture will concentrate on the Habima’s origin, the theater’s relationship with the Revolution, the Soviet regime, the Moscow Art Theater, the director Vakhtangov, and the defining role of The Dybbuk in Habima’s history.

Noon – 1:30 pm Lunch on your own

1:30 pm – 3:30 pm “Ale Brider: Yiddish Songs of Eastern Europe and America”
Lil Rev, Folksinger, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Come along on a fascinating journey through songs, history, lore and story, as Music Historian and Folk Singer Lil Rev demystifies old world music, highlighting Klezmer, Hasidic and Yiddish Folk developments. Expect to laugh, Learn, and sing along with Rev who will utilize live demo, recordings, old sheet music and lecture.

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm If you are interested in continuing the conversation focusing on all that is Yiddish,
please join us for more lively discussion. Location to be announced.

Evening 7:00 pm Enjoy a night of klezmer music by Madison’s own Yid Vicious. The music, the terrace the scenery, who could ask for anything more?

Wednesday, July 16th

9:00 am – 10:30 am “The Jews of Russia”
Judith Kornblatt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, UW Department of Slavic Languages and Literature

Many American Jews know of Russia as the land from which their grandparents fled at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The history of the Jews in Russia, however, is much older and more complicated than family stories of pogroms and impoverished shtetls would suggest. This lecture will survey the history of the Jews in Russia up to and including the tumultuous changes wrought by the revolution and wars of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The latter will be seen in part through the eyes of Isaac Babel, the grandfather of Andrei Malaev-Babel, the actor and director who will present on the previous day of the Institute.

10:30 am – 10:45 am Break

10:45 am – Noon “Exporting Yiddish Socialism: American Jews and the Russian Revolutionary Movement”
Tony Michels, Mosse Professor of Jewish History, UW History Department

Immigrant Jews both fashioned a new culture in the United States and exported that culture back to Eastern Europe. This lecture will address how immigrants shipped Yiddish-language publications to the Russian Empire in order to help build the Jewish labor movement there. It will discuss how these Yiddish publications were smuggled into and disseminated throughout Russia’s Pale of Settlement. Through such contacts, immigrant Jews established longstanding ties between political activists in the United States and Eastern Europe that would continue into the middle of the twentieth century.

Noon – 1:30 pm Lunch on your own

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm Tours of the Wisconsin State Historical Society

Evening:An Evening at the Concert on the Square
Enjoy Madison’s historic state Capitol as you listen to a concert of pop music by the Madison Chamber Orchestra.

Thursday, July 17th

9:00 am – 10:30 am “The Past as Future? Images – and Resurgence – of a Lost World of Jewish Learning”
Daniel Pekarsky, Director, Joint Program in Education and Jewish Studies, UW Educational Policy Studies

In this session we will carefully examine an inspiring, but now largely lost, universe of Jewish learning that was embodied in eastern European Jewish culture, paying careful attention to the role that learning played in this culture and the distinctive institutions in which this learning unfolded. We will also consider what this world of learning can teach us that could inform Jewish and general education today, and we will also look at phenomena that may presage the renaissance of this kind of learning in contemporary Jewish culture.

10:30 am – 10:45 am Break

10:45 am – Noon “You Say Kugel & I Say Keegel: Litvaks vs. Galitsianers”
Allan Nadler, Professor of Religion, Director, Jewish Studies Program, Drew University

This lecture deals with the religious and cultural origins, and the major features, of the great divide that separated the Jews of North-Eastern Europe, or Lithuania and Belorus, from their brethren to the South, or Poland and Ukraine. While the Hasidic movement spread like wildfire across Poland and Ukraine in the late 18th century, it met fierce resistance among the leading Lithuanian Rabbi, whose followers became known as the Mitnagdim. The Hasidic/Mitnagdic divide served to deepen already existing religious and cultural differences between their respective Lithuanian and Polish constituencies. Since then, and until both Jewries’ destructions in the Holocaust, Litvaks and Galitsianers have been in fierce, although mostly good-natured competition with each other over issues as sublime as the nature of God and the ideal human encounter with Him, to the nature of kreplach and the ideal human encounter with Gefilteh Fish.

Noon – 2:00pm Farewell Lunch (no charge)
University Club

Registration

REGISTRATION CLOSED

Once your registration has been received, information about the lectures, housing, specific events and parking will be sent to you in a month’s time.

The Greenfield Summer Institute, “The World of European Jewry,” is co-sponsored by the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, and is funded through the generosity of Larry and Roslyn Greenfield and the
Ettinger Family Foundation.

For more information, contact the Center at (608)-265-4763 (Monday-Thursday) from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm CST.

4 Responses to “Ninth Annual Greenfield Summer Institute”

Hugh Metzgwe Says:
August 27th, 2008 at 12:43 am

What are the dates of next July’s Program
Marcia Slomowitz Says:
October 12th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

What are the dates of the July 2009 program?

thank you.
chriscoyier Says:
October 13th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

The Institute will take place from Sunday, July 12th through Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Title: Jews and Politics
Sharon Guten Says:
February 13th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

Hi (Anita?) – I really like the Center’s redesigned site. Very usable and visually appealing. I’m looking for info about the 2009 Greenfield. Can you tell me when we’ll receive info? Thanks and regards, Sharon Guten

Jewish Studies