I start the new academic term, which is right around the corner, with butterflies in my stomach. And yet, unlike the Sunday evenings before the Monday mornings of yesteryear when I experienced a similar sensation, this one is born of excitement, not anxiety.
Sunlit chair in old classroom. Flickr/Jason Pier in DC Each semester brings with it a sense of possibility as my colleagues and I set about exposing our students to the fullness of the human condition and, concomitantly, of bringing out the best in them. Spring 2014 is no exception. The varied courses GW’s Program in Judaic Studies offers are designed to do just that.
Immersing our undergraduates in rabbinic thought and Jewish philosophy, the Jewish literatures of Latin America and the United States, Jewish women’s history and the history of the ghetto, to name just a few of our offerings, should make it abundantly clear that there’s so much more to Jewish education than Hebrew school.
Our public programs, which are open to the community, also make that point, expanding our intellectual as well as our geographical horizons. Over the next few months, East European Jewry looms especially large in our sights. For starters, Professor Marek Kucia, a sociologist from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, will be on campus in mid-March where, among other things, he’ll be delivering a talk on the Europeanization of Holocaust memory.
A week or so later, the Program’s annual Frieda Kobernick Fleischman Lecture will feature Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute in New York, who will be speaking about his recent bibliographic adventures in Vilna, where thousands of once well-thumbed Jewish books remain, inert, on the shelves. Co-sponsored by and held at the Polish Embassy, Mr. Brent’s talk promises to affect both our intellect and our emotions.
This is as it ought to be. Judaic Studies, I’ve come to see, and hope you do, too, is not just a discipline or a field of study. It’s also a way of contemplating the world – and of emerging just a bit wiser for it.
These days, grading is central to the social contract that exists between professors and their students. Throughout the course of a semester, professors grade their students and at its conclusion students grade – or, as the lingo would have it – “evaluate” – their professors, and everyone’s the wiser, and the better, for it.
Flickr / acordova.
That’s the theory. On paper, things don’t work out quite so neatly. Students complain often, and bitterly, that the battery of tests and special projects to which they’re subjected do not adequately reflect their talents. Professors complain just as often and just as bitterly that the evaluations to which they’re subjected simply don’t add up.
Frustration mounts. Students lament the letter grade that is permanently incised on their transcripts, insisting that it’s not right that professors have the last word. But, from the professorial perspective, it’s the students who – quite literally – have the last word and often, it’s a real stunner.
Two examples will have to suffice. One of my cherished colleagues, for whom teaching undergraduates about the Holocaust is no mere academic exercise but a responsibility, decided recently to devote an entire year to the subject rather than cram the rise of Nazism, the growing dehumanization of the Jews and their subsequent extermination into one semester.
One of the students, when asked to account for his experience in the classroom, allowed how he was a bit disappointed with the first half of the course because it didn’t really dovetail with his interests, which extended only to the actual killing of the Jews. Still, he conceded, learning about anti-Semitism and the Nuremberg Laws and reading the memoirs of people such as Victor Klemperer who, in poignant and painstaking detail, recall what befell them was “surprisingly fascinating” (my emphasis). Hmm.
My turn. I had the good fortune earlier in the year to co-teach a course on The Merchant of Venice with another one of my dedicated colleagues, Professor Leslie Jacobson of the Department of Theatre & Dance. While she concentrated on the theatrical end of things, I sought to place the play within its historical context and to highlight the critical role played by the Jews in both the fashioning of the play and its subsequent reception.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that they go hand in hand. To which one of my students – a very good, one, I have to say – wrote in her evaluation that in the event I teach this course again, other aspects of the subject should be emphasized, “not just Jews.”
Since coming to Washington 18 months ago, I’ve had lots of rewarding experiences, but none quite as memorable as my recent excursion to the U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command at the D.C. Navy Yard, where I delivered a speech in commemoration of the Holocaust to a varied and engaged audience of military personnel and civilians.
Flickr/Paul Belson I came to the Navy Yard wearing two hats. One was that of an historian, whose charge was to suggest something of the ways in which history complicates and enriches the world we currently inhabit. Toward that end, my talk, “Past Imperfect,” explored how the past relentlessly and inexorably intrudes on the present, especially when it comes to the continuous stream of new revelations — archival, cinematic and material — about the Shoah.
In that connection, we screened and then discussed Yael Hersonski’s recently released documentary, A Film Unfinished, whose provenance is both fascinating and chilling. At the end of the war, 60 minutes of raw film was discovered in an East German archive. Labelled simply “Das Ghetto,” it trained its sights on daily life within the Warsaw Ghetto only three short months before its liquidation. For years, historians took this vividly detailed film to be an accurate ethnographic record of ghetto life but, as it turns out, many of its scenes had been simulated and staged by the Nazis.
Complicating our understanding of what constitutes reality, let alone history, Hersonski’s affecting film not only draws heavily on “Das Ghetto,” but also includes interviews with five of its former inhabitants as well as testimony provided in the wake of the war by one of the film’s cameramen. This tangle of fact, fiction and personal memory mesmerizes and disturbs in equal measure. A must-see.
The other hat I wore was that of a daughter of a World War II veteran who, as a young and innocent sailor of 18, served on the flagship, the USS Augusta, during the Normandy invasion. My father was extremely proud of his service and, as he grew older, made a point of wearing a cap on which the words “USS Augusta” were prominently imprinted. He would have gotten a real kick out of learning that I had been asked to speak to a latter-day generation of the navy.
From where I sit, it’s not often that the personal and the professional come together quite like this, which made my presentation at the Navy Yard particularly meaningful to me. Citizen, scholar, daughter – for once the different strands of my life were neatly braided together like insignia on a uniform.
This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.
By Menachem Wecker
"Black woods howl in the stove/Our dog turned into a lion/but today the grownups are/Frowning like a mean witch." So go the lyrics to Karel Berman's song "Children at Play" from his 1944 work "Poupata" (Buds), sung by Canadian bass Robert Pomakov.
Walter Braunfels
Berman's lyrics convey a naïve perspective but were composed for a bass on purpose, according to James Loeffler, research director of Pro Musica Hebraica, an organization that revives neglected Jewish music.
"If the cantor is the sound of a grown man crying, this is the sound of a grown man being reduced to a child," said Loeffler in a November 18 lecture, "What Is Jewish Classical Music and Why Does It Matter?" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The talk preceded the 90-minute performance "War and Exile: The Music of Berman, Braunfels, and Ben-Haim," featuring the works of Jewish composers Karel Berman, Paul Ben-Haim, and Walter Braunfels. Pianist Dianne Werner accompanied Pomakov, while the Ben-Haim and Braunfels pieces featured violins (Benjamin Bowman and Marie Bérard), viola (Steven Dann), cellos (Bryan Epperson and David Hetherington) and clarinet (Joaquin Valdepeñas).
According to Loeffler, the Holocaust was a "backdrop" to the lives of the three composers, "but they are also three different key figures in a kind of mid-century moment of reconfiguring and rethinking what it means to talk about Jewish classical music."
Pomakov, who is not Jewish and does not speak Hebrew, said prior to singing the Berman music he had never sung Hebrew opera. The new experience opened his mind as a musician, he said. "You can get very stuck doing Beethoven and Brahms and all the usual stuff."
The performance also drew on his childhood. "I'm Catholic, and half of our Bible is the Torah," he said. "I grew up singing religious texts my whole life. It's something I can look to my past for."
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Charles Krauthammer, chairman of the board of Pro Musica Hebraica, introduced the performance.
"We started from the premise that this is a very neglected area of Jewish culture, and a neglected area of classical music," Krauthammer said of the organization he co-founded with his wife Robyn four years ago. "This is a small room in the mansion of Jewish culture, and an equally small room in the mansion of Western classical music."
According to Krauthammer, people tend to identify "Jewish music" with klezmer, songs like Hava Nagilah, or liturgical music sung in the synagogue. "This whole world of Jewish classical music, which is so rich and moving, has been neglected,”"he said.
Asked if he thought Pro Musica Hebraica's audience was mostly classical music nuts wanting to learn more about Jewish culture, or Jewish music aficionados looking to expose themselves to more classical music, Krauthammer said, "I'd like to do an exit poll." He estimated that two-thirds of the audience fits the latter category, and one-third was the former group.
However exposed to Jewish classical music the audience was, it was treated not only to something other than the usual stuff, as Pomakov explained, and not only to Jewish works on par with secular classical music, as Krauthammer suggested, but also to a program that was defined as much by its sounds as by its effect on the musicians.
Berman had Pomakov grinning at the humor of the childish lyrics, and Ben-Haim's and Braunfels's compositions moved the musicians into a symphonic game of Twister, where they were swaying in their chairs and coaxing palpable emotion out of the music.
James Loeffler will be coming to GW on March 8th to deliver the annual Fleischman Lecture in Judaic Studies. His theme: the storied relationship between the Jews and the violin. Stay tuned for details.
This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.
By Menachem Wecker
According to the MoMA website, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe screen-print series challenged "the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning."
It's tempting to cite Warhol's Marilyns as the inspiration for the 18 screen prints in Miriam Mörsel Nathan's Greta series, each of which shows a different colored version of the same dress.
But whereas Warhol used redundancy to emphasize triviality, Mörsel Nathan's series is intentionally repetitive, leaving no color palette untried in its search for the answer to a particular question.
Leafing through pre-World War II photographs, Mörsel Nathan, former director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, discovered a picture of her aunt Greta, whom she had never met. When she started making prints based on the image, she realized she had no idea what color to use for her aunt's dress.
"The series of screen prints is of the same dress but in many different colors, as if to say to my aunt Greta, 'Which of these do you like?'" says Mörsel Nathan in a wall text at the exhibit "Memory of a time I did not know…" at the Washington D.C. JCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery. "There is little that I know about my aunt…These walls of many dresses remind me of what I don't know." ...continue reading "On Marilyn Monroe, Aunt Greta and a Dress of Many Colors"
It's tempting to cite Warhol's Marilyns as the inspiration for the 18 screen prints in Miriam Mörsel Nathan's Greta series, each of which shows a different colored version of the same dress.