Leo Baeck Institute Lecture Series, London 2022 

POPULAR CULTURE, POLITICS AND JEWS

Sonia Gollance  

University College London, UK 

Dangerous Attractions: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity 

6.30pm, Thursday, February 3rd 2022

Contemporary popular culture often portrays Jewish mixed-sex dancing as either absolutely forbidden or as the punchline of a dirty joke. Fictional portrayals of women who leave Orthodoxy sometimes use transgressive dancing to underscore the temptation of secular society – and gentile men. Yet long before the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Jewish writers used partner dance as a powerful metaphor for social changes that transformed Jewish communities between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Scandalous dance scenes in German and other literatures are part of a larger conversation about acculturation and courtship norms. Writers deploy these scenes to convey their concerns with Jewish modernity while simultaneously entertaining their readers.  

Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. She taught previously at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen. She is the author of It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021). Dr Gollance is Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama, an initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.  

This lecture will be held online via Zoom on Thursday, February 3rd 2022 and will start punctually at 6.30pm (UK time).  

To join the event please click this link:  

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89772203672?pwd=Q0t2QVBwVkp3amc3T3JqcTdiMDI0QT09 

at the appointed date and time, wait to be admitted by the host and follow the instructions on your screen. If you have any difficulty joining us on the night, please contact volunteer@leobaeck.co.uk and a member of staff will be able to assist you. 

Admission is free but we would welcome if you could inform us of your intention to participate prior to the event by emailing us on info@leobaeck.co.uk. This would help us to prepare in advance for participant numbers and management. 

University of Manchester Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies 2022

The University of Manchester Centre for Jewish Studies is pleased to announce the 2022 Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies will be delivered by Prof. Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. Prof. Kaplan is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her books: The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (Indiana, 2011).

Tues 8 Feb 2022, 6 – 7.30pm (GMT).  Lecture 1: Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945 

The lecture depicts the travails of refugees escaping Nazi Europe and awaiting their fate in Portugal. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee existence, it highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, Kaplan probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed, the consulate lines they fretfully waited on, the smoky cafés they uneasily inhabited, or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signalled their liberation. These sites induced feelings of frustration or relief – often both. Online public event followed by Q&A. Register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Bq-V5KpIQPWpHVAfc1doVQ

Weds 9 Feb 2022, 6 – 7.30pm (GMT). Lecture 2: Gender and the Holocaust

This lecture will look back to the beginnings of research on women and/or gender and the Holocaust. The talk will describe the first workshops that attempted to raise this question and the first books to offer some answers. Besides discussing how the field grew, it will focus on showing how a women’s and gender history perspective made a difference in understanding the Holocaust.  It will raise women’s and men’s different perceptions and different reactions at home, in ghettoes, and in camps and it will look forward to new areas of research that also highlight women’s and gender studies.

Online public event Followed by Q&A. Register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AXEqgTLwSPu23GQ67w9UlQ

Further information at http://www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/bogdanow-lectures-2022/