[YSU-Jewish] program for the Jewish Woman and Her Body

[Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies at YSU]

On March 7-9, 2010, the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies will be
hosting an international conference on the Jewish Woman and her Body.  The
conference will bring scholars from around the country and from overseas to
speak on this topic.  Most sessions will be free and open to the public.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Center and is a part
of Women’s History month.  For more information on the conference, please
call 330-941-1604 or email judaic at ysu.edu.   

 

 

 

The Jewish Woman and her Body: An International Conference
March 7-9, 2010

Youngstown State University

 

Sunday

All events on Sunday, March 7, 2010 are held at the Stadium Club on
Youngstown State University campus.  To attend the opening program, please
call 330-941-1604 to make a reservation.  All other events are free and open
to the public.

 

11 am – 1:15 pm: Opening Program [Reservation required: Call 330-941-1604
for reservation]

 

Welcome: Dean Shearle Furnish, Youngstown State University

Keynote Address: Judith R. Baskin, University of Oregon 

 

4pm – 4:15pm – Performance of “Thumbnail” by Rebecca Pappas

 

4:15pm - 6 pm: Beauty and the Grotesque

Karen Grumberg, University of Texas at Austin. ““Female Grotesque”: Orly
Castel-Bloom and the Israeli Woman’s Body”

Adriana Mariel Brodsky, St. Mary's College of Maryland “Queen Esther, and
Miss Sefaradi: The Jewish woman’s body and its political and ideological
uses (Argentina, 1940s-1970s)

Gail Labovitz.  American Jewish University "Even Your Mother and Your
Mother's Mother": Rabbinic Literature on Women's Usage of Cosmetics”

Rebecca Pappas “Performing my monster”

 

Monday

All  events on Monday, March 8, 2010 are held in Kilcawley Center in the
President’s Suites and are free and open to the public.

  

9 am – 10:45 am – Literary explorations in the US and Abroad

Nevena Stojanovic, West Virginia University “The Jewish Actress: Staging
Power and Enacting Change in Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask”

Nathan P. Devir, Middlebury College “The Body of the Shekhinah: The Case of
Chochana Boukhobza’s Un été à Jérusalem [A Summer in Jerusalem]”

Scott Lerner, Franklin and Marshall College, “The Jewess in the French
Liberal Tradition”

Tahneer Oksman, City University of New York, “Between Hunger and Wings:
Anzia Yezierska’s “Unleashed Voice”  

 

11 am – 12:45 pm – Religious Law and the Body

Ronit Irshai, Bar Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Wasted Seed” (Hashhatat Zera') and Fertility in Modern Halakhic Literature 

Sandra Collins, Byzantine Catholic Seminary “Weapons Upon Her Body: The
Female Heroic in the Hebrew Bible.”

Orit Avishai  Niddah and Hetrosexual Desire

Ágnes Vetö, Vassar College “Written On the Body: Salome, Sota and Gynecology
as Truth-Testing”

2 pm – 3:30 pm – The Jewish Woman as Mystic and Possessed

Haim Weiss, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev "I Saw a Dove Flying Over My
Bed: Women in Rabbinic Dream Literature"

Sharon Vance, Northern Kentucky University. “La Hermosa Sol”

Agnieszka Legutko. Columbia University “Acting the Woman’s Body as a Mode of
Resistance: A Gendered View on Spirit Possession in the 20th Century Jewish
Literature”

 

3:45 pm – 5:30 pm – Possessing the Body Text, Biography and Ethnography

Nadja Berkovich, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “An-sky
Questions Women: Contrasting and Comparing Ethnography and Literature”

Orian Zakai, University of Michigan “Entering the Records:  Bodies, History
and Orientalism in Sara Azaryahoo’s Autobiography”  

Beverly Bailis, Jewish Theological Seminary of America "Anatomy of the New
Jewish Woman: The Emergence of Female Sexuality in the Turn of the 19th
Century Hebrew Novel" 

Talila Kosh, Kibbutzim College of Education.  “Written on the Body: Memory
Writing in the Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation in Israel”

 

 

Tuesday

All  events on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 are held in Kilcawley Center in the
President’s Suites and are free and open to the public.

 

8.45 am – 10:15 am – Contemporary Representations of the Torah Observant

Yael Shenker, Sapir college and Haddasah College, That made me a woman: On
body and gender representations in Israeli's religious-community filmmaking

Hannah Hashkes “Poetics of Exposure in Literature of National
ReligiousWomen”

Marc Michael Epstein, Vassar College "'I will hide my face': The body of
Esther and the bodies of others in contemporary Hassidic visual culture"

 

10:30 am – 12:15 pm – Deviants, Exceptional Cases and Establishing the Norm

Jennifer Heilbronner Munoz, Harvard University “Domestic Violence and
Religious Observance: The Case of the Conversas”

Ronit Fischer, Western Galilee College “Sharing one Fate: The Racial laws in
Germany and Romania through the fates of two Jewish women’s Mixed Marriages”

Barak Levy Shilat, London School of Economics “‘Nice Jewish Girls Don’t Do
That’: The Housewives’ Campaign for Soviet Jewry”

Allan Amanik, New York University "Body Politics: American Jewish Burial
Practice and the Role of the Female Deceased"