KlezCalendar

The Jewish Music Forum, a project of the American Society for Jewish Music at the Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce the following presentation:

"I am a Jew from eternal nowhere": Yiddish song in the aftermath of the Holocaust

Shirli Gilbert (University of Michigan) Respondent: Jeremy Dauber (Columbia University)

Friday, April 28
10 A.M.
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY

Admission is free and open to the public

For information on this or other events of the Jewish Music Forum, please see the website: www.jewishmusicforum.org, call 212-294-8328 or

Among source materials relating to the Holocaust, music occupies a distinctive position: it is not only a source of historical study in its own right, but also an important vehicle for the transmission of memory. Shirli Gilbert will explore the relationship between music—in particular, Yiddish song—and Holocaust memory, focusing on the extent to which present-day conceptions of that relationship have shifted from the early postwar years. While early conceptions of music’s relationship with memory were remarkably sober and unsentimental, in recent decades music has increasingly been seen as a seemingly natural opportunity for redemptive, hope-tinged discourse, emphasizing the heroism and resistance of Nazism’s victims.

Shirli Gilbert is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where she teaches modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and music & resistance. She obtained her Masters in Musicology and Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Her research is currently focused in two principal areas: music and memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as a project on popular song and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Her book Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford University Press, 2005) was a runner-up in the Holocaust category of the 2005 National Jewish Book Award.

Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Columbia University. His first book, Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, was published in 2004 by Stanford University Press, and Landmark Yiddish Plays, an anthology he co-edited and translated with Joel Berkowitz, will be published in June. He is the co-editor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

For information on this or other events of the Jewish Music Forum, please see the website: www.jewishmusicforum.org, call 212-294-8328 or Posted by Ari Davidow on April 28, 2006 10:00 AM | Permalink