11th Annual Greenfield Summer Institute 'The Wandering Jew' - July 11-15

The Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents the 11th Annual Greenfield Summer Institute July 11-15, 2010.

This year's theme is "The Wandering Jew" focusing on the meaning and significance of Jewish wanderings from ancient times to the present.

Participants are coming from near and far for a week of summer learning and fun, including a concert by local klezmer band Yid Vicious and classes given by Jewish Studies faculty and guest lecturers.

Since Abraham's journey to Canaan, travel, movement, and migration have been important and recurring features of the Jewish experience.

From the Exodus to the expulsion from Spain; from Minsk to Ellis Island, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv; from home to homelessness, the Jews seem constantly to be on the move. Their fate as wanderers has been viewed many ways—as a curse (the Christian legend of the Wandering Jew), as a threat (Josef Stalin’s condemnation of the "rootless cosmopolitans"), or as a positive source of cultural vitality and creativity.

Jewish journeys have always been as much figurative as literal: as much cultural, culinary, and linguistic as geographical; and as much spiritual as material. Even conversion to or from Judaism may be under- stood as a journey: "Wherever you go, I will go," proclaims Ruth, the prototype of the righteous convert.

The Greenfield Summer Institute is sponsored by the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies through the generosity of Larry and Roslyn Greenfield.

For more information, contact the Center at (608) 265–8150 or see http://jewishstudies.wisc.edu/eleventh-greenfield-summer-institute/

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Gift will establish new Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture

The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies has received a major gift from Sherry Mayrent and Carol Master, and the Corners Fund for Traditional Cultures — a Donor advised fund of Combined Jewish Philanthropies — to establish the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at UW-Madison.

The institute will be the only one of its kind, devoted to exploring the world of Yiddish through the arts.

Mayrent and Master chose UW-Madison for their gift in response to the success of the Henry Sapoznik’s 2009 Interdisciplinary Arts Residency at UW-Madison and the concurrent symposium of the Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

Sapoznik, one of this generation's leading scholars on Yiddish culture, will be the director of the Mayrent Institute and will join the university in 2011.

He is currently the Executive Director of Living Traditions and founder of KlezKamp — both which will now be headquartered in Madison — and the creator of the Peabody Award-winning Yiddish Radio Project, broadcast on National Public Radio

In addition to their gift, Mayrent and Master are planning to donate their collection of over 7,400 digitized recordings of Jewish music to Mills Music Library, which will provide on-line access to the collection.

The institute will also produce publications, recordings, conferences, and other outreach activities, including a summer KlezKamp event in Madison.

• UW-Madison to establish Yiddish institute (Wisconsin State Journal)
• UW-Madison Jewish center gets $1 million gift (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
  

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What is Bob up to?

Bob Skloot, emeritus professor of Theatre & Drama and Jewish Studies, is working in the Volunteer Corps of the American Jewish World Service in Vijayawada, India this spring.

Skloot's assignment over the two months in India is to use theatre to raise and discuss social issues and to bring public awareness to them. 

He also hopes to improve the individual self-confidence of young people in two impoverished Dalit (formerly "untouchables") villages.

 

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Feldhay Brenner awarded Weinstein-Bascom Professorship

Professor Rachel Feldhay Brenner of the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies has been awarded the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professorship in Jewish Studies from the Weinstein-Mosse Center for Jewish Studies. 

The Weinstein-Bascom Professorship is designated for a faculty member who has through exemplary teaching and distinguished scholarship or artistic creativity contributed to a deeper understanding of the Jewish experience.

Brenner’s research focuses on literary representations of the search for the coexistence of ethical values with the consciousness of the Holocaust.

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Potter named Director of the Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies

Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Musicology, has been named Director of the Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, following a term as Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music. 

Potter's research and publications have concentrated primarily on German music and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, and her work in Jewish Studies includes exploring ways of defining Jewish music and the impact of Jewish immigrants on American musical life and scholarship. 

She has served on a number of committees including: the Arts and Humanities Research Committee, the University Fellowships Committee, the General Education Committee and the L&S Curriculum Committee. 

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