The Benita and Sigmund Stahl Lecture Series
Prof. Riv-Ellen Prell
(University of Minnesota)
Riv-Ellen Prell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota where she is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Prayer and Community: the Havurah in American Judaism (awarded the National Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life in 1990) and Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Affiliation, as well as co-editor of Interpreting Women's Lives: Personal Narratives and Feminist Theory and editor of Women Remaking American Judaism. She held the Fesler Lampert Chair in Public Humanities at the University of Minnesota in 2008 and was recognized as a Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Prell is notable as an anthropologist who has crossed over to do history; she has brought to the field an anthropologist's eye, which makes her work fresh, innovative, and always surprising.
About the 2009 Lecture Series...
Jewish Baby Boomers, born immediately after World War II, had a critical place in the development of Post War American Jewish culture. The agents of Jewish communal life-youth organizations, and summer camps in particular- imagined a Post War “new” American Jewish culture and Judaism as they sought to socialize this crucial cohort. No less important were the ways in which Baby Boomers reshaped these visions and institutions as they became teenagers and college students. These lectures will look at both the visions developed for that new culture and the conflicts they wrought. These ideas were realized in settings such as summer camps where new ways of being Jewish were pioneered. At the same time youth serves as a powerful lens for understanding this period because those same settings revealed the dilemmas of a developing Post War Jewish culture. Central to new visions for American Jewish culture were how to integrate liberalism and pluralism within Jewish uniqueness in all of its dimensions: religious, ethnic and national. This critical period also demonstrated how Jews understood and positioned themselves in terms of racial inequality and growing access to mainstream society. The volatile and exciting spaces for Jewish youth that developed from the beginning of the 1950s through the early years of the 1970s provided a profound re-imagining of American Jewish life that created a vision of a Jewish cultural citizenship that continues to unfold in the 21st century. What shaped many Jewish Baby Boomers as teenagers discloses a great deal about the complexity of Jewish liberalism and American Jewish life, and complicates the story of race, religion, and politics in the post war period.
Monday, March 23, 2009
6:00pm
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Square East
The Emergence of a Post War American Jewish Culture
The first lecture in the series considers the ways that a variety of Jewish communal leaders in the 1950s and 1960s wrote about youth in order to reveal critical shifts taking place in how American Jewish life was being reconfigured. At the core of their intertwining of youth and American Jewish life was an important engagement with the issues of pluralism, citizenship, and the place of a unique American Jewish culture in Post War America.
Thursday, March 26, 20096:00pm
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Square East Youth and Utopian Spaces for a New Jewish Culture
This lecture examines Jewish summer camps that came into existence following World War II. In combination with earlier camps they became testing grounds for competing visions of Jewish cultural citizenship—not only how to live a Jewish life, but how an entirely new type of Jewish life was possible. In particular, Zionist and denominational camps provide the focus of the lecture in order to understand how these visions were translated into the lives of the Baby Boomers.
Tuesday, March 31, 20096:30pm
Lecture Hall, Room 102
19 University Place
Race and Politics in Jewish Summer Camps of the 1960s and 1970sThis lecture focuses on a series of events that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s in summer camps that reveal conflicts and contradictions in a newly envisioned Post War American Jewish culture. Campers began to revolt over the meaning of Jewish authority, Zionist leadership, and political responsibility. The lecture examines, in particular, conflicts created by pluralism and liberalism within that vision. These stories of confrontations and revolt identify the beginning of a powerful transformation and the emergence of a cultural and religious realignment in American Jewish life.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
6:00pm
Jurow Lecture Hall
100 Washington Square East
Baby Boomers and Reshaping American Jewish Culture
The youth culture created and reinvented by the Jewish men and women who participated in camps and social movements had an enormous impact on American Jewish culture for more than three decades. This lecture examines the legacy of these conflicts and the many innovations in Jewish life that followed from them. In contrast to the common view that after the Six Day War of 1967 American Jews turned away from American social issues and toward particularistic concerns with Israel and Holocaust memory, the lecture stakes out an understanding of an emergent American Jewish culture pioneered by Baby Boomers. In particular, innovations as diverse as havurot, Jewish feminism, Jewish studies and the Radical Zionist Alliance, embraced a vision of a Jewish cultural citizenship that linked the particularism of Jewish cultures to participation in American political and public life.
All lectures are free and open to the public, but RSVP is requested. Please call (212) 998-8981 or email gsas.hebrewjudaic@nyu.edu to secure your place at the lectures. Make sure to indicate which specific dates you are RSVPing for in your message/email.
Stahl Graduate Seminar Series
Dr. Prell will also be hosting a series of graduate seminars for the
student in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic studies. These
are open to members of the academic community (students and faculty)
but due to space limitations are not open to the general public. If you are a member of the academic community and would like to attend, please call 212-998-8981 or email gsas.hebrewjudaic@nyu.edu
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
12:30 - 1:45pm
53 Washington Square South, Room 428
Topic: Women and the Disappearing Jewish Subject in Recent Cultural Studies Scholarship about Jews
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
2:00 - 4:45pm
20 Cooper Square, Room 520
Topic: Historiography of Post War American Jews
Closed Session presented as part of NYU course "Post World War II American Jews"
Monday, March 30, 2009
12:30 - 1:45pm
53 Washington Square South, Room 527
Topic: Post War Suburbanization and the Transformation of American Jewish Cultures - Engaging Critical Whiteness Studies
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
4:55 - 6:15pm
194 Mercer Street, Room 203
Topic: From the Ghetto Girl to the JAP
Closed Session presented as part of NYU course "American Jewish History"
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