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"Celebrating Women and Judaism: Mind,
Body, Voices" is the title of a multifaceted program
cosponsored by the Jewish Studies and Women's Studies
programs on November 13 through 17.
"We want to take advantage of the new scholarship on the
subjects of Jewish women and Jewish identity and to
celebrate the creativity of Jewish women artists," says
Women's Studies director Deborah Nord, professor of English.
"So many important feminist literary critics, who pioneered
the field in the 1970s, have begun to write about their own
Jewishness, about their individual pasts, and about Jewish
literature and culture. Froma Zeitlin, a classicist, has
been teaching a course at Princeton on the Holocaust for a
number of years now, and I, a specialist in 19th-century
British literature and culture, have begun to teach a course
on American Jewish writers. So in our own teaching we
reflect the 'turn' to Jewish studies. We are delighted to
collaborate on this weekend of events."
Symposium
November 13. "Back to the Sources: Feminist
Critics and Jewish Identity," a symposium with panelists
Natalie Davis, Rachel Brownstein, Susan Gubar, Marianne
Hirsch and Susan Suleiman. 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., 106
McCormick.
• Nord and Zeitlin, who is professor of classics and
comparative literature and director of Jewish Studies, will
moderate.
• English professor Brownstein, who teaches at CUNY
Graduate Center, is the author of Tragic Muse: Rachel of
the Comédie Française.
• Davis, Princeton history professor emeritus, is
now professor at the University of Toronto. Her publications
include Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth- Century
Lives.
• Gubar, professor of English at Indiana
University, is coauthor of Madwoman in the Attic and
author of Race Changes, White Skin, Black Face in
American Culture. Hirsch, a senior faculty member at
Dartmouth, wrote The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narratives,
Psycho-analysis and Feminism.
• Suleiman, whose books include Budapest Diary:
In Search of the Motherbook, is a professor of French
and comparative literature at Harvard.
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Regina Nejman (l) and Liat
Steiner in "Jephtha's Daughter"   
Aleta Hayes (l) and Ze'eva
Cohen (left) in "Negotiations"
Ze'eva Cohen (l) and Jill Sigman
(right)
in "If Eve Had a Daughter"
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Dance
November 14 and 15. "Creative
Explorations of Judaism and Gender: Dances
Choreographed on Biblical Themes," by artistic
director Ze'eva Cohen, Aleta Hayes, Regina Nejman,
Jill Sigman and Liat Steiner. 8:00 p.m., Hagan
Dance Studio, 185 Nassau St. (Call 258-3676 for
reservations.)
• Three duets for women include "Jephtha's
Daughter" (with Steiner as the nameless daughter
and Nejman as the collective Daughters of Israel),
"Negotiations" (with Cohen as Sarah and Hayes as
Hagar) and "If Eve Had a Daughter" (with Cohen as a
Yiddish-style mother and Sigman as her
modern-thinking offspring).
• Two additional presentations will feature
dancer-choreographers Hayes in "Hatshepsut," a
portrait of the only female pharaoh of Egypt, and
Sigman in "Embers," a reaction to the
Holocaust.
• Both peformances will be followed by
discussion with the artists.
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Marilyn Hacker
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Irena Klepfisz
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Poetry and Lecture
November 15. "Daughters of Sarah: Four
Jewish Women Poets," Marilyn Hacker, Irena
Klepfisz, Alicia Ostriker and Eleanor Wilner. 3:00
to 5:00 p.m., Stewart Theater, 185 Nassau St.
• Hacker is the author of eight books,
including Presentation Piece and Winter
Numbers. Her Selected Poems won the
Poets' Prize in 1996. Now professor of English at
Hofstra University, she was editor of the Kenyon
Review from 1990 to 1994.
• Klepfisz, who teaches at Barnard College, is
the author of A Few Words in the Mother
Tongue and Dreams of an Insomniac and
coeditor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's
Anthology.
• Ostriker, poet and critic, has published
nine volumes of poetry. Her most recent book,
The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions
and Revisions, is a rereading of the Bible from
a modern Jewish women's perspective. She is a
member of the faculty at Rutgers University.
• Wilner, who currently teaches at Warren
Wilson College and the University of Utah, is the
winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, among others. Her
Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems
was published this year.
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Alicia Ostriker
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Eleanor Wilner
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 November
17. "Daughter, Sister, Bride and Mother: Images of God's
Femininity in Early Jewish Mysticism," a lecture by Peter
Schaefer, Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies.
4:30 p.m., 2 Robertson Hall. A reception in the lobby
follows.
• Born and educated in Germany, Schaefer is an
expert on ancient Israel, rabbinics and early mysticism.
Named first incumbent of the Perelman professorship in
December 1997, he was previously professor of Jewish studies
and director of the Institut für Judaistik at the Free
University of Berlin for 14 years. He has been a visiting
professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Jewish
Theological Seminary and was a member of the Institute for
Advanced Study in 1992 and again from 1994 to 1996 as Mellon
Professor.
Among his current research and
publishing projects are a multi-volume study of magic texts
from the Cairo Geniza, a series of synopses of the Jerusalem
Talmud, and several ongoing projects of which he is a
coeditor: a translation of the Jerusalem Talmud, a history
of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, and texts and
studies in medieval and modern Judaism.
Photos: Anja Hitzenberg, Tom Brazil, Anja
Hitzenberg, Odile Debloos, Linda Eber, Jeremiah
Ostriker, Bob Weinberg Randall Hagadorn
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